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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."
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 do hope Blizzard will fix these users accounts. I don't currently play WoW on OSS platforms, but I plan on doing so in the future. It would be even better if they would make a Linux version of the game. Then again, I'd probably get caught "cheating" since I'd run it on BSD.
I've seen this happen with PunkBuster checks in some games when you try to run then in another OS as well.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Blizzard is about as customer-friendly as Sony.
These guys really deserve being knocked down a notch or two. Unfortunately, with WoW being as popular as it is, there's not much chance of that happening for a few years yet.
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.
No, but you can get bearded GNOME freaks...
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
..... Then the terrorists win.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
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.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
>doing his repetitive task
I choose not to play games that hinge on this so much. Aside from the monthly fees, something like Oblivion's fast travel (or even console commands when the gates got boring) is the sign of a better game to me, instead of one which rewards behavior that can be currently emulated by a computer. It's not a job, it's a game!
There's a Wine package for Ubuntu that fixes a couple of bugs associated with WoW. The howto can be found on the excellent Ubuntu wiki at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WorldofWarcraft and details the instructions. It's pretty much a download the package and double click it, then run 'wine WoW.exe -opengl'. This ban rumor pops up periodically but I have yet to encounter any problems.
New information in the thread on the TransGaming forums linked in the original article shows that European Cedega users that play on European WoW servers are affected as well.
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.
For anyone that thinks Cedega's (or WINE, for that matter...) anything other than a good short-term solution to
Linux gaming, all I need do is point them to this as a good example of why it's not so hot of an idea. And it's
perfectly within Blizzard's rights to do this action- to the point of ignoring any contact with regards to this
whole affair. Doesn't make it good for PR or customer relations, mind- but it's completely within their rights
to do so. After all, they only support Windows on this title and don't have plans to provide support to other
OS platforms. Again, which is their right.
Native ports wouldn't have as many of these issues.
As for the whole affair... It's Blizzard. They've apparently got a singular attitude about Linux users that
started with the period around Starcraft forward. I wouldn't buy any title from them right now and for some
while to come- you just don't treat customers or potential customers the way they seem wont to do.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I use linux, and I was not banned. Could we calm the knee-jerk reactions just a bit?
Once they get their heads around the next expansion why not start on a real Linux port? Linux is definitely growing in popularity. Blizzard could do well in mindshare alone by creating - even if it is just an authorized version to play through Cedega - a real Linux version, rather than having people run through a relatively unauthorized emulation system which can cause quirks with their weird anti-bot stuff.
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.
You have NOTHING to whine about. nada. zero. zip. People modded him as a troll. Deal with it. We have no responsibility to take how you read things into account. You can whine all you want about it not being fair, or how you have some 'right' to have everyone else read, but you don't. Slashdot moderators make moderations for slashdot readers. If you get it to read it, power to you. But if it stops being read, tough luck, it was never intended to be read anyway. You may as well complain to Nintendo about the quality of Snes9x.
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?"
Why did this get modded "Troll"? He has a point. If I had mod points I would upmod this...
If he wanted be modded +5 Informative, he would have written, "M$ teh suck."
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."
Why did this get modded "Troll"? He has a point. If I had mod points I would upmod this...
Would you rather it get modded Undead, Tauren, or Orc instead?
With the first link, the chain is forged.
People spend too much time on this game...
[%] Cingular Ringtones
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.
The Linux community has pushed up the expected release date of kernel 2.8 by two full years.
It's probably for the better. Now they can go out in the sun and play (in real life).
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.
Emails to World of Warcraft's Account Administration staff continue to go unanswered
How terribly surprising! After the amazing track record of Blizzards customer support, this is totaly unexpected!
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
Please stop bad mouthing Blizzard. WoW GMs are infallible and beyond reproach. They do not make mistakes, these people were clearly cheating and using hacks, they had to be or Blizzard would not have banned them.
"Why did this get modded "Troll"?"
Umm, because he's wrong?
Yes, I'm a die hard Linux user and gamer. But I am going to be as completely objective about this as I can be. The accounts are being *banned*. Which is to say: sure, if I try to run EQ2 (what I play instead of WoW) under Linux, and it works for a while and then breaks, all his points are valid. The problem then becomes that I can't go back to my Windows box and play from there. Why?
