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

Re:Glad I left months ago...

[MrPink2U]

I wish I could design a poorly written client/server infrastructure. /sigh

The eternal struggle

[RomulusNR]

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?

Re:The eternal struggle

[petrus4]

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.

Fuck off.

I am fed up with seeing this kind of self-righteous, autistic rubbish on Slashdot. Blizzard and Microsoft are two completely seperate companies; as you've already said, the game has an OSX port, and I bet you wouldn't take that stance with people running the OSX version on either a Mac *or* under Linux/FreeBSD if that were possible.

It is exactly such gloriously rational, objective individuals such as yourself that are the reason why I can almost promise you that we will *never* see a Linux port (or even an attempt at such) of WoW. Another group of such geniuses ended up in court with Blizzard over the bnetd project; that in conjunction with the amount Battlenet was being hacked even before that gave the company a siege mentality. The experience they've had with the online "community" has caused them to adopt an almost totally adversarial default view of it...and I personally don't blame them. I know the groupthink around here says that corporations are evil by definition, but Blizzard are one case where in my own opinion there has been abuse both given *and* received. Battlenet has been hacked constantly, every possible means by which any of their online applications could be subverted has been exploited, and Blizzard staff have had to deal with being inundated with vitriol on an ongoing basis by sociopathic adolescents. The plutocrats at the top of the company might be worth {m,b}illions, but there are one heck of a lot of other people in the proverbial trenches within the company who are not, and who do not deserve a lot of the shit that they have had to deal with.

I am sick of every last one of the smug, self-satisfied Marxist hypocrites that I encounter on this site on a daily basis; people who insist on continually trying to dictate how others should think, act, and live. It's also always the same tired Aspergian screed:- do not *dare* use any commercial software yourself; worship without question that autocratic sack of Stalinist vomit Richard Stallman and obey his every decree, regardless of consistency or logic; and above all, never, NEVER engage in any form of activity whatsoever that could even be remotely construed as capitalist.

I'm also sick of these same people condemning others for such pathetic things as the use of binary hardware drivers; most such people who behave as though they "own" Linux and that anyone who uses it is somehow on their turf don't in fact own jack shit. I've spoken to people who actually *do* write code for Linux before, and they virtually never have the same attitudes themselves that the armchair zealots do.

For the love of God, stop fucking trying to tell me and everyone else how we should live, and realise that by doing that you're no better than what you claim Microsoft are trying to do themselves. If we want to use FOSS, we will. If we want to use Microsoft's (or anyone else's) closed source, proprietary stuff, we will. Stop acting as though Linux is something that you own and that the rest of the population can't use it unless we adhere to your decrees...because you can't stop anyone from doing so. I realise however, that all of the other people in the Linux community who act like this *only* do because of a need to unquestioningly emulate Richard Stallman, and that he is the source of this particular sickness...that is the main reason why I have grown to passionately hate that man to the extent that I now do.

Dictating people's actions in any context is NOT promoting freedom. Mod me down, FSF cowards, like you always do. I'm aware that you don't have the courage, integrity, lucidity, or intelligence necessary to refute what I say on its' own merits, so attempting to silence me is really the only thing you *can* do.