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."
Well, I've talked with someone who does a lot of this sort of stuff and he explained to me that long ago when Blizzard first debuted WoW, it was an instant success. And there were many people that had developed scripts (duping, afk farming, etc) for games like Diablo that wanted to to do the same thing for WoW.
... after all, you don't want a GM messaging your bot as he sits idle doing his repetitive task, do you?
The art of doing this successfully lies in knowing what addresses of memory that your client application is using to store data. You change these memory addresses & your client's state is altered. But there's some things you can't change because they're located on the server. Realistically, the client has to do some of the computation and storing itself (and with WoW being some huge multi-gigabyte client, there's a lot to investigate). Obvious, you want to reduce network traffic and give your servers a break so you design this to have minimal communication.
The problem then becomes that users will write applications to modify the data & memory that their client applications are using. What results is signals sent back to the server which aren't true and give that user an advantage. Solution? Enter Warden to check these memory spaces and files for any potentially unauthorized changes (checksums, whatever method they want to use or seeing which threads are accessing that memory). And how do you protect Warden from it itself being hacked? You design it kind of like a root kit--that is the user shouldn't be able to alter or disable Warden & they lose the domain over that tiny bit of functionality of their hard drive.
My guess is that before, they were checking if there were any known scripting or programs that were unauthorized and changing this data. And they were banning those and only those accounts. I fear that it now does a verification on the memory space, files & system registry to ensure that it is not being molested by another application or tweaked at all. I am guessing that they have changed the ban notice to ban whenever this verification stage fails and that Cedegra does not emulate Windows to the point of their verification satisfaction or to the point of Warden being able to query all other running applications. Worse yet, I fear they may look to integrate this with the WGA with Windows & some other means with Macs--though that is pure speculation on my part.
The irony of it all? The fact that a talented programmer with burp or some other styled network tool and use linux on a routing box to intercept packets and change them to give him position hacks. Unfortunately, if you use this too much, I believe that random server side verification checks will eventually catch up with you but I can't say I've ever implemented this or been caught using it.
Which brings me to one last point I'd like to make on this topic. I think that this cat n' mouse game of Blizzard versus the cheaters is good for AI. The last possible domain we have is people writing applications that extract data from video memory and use computer vision algorithms to write if-then-case bots. Yes, bots are bad but this is driving people to a corner where they essentially strive to pass the Turing Test
My work here is dung.
I run WoW in Linux, I only have one box for Windows and I don't want to be sitting at my windows laptop when I have a nice dual head display setup on my workstation with a better video card. If they ban me then so be it, there's money back per month for me. Usually the Blizzard guys are pretty good, so a bit disappointed if this is the path they are wanting to go.
Windows users got banned. Linux users got banned. Not all Windows users got banned. Not all Linux users got banned. Could it be that the banned Linux users where doing somthing byond just using Linux?
Naw, cant be.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I used to play WoW via Cedega, before I just decided I didn't have enough time for games entirely, and I think this is too bad. If they had stopped me from using Cedega, it would have been my subscription.
Actually, using it via Cedega worked really well once you got it working. I can't say it was "better than Windows," because I've never run Windows on that hardware (at least, not as the bare-metal OS, only in VMs), but it was a lot better than I imagined it would be when I started messing around with it.
I think there are quite a few people who only use Cedega because of WoW, so I expect that the Cedega people will fix stuff pretty quickly, if the Blizzard folks will even tell them what the problem is and what Cedega is doing that Warden doesn't like.
I think it's going to get to the point where "anti-cheats" and "copy protection" are the major things tying games to the Windows platform, because they're fundamentally hard (if not impossible) to implement on a Free OS, because the user -- by design -- can basically modify whatever they want, run debuggers, memory editors, etc.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I boot to Windows to play because my first account was banned for no reason when I was using Winex. Luckily, it was banned before I even reached level 10, although it pissed me off I just started another account. Noone ever responsed to my emails or anything.
If you aren't going to let us legitimately run the game under a Windows compatibility layer, would at least release the Linux binaries already? We know that they exist. Your programmers have told us as much.
There are still better ways of catching cheaters.
The old adage, "Never trust the client..." certainly applies here. The warden should run on the server, not the client. It should authenticate the client across the network.
Granted, you don't want to saturate the network with every little move and detail of gameplay. But fortunately, you don't have to. There is only so much gameplay that a user can do in a given amount of time. The solution is to set a threshold for gameplay actions and client state - call it gameplay bandwidth - if it progresses too fast, it's scripted.
The solution isn't to ban the cheater, but to throttle the gameplay bandwidth, as it were, to a reasonable level. This defeats the advantage of scripting without the attendant possibility of a false positive kicking out a legitimate player.
With respect to altering packets mid stream - well, a good encryption scheme could take care of that. I suspect that most of the work has already been done with the operating system's SSL.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Amen. I am tempted to tell my good friend (or former good friend) to start using WoW on Linux. Maybe he'll get banned and hang out with friends again.
An operating system would not produce a false positive, no.
As a final word to those here concerning their account being closed I can only recommend that you contact our Account Administration team by e-mailing wowaccountadmin@blizzard.com which is also included in the e-mail you should have received.
