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."

Comments

Cheating is bad for their community

[erroneus]

If cheating were to go on unabated, the WoW community would shift away to something else. They are trying to tend to their interests and I can't blame them.

What should have happened? Well, for one, someone from the Cedega project who also uses WoW (chances are pretty good) should get into communication with the Blizzard people in order to work out any issues. Allowing people to use Linux while playing WoW is certainly in Blizzard's interest and since Cedega is doing the bulk of the work, I can't imagine why Blizzard wouldn't at least come to the table to work it out. Cutting users off is likely the side-effect of an automated process not seeing what it expects to see and not some assault on Linux users.

Re:No Wai !!

[91degrees]

No. People have every right to complain. Blizzard are behaving reprehensibly. They're banning a load of users and accusing them of cheating for no reason other than their decision not to use Windows.

Their customers want to use Linux. If they are not going to take account of thios then they will be publicly criticised. The affected users have ewvery right to complain.

Re:Of course letters to Blizzard go unanswered ...

[MeanderingMind]

Nintendo ignores any mail complaining that someone couldn't get Halo or God of War working on their Gamecube. The same applies here.

Blizzard does not support Linux. It was great that some enterprising people got WoW working, but that doesn't mean you can complain when Blizzard does something that unintentionally breaks it.

My experience has been that Blizzard is extremely customer friendly. I've had a number of issues resolved cocerning game glitches, account errors and more in a timely and respectful manner. Many people complain that "blue" doesn't respond enough in the forums. Given the huge amount of traffic there, and the additional traffic and focus any blue response gives a thread, it would be both impossible (time constraints) and unfair (any thread with a blue response implodes, leaving other worthy threads unread) to increase their interaction.

When Blizzard releases an expansion for WoW which does nothing but raise the level cap by X and doesn't even feature new content but the promise of new content claiming "You'll buy it because it's WoW", when they discontinue the in game ticket system and shut down the forums, when they "have built a line of equity and we intend on spending it", then they will be about as customer-friendly as Sony. As it stands, I don't think you can claim that Blizzard's service is anywhere near as hellish as what SW:G and EQ players have had to deal with.

Re:No Wai !!

[Ephemeriis]

You people have NOTHING to whine about. nada. zero. zip.

You are using it on a non-supported platform. Deal with it.
Blizzard has no responsibility to take how Cedega does things
into account. You can whine all you want about it not being fair,
or how you have some 'right' to play it on your Linux enabled
toaster, but you don't.

Blizzard makes the game for Windows. If you get it to work in
Linux, power to you. But if it stops working, tough luck, it
was never intended to work anyway. You may as well complain to
Nintendo about the quality of Snes9x.

You're missing the point.

This isn't a problem with support. It isn't a matter of whether WoW.exe will run or not - it does run under WINE/Cedega. The issue is that Blizzard is closing game accounts. You can still run the program, you just can't log in to your account. Doesn't matter if you reformat and reload your machine with Windows or MacOS to appease Blizzard, you can still run the program, you still can't log in to your account. Worse, the account is being closed because of cheating. That's what it'll say in your account details - hacking/cheating. Not "didn't pay his bill", but "caught running cheat/hack program". Much harder (impossible?) to get such an account re-activated.

My bank doesn't support Firefox on Linux for viewing my balance on-line. They have a list of supported browsers and operating systems and Firefox/Linux just isn't on it. Because of that I will not be surprised if I cannot view my balance on their website...I will not be surprised if the page renders incorrectly or isn't functional - it isn't a supported platform. That's fine. I'll go view my balance on an IE6/Windows machine instead. But I most certainly will complain if they close my bank account because I tried to view my balance with Firefox/Linux.