Slashdot Mirror
Linux Users Banned From World of Warcraft?
Turmoyl writes "Many Cedega (formerly WINEX) users claim to have been mistakenly caught up in a security sweep of the U.S. game servers performed by Blizzard's World of Warcraft Game Master (GM) staff. Affected users received the same strongly-worded 'Notice of Account Closure' email messages that true bot users did, in which they were accused of the 'Use of Third Party Automation Software.' While diagnosis of this event continues early speculation points to Blizzard's use of the Warden anti-cheating spyware application that is bundled with World of Warcraft, and the odd things that may have been produced by it when it was run via Cedega. Emails to World of Warcraft's Account Administration staff continue to go unanswered while the list of affected people continues to grow."
Drysc (Blizzard poster) confirmed that "[a]n operating system would not produce a false positive[...]." So, no. This does not appear to be targetting linux/alternate OSes.
Blizzard has worked with the people at Cedega to make the product work properly. One known issue they helped the linux community with was when the mini map used to cause the screen to freak out. The Cedega team worked with the Blizzard developers to come up with the solution to the problem.
Don't say that it isn't supported. No, officially it is not, but it is unofficially.
As for him being modded as a troll--it would seem he is a troll. He is speaking out his arse without any knowledge nor history on the subject.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
What you just said would make sense if they weren't RUNNING WOW ON LINUX SERVERS. Their database environment has been Oracle on Linux since the game was released.
http://www.blizzard.com/jobopp/senior-oracle-data
Blizzard has nothing against Linux users. Their main beef is with cheaters, and I'm sure these accounts will be reenabled. But some Linux users (incorrectly) jump to conclusions that they're being targeted.
Their previous beef was about bnetd allowing people to play online without buying games. They could care less if people played the game on Linux, they just wanted to make sure people went through official servers and paid to play the game. Again, some Linux users jump to conclusions that Blizzard was targeting the Linux userbase in general.
Poor assumptions make poor arguments. Incorrect assumptions make faulty ones. If you're assuming Blizzard hates Linux or Linux users, you're incorrect. They wouldn't be using the OS themselves if that was the case.
Your analysis falls down when you consider that there have been no reports of any Mac users being targeted by this. There is no Warden process or anything resembling a rootkit on my system when I start up the client. Just one process: World of Warcraft. I suppose they could just be excepting any client that reports as being run on a Mac, but if that were the case, all of the people working to hack the system would just switch to running on a Mac. I suspect there is a bit more to the method that they're using and have heard rumors of them using things like 'multiple logins to the same account from different IPs' and other indicators. Perhaps the linux emulators are doing something that trips one of these other detection mechanisms.
I believe that for the most part Blizzard is handling the cheating by making the client as dumb as possible and not trusting it for anything other than 'requests'. The design philosophy is centered around the client 'asking' to do something and the server saying 'yes' or 'no'. There isn't a way for the client to say 'Put this character at position x,y', there is only a way for a client to request to move along a vector. The server then reports the current position back to the client. That doesn't mean that hacks haven't ever happened - but those have been cases of the server not strictly following this model and are subsequently patched.
Of course, this doesn't stop anybody from writing their own client that allows them to automate the request process given they were good enough to spoof being a 'real' client to the server.
Culture is more than commerce
As you can see most add-ons revolve around giving the user more information. The closest thing to botting there is the auto-curing, which is on its way out.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topi cId=47009071&pageNo=3&sid=1#40
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topi cId=47009071&sid=1&pageNo=3#53
"We have been testing our security software with Cedega. Cedega was used and tested before the security procedures and during the security procedures. From this testing we have yielded no hits, meaning Cedega, by itself, does not incur an account suspension.
We have accounts of several Cedega users who have been playing normally during the time that these processes are running. Again, these people are not being suspended simply because of using Cedega or Linux.
We are in contact with the people at Cedega and following up with them regarding individual accounts.
To answer the OP's question, no it is not against the ToS to use Linux or Cedega. We continue to monitor the situation to prevent cases of false positives and to rectify them if they do occur." - Tseric (Blizzard poster)
Again, less knee-jerk reactions.