As I said we take enormous steps to ensure that those we remove from the game are specifically and properly confirmed as being in violation of our rules and agreements before doing so. I still urge those of you who feel you have been wrongfully banned to contact our Account Administration team.
Now, I have two co-workers who were banned who I know don't run bot clients, cheat programs, or anything of the sort. They do run cedega though.
Some people have mentioned that they weren't playing on Linux at the time of the ban but that they were actually on Windows. This doesn't really matter though as the GMs and CMs have said that they don't ban clients as they are individually discovered but rather they build up a large list and weild the ban hammer at once. So, if you were banned it may not have been for actions you were taking at the time of the banning, but instead could have been for something that happened a month ago. My instinct is to blame the period around October 29 when Blizzard made a change to their warden on the server side and it caused all cedega clients to crash upon login. Two days later Transgaming released a fix, but I wonder if a number of clients were incorrectly flagged for those warden-related crashes.
Also, if you were not banned it doesn't mean that your account hasn't been flagged, correctly or incorrectly.
This article discusses how to design a game where a human has an intrinsic advantage over a computer player. (Forgot to press preview last time).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Blizzard has been pretty decent to me.
For a little while, Cedega and the WoW graphics options dialog weren't playing nice with each other. Every time you saved graphics options, WoW would crash, and your changes weren't saved.
So I figure what the hell, I'll drop Blizzard support an email and ask them for a list of keys for Config.WTF. A couple days go by with no response. I figured I scared them by saying up front that I used Cedega to play WoW.
Nope. Get a nice response four days later, 'Greetings! We don't have a documented list, you're not supposed to touch those. But here's my cheat sheet. Have fun!'
.sig: Now legally binding!
I used to get kicked by punkbuster while playing the linux version of America's Army on FreeBSD. This wasn't caused by me running it on FreeBSD, but by certain overzealous server admins throwing in mountains of custom checks that only worked with the Windows version of the game.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I played WoW under Cedega with no problems, and I confirmed with a GM that it was kosher. I suspect that most, if not all, of these bannings are legitimate. Cheaters don't usually break down and admit it when caught.
Just for the record, Blizzard in the early months of WoW, both pre and post beta, were "looking into" the possibility of linux development. I followed that on the forums for a while before I started using Cedega to play, thinking it might be a stop gap until the linux client finally emerged. After sinking nearly $200 dollars into that game with the monthly fees attached, they have crapped in my fruit-loops. To all of you out there saying I should have seen this coming, I'd like to know why it didn't happen oh say, two damned years ago. For what its worth, my $15 a month will be going into a little jar labeled Wii. You might even say a wee jar.
There is a long history of folks blaming wine for bannings in WoW, and I would wait to see exactly what happened here, before assuming that Blizzard has gone off the deep-end and started attacking those users who have clearly gone to great lengths to be able to run the game.
PS: If you want to run WoW under Wine, here's what I did on my Fedora Core 5 system using an NVidia card with the binary NVidia drivers:
It now works fine. The only problems that I have are:
On the other hand the benifits are huge:
Overall, I love WoW under Linux. It's a joy compared to some made-for-linux games I've tried to run, and wine really seems to have come along.
This is the site where all the scammers are crying about their bans./
http://forums.wowglider.com/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=16
This is a program that automates warcraft. Blizzard can no doubt just cough up $25 and get themselves a copy. People on this slashdot aren't stupid. If blizzard had access to the program and warden has full access to the operating system then nothing can hide. If it tries to hide, blizzard can reverse engineer the thing and find how it hides. No false positives, no mixing up linux users - they can without doubt target such a program. No need for blizzard to seek out strange memory access or whatever - they can just go straight for the program.
The thing is many people put years of work into their characters and have been caught cheating. Now they're trying to scam their way out of their problems - like theyve scammed their way through the game. Don't beleive these idiot posters.
I remember back when I played WoW in Cedega on linux that if I played the game in fullscreen mode but put in managed mode and set the desktop to a value less than my desktop resolution, then World of Warcraft would essentially run in a windowed screen but think it was fullscreen. This was immensely useful if I wanted to read something while grinding for instance. However, I distinctly remember that if I held down the right click button while inside the game and didn't release it and moved my mouse really quickly to the side, the game would slow down immensely, and then send me back to the login screen. I believe something about how cedega sends signals to the client when it is in managed mode made the World of warcraft client freak out and think something weird was happening.
Can anyone who got banned comment on this? Were you playing the game in managed mode rather than fullscreen in Cedega, or was it unmanaged and in fullscreen mode?
Many players run under Linux and have not been banned. Many people who have been banned for botting claim they have not been botting. Very few people who get caught cheating ever admit to it. I have a hard time believing this story.
'Same speed C but faster'
Direct link to Blizzard BBB listing:
(click: [file complaint] down right corner)
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
It's not what you want to do, it's what the game company wants you to do: spend months paying them the subscription fee. And really, in what game does the actual content last months ? None. That's why they need to add repetition, and take a dim view on anyone who automates performing that.
The standard model of handcrafted gameworld simply doesn't allow perpetual gameplay. As AI progresses, it's likely that we start seeing semi-dynamic worlds where new content is generated algorithmically; fully dynamic games would be possible even with today's technology, but would run the risk of upsetting the Horde or the Alliance if their side loses.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.