Because they banned the *account*! It's not like I tried to get F.E.A.R. working and it didn't so "waaaaah, I have to play under Windows!" Rather, I tried to play under Linux and now, even though I paid for the right to play, I cannot play under Linux or Windows at all.
Now, their nazi-EULA probably says they can terminate your *paid* account for whatever reason they want, but if you want to talk about whether there is something to "whine" about, there absolutely is. People's accounts should not be banned because they attempted to get their software working under an unsupported OS. That really is unfair.
I cannot address whether or not any of this is FUD, however, since I don't play WoW and I stopped paying for Cedega. It seems odd that only some of the Cedega users are affected, but not all.
I can remember this being talked about months ago, people were getting these letters and they were running WoW under wine.
Slashdot at 11, we put a man on the moon.
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.
My wife, it kills me, she'll grind through the same thing on D2:LOD 50 times an evening.
I accuse her of being a bot- it's the most mechanical thing you've ever seen.
she writes down many EXP points she got per baal run, then does it again,
then does it again, then does it again, then does it again, then does it again, then does it again, then does it again, then does it again, then does it again, ad infinity..
to a 'gamebandwidth' counter, that'll look VERY suspicious
(BTW some of the repetions above I typed by hand, some I did by cut and paste- can you see where I switched to cut & paste above?---riiiight.....)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Number of people who play Wow >= 7 millionf t-hits-7-million-subscribers/
c tion=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=40982)
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/09/07/world-of-warcra
Number of people who watched The Sapranos premier = 9.5 million
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fusea
So I wouldn't say that the game is unpopular.
Of those that play using Linux, Cedega is a probably method-- the most popular so far as the anecdotal evidence I've come across. Let's say for the sake of argument assume half are using something else though.
If 1% of World of Warcraft subscribers use Linux to play then there are about 35,000 people playing under Cedega.
At $15 USD per month that's $7,000,000 per year in subscription fees.
GG Troll, L2P.
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.
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.
;)
Correct, in 10-20 or so odd years the technology maybe available that is undetectable nor traceable by any server to find if a person is an AI or human.
Lets say in 15 years you have on computer with WoW2 installed on it.
On a second one that isn't even hooked up to the network you simply take the VGA/DVI output to it and then OCR the text states and by able to recognize objects in the virtual world much like Stanley's robot car is able to recognize objects on the road.
Then your AI could simply feed the other computer commands through a USB keyboard.
If the WoW client had sufficient DRM and rootkit abilities then perhaps it could detect such a hardware setup.
But even then perhaps if you had a robotic arm and a camera giving the input making it impossible for another program to detect an AI.
Suffice to say... It will be something Blizzard or any other game company can defeat unless they require game players to physically come to game centers.
Even then... How would you know if the player didn't have an AI chip implanted in his skull?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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.
It's not a much a difficulty question as it is a cost question. It simply costs more to develop something on multiple operating systems. It's easier if the program can just be recompiled or rebuilt in some development environment, but it's not that easy most of the time (hardly any of the time). And on top of that, it takes time (and money) to test the new client and to provide support when it doesn't work. Since Linux troubleshooting is much more complex under average conditions than troubleshooting a Windows program, your tech support people need to take more time per person, and have to be paid more because it's a more rare skill.
Bottom line, it costs more than it's worth.
of warcraft...
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
How would running WoW under Cedega look like Glider or any other botting software? Maybe it's just Warden working funky, but something just seems very off here. It doesn't surprise me, Blizzard acting first and thinking later. If it's any consolation to those banned, you'll probably get your accounts back in a couple weeks...
Might help to make a big stink about it in the meantime though.
Don't buy WoW Gold! Make it yourself!
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'
"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." http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topi cId=47009071&sid=1&pageNo=3
You were caught running a highly efficient, highly secure, highly robust operating system - namely Linux. In our (Blizzards) opinion this would provide an advantage over other players. In addition, use of this software can lead to exploitation and destabilization of the World of Warcraft server economy. As such, this account has been closed and will not be reopened under any circumstances. The recurring subscription on the account has been disabled to prevent further charges.
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.