Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard Unbans Linux World of Warcraft Players
An anonymous reader writes "World of Warcraft players using Cedega (the Linux-based Windows emulator) had their bans lifted after an investigation by Blizzard in cooperation with the Cedega development team revealed that the bans were in fact made in error."
The response was a lot more classy than some companies would have done (*coughSonycough*)
Bark less. Wag more.
It's good to see Blizzard actually take the time to investigate their mistake and make things right.
I understand based on market share vs. time to develop why Blizzard doesn't have a linux client, but considering that they've got an OSX client I can't imagine the hurdles for porting are that high.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I would also like to say 'Eat shit' to all the bandwagoneers who said HURR THEY MUST HAVE BEEN CHEATING BIZZRD IS NEVAR WRONG!!!
Even though I can't stand WoW, I can't stand shameless corporate shills either. So it's a tossup. In this case, they were both wrong, so it's a win/win situation for me.
The linux community reversed it's announcement last week concerning the early release of 2.6. Now they have pushed back the release date by three years, and possibly four depending on "how awesome the Blood Elf race is."
It's amazing to see Blizzard actually re-instate these accounts, and I'm damned glad they did. I've been avoiding trying to get WoW going under Cedega lately due to the looming threat of Warden and how people thought it was react to Cedega.
This certainly isn't the first time they've mass banned people due to "mistakes" in their detection programs. Almost my entire guild was banned last year when one of their programs to check for cascaded raid timers was set for 7 days instead of 6; even then it would have been wrong due to Blizzard resetting all raid timers during a patch the week before. After raising a stink on the forums plus a number of calls to Blizzard, they reversed all our bans with a measly 24 hour credit.
Finally, we can sleep at night knowing that the 15 people who play WoW on Linux can once again have their freedom.
1) Run Cedega
2) Run your new Linux bot
3)
4) Profit!
In consideration of our error, we are applying a credit of two weeks play time
onto your account, in addition to crediting back the time that your account was locked. This comes to a total of twenty (2O) days credit, which should be visible on your account within the end of the week.
I'm not a WoW player, but to me this seems pretty fair. Kudos to Blizzard.
First they ban gays, have massive amounts of downtime, now they ban Linux users? Are they deliberately trying to erode their game base? Everytime I read about this game it's usually something bad.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Its amazing that this hasnt happened more often. I would imagine that running a "Windows Game" on linux isnt in violation of most EULA's that come with todays games. Of course, it would seem pointless to alienate a customer base that solves this technical problem on their own (without having to spend time and money porting your product to another platform), but stranger things have happened. I wonder if it would be legal to revoke someones liscence or CD-KEY for playing a game developed and liscenced for Windows on a Linux platform (therefore violating the EULA)?
20th century Marxism is not progress...
They should give a better comp than just a few free weeks of play. Something like an ingame penguin pet... Ya, that'd be sweet!
I have to give them credit as well, they heard about the problem, acknowledged there was a problem, teamed up with Cedega and then FIXED the problem (reinstated locked accounts) and then gave them 20 days credit as well.
Would I be pissed if I played and had an account locked/banned by this? Hell yeah. Would I be somewhat mollified by 20 days of play tacked onto my account and an e-mail apology with an admission of "We screwed up, sorry" to boot? Hell yeah!
A lot of companies these days don't listen to their "base" and ignore the customer as nothing more than a $ and a number. Blizzard isn't perfect on this account, but they're better than a lot of the major playors out there. Kudos to Blizzard for realizing their cash cow was supported by multiple _people_/players and not just a bunch of $$$ and random numbers called credit cards - and willing to work to fix the problem! Keep up the good work.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
The summary also failed to mention that the people who were blocked got 20 days free play time - 2 weeks more than the time they were blocked. Basically, compensation for time lost plus some insane interest. They got some flak for this initially, but now, not so long after the incident in question, they admit to being wrong, reimburse those wronged, and told us they worked with the Cedega folks to get this resolved, thus supporting the Linux community. I don't see that they could have handled this much better after the initial screw-up, and with that last bit, they now come off smelling like roses (or at least a lot less like shit) to a majority of the /. community. Well played, Bliz, and bravo.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Looks like a fair deal.
One has to wonder, however, what would have happened if Cedega did not exist, and the people would have emulated the game through a random SourceForge project.
I have my issues with the new Blizzard that made WoW, but deep down I know they still care about making a quality product for their customers.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
I recently installed WOW on linux using Wine... It works great. I hope I don't get banned just because I'm using a different emulator. Does anybody know if they can tell the difference? I didn't see any mention of Wine in the article.
If anybody has a clue on this, please reply.
Blizzard probably allowed it because such a tiny percentage use linux to run WoW that it's easier to monitor for dodgy activity. That said, if you've access to Windows I can't see you wanting to run it through windows. The game is demanding enough during raids without running through an emulator or whatever.
No anti-cheating effort will be 100% error free 100% of the time. I think judgement should be made on how often errors occur and how a company handles reports of errors. The statements before and after indicate a pretty decent handling of the situation. Especially for an unsupported OS. Apparently not all Cedega users were banned, the problem must have been intermittent. This is consistent with what many Cedega users were saying, that they have been playing and everything was fine.
i cId=47009071&sid=1&pageNo=3
n bans_linux_world_of_warcraft_players
So, they test in an unsupported environment and promptly investigate problems and address them. IMHO Blizzard is showing Linux some respect, as they did many years ago for Macintosh when most people laughed at it. Hopefully history will repeat itself.
What they said before the investigation when the report of problem first came in:
"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?top
What they said after investigating:
"Greetings,
As you know, Blizzard Entertainment traditionally makes a serious commitment to protect the World of Warcraft community from players who gain unfair advantage through hacks and exploits. Last week, our administrators implemented bans on a large number of accounts that were identified acting against the terms and the spirit of the game.
However, it has since come to our attention that a very small percentage of those accounts should not have been banned. This case of mistaken identity seems to be isolated to users of an unsupported, Linux-based Windows emulator called Cedega.
Once this pattern was brought to Blizzard's attention, our staff worked directly in conjunction with the Cedega development team in a rigorous and thorough review of the situation. We have since determined that your account was one of those accidentally flagged, and as such we are immediately reinstating your account to fully playable status.
Blizzard Entertainment deeply regrets the error, as we understand that this brief account closure presented you with an inconvenient and highly frustrating experience. We remain firmly committed to enforcing our regulations and suspensions for those exploiting our game, in the interest of ensuring that our legitimate customers have the best possible play experience. In this case, however, we regretfully caught a handful of innocent customers in the process, and for that we offer you our genuine apology.
In consideration of our error, we are applying a credit of two weeks play time onto your account, in addition to crediting back the time that your account was locked. This comes to a total of twenty