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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."
The first 59 levels were great. 60+ was a whole different game.
Warden was just the last reason I needed to leave the game. A poorly designed client/server infrastructure is no excuse for Blizz snooping outside it's own client's memory space.
When WoW went GA in late '04, the 1-60 run was great. Good quest chains, plenty of instances to go do that were original. Once 60, MC and other raids were doable and took some smarts to deal with each boss's tactics.
Fast forward two years. No expansions, no significant new content other than a raid zone or two, a hastily-made "honor" system which forces people to have to play daily in order to not lose rank, battlegrounds which two of which can be won constantly by exploiting terrain, or just using good ol' speedhacks.
There is no challenge in WoW anymore, just grinding alts to exalted with various factions, or maybe trying to rank in PvP.
In the same two years, Everquest 2 has gone through some major changes, has had two, going on three major expansions. Everquest has had four expansions, each of which added about as much territory as WoW's single expansion purports to add.
To boot, Blizzard still hasn't gotten a handle on network stability and server stability, something which SOE and other MMO makers got to a stable level in about a year or two of having the game running. EQ servers can be up for weeks if not months.
Blizzard *had* a success, but the Burning Crusade expansion is too little, too late. A good number of my former WoW guildies are going back to their raid guilds to explore the new Kelethin in EQ2, or shake down Ashengate for high-end loot in EQ1. There is just a point where even though Blizzard had a high quality product, not maintaining it has soured it for a lot of the players.
EQ3... er Vanguard likely will make a dent in WoW when it goes GA. The hardcore PvE and raiding types will leave, leaving WoW to the b.net kiddies.
SOE sucks and has their own issues/bugs, especially their new customer service ticket system, but they know their stuff, and the servers are up when you log in.
Why is there such a constant war between game development and alternative OSes? There is a dearth of games for Linux -- none save perhaps some iD titles are major games. It's a disconnect -- Geeks are generally inclined to be both gamers and OSSers, yet no major games run on OSS OSes natively.
IME, Wine doesn't work out of the box, but even if it did, IMO it's a cheat around practicing an OSS life. Running Wine is a surrender to the Microsoft hegemony. Running Wine says, I can't do it all with Linux, I need to have Windows. You can tell yourself it's really empowerment, or that emulation isn't the same thing as adoption or embracement, but I think you're kidding yourself. You're giving in to Windows dominance. The game studios more or less force you to in order to play the games everyone else is playing.
Is there in fact no real overlap between gamer geeks and OSS geeks? Are there no movements within game housen to say "Hey, we support Windows and Mac, why not support Linux too?" Would porting to a third platform -- one that is openly documented -- be that much more difficult than porting to a second?
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
If she's looking for something a little different I mod for a private server. You can find out a little about the mod on my site: http://www.wartsworld.com/Diablo/ or the site that hosts the mod http://www.hardcoreplayerz.com/
I've got a friend who's a cheater. Most recently the game he is cheating at is Rakion. But that's not the first or last game he's going to cheat at. He starts every game the same, playing legitimately for a couple weeks, then he starts talking about people he notices cheating, at first he takes screenshots and reports the cheaters, but he's impatient. If the people he reports aren't punished immediately he gets mad and thinks the company doesn't care about the game. [That's the point where I can see he's getting ready to do it himself]
About two weeks into playing, he starts sending private messages to cheaters and gets to be acquaintances with them. A couple more days go by and he's running a cheat himself. He'll justify it by saying the company doesn't care anyway because they don't stop cheaters (implying the company tacitly approves of his behavior). A week or two later he'll get caught and dealt some kind of punishment. If it's not a complete ban he'll stop cheating for a little while, but then cheaters who get away with it bother him more than ever, he goes on this hypocritical/psychotic rampage reporting cheaters by the dozen, essentially trying to harass the company into dealing with cheaters. That lasts for about a week before he starts cheating again, and gets another punishment. At that point, he thinks he's smarter than the game company, so he'll find little ways to cheat, small exploits that he thinks will go unnoticed. Instead of obvious cheats, he tries adjusting game properties by small values he thinks no one will notice. For example, instead of cheating to gain infinite health, he boosts his health by 5%-10%. That goes on for maybe another month until the company bans him permanently.
At that point he gets self-righteous and rants about the following topics in no specific order:
It's not any specific game, it's every game he plays, the same cycle. I try to keep him honest, inspire him to take pleasure in normal gaming behavior, but he can't. He's supernaturally compelled to cheat. It's disappointing because I don't get to play games with him that we could enjoy together. It's always fun for the first couple of weeks, and I'm always thoroughly convinced that he's really not going to cheat this time, but after he breaks into the cheating cycle I distance my play from him because I don't want to play with or against someone I know is cheating, and I don't want my accounts to become associated with his in the eyes of the GMs (which has happened on more than one occasion).
One day, I actually got a phone call from a GM that wanted to know how I knew him and wanted to know how he convinced me to open an account for him after he got banned. This wasn't the first time he was banned, he had received a lifetime ban from this game 5 or 6 times, but he always finds ways to get someone to let them use their account. The GM discovered that he was playing on my account because my friend told one of his game acquaintances who he was. He revels in infamy. He can't play a game for the game's sake, he needs people to know who he is. Even if it means that his best friend's account is in jeopardy, he'd rather screw his friend over than risk having people in a game not know how clever he is in circumventing the system. Before I gave him access to a slot on my account, I pleaded with him to just play the game and not tell anyone who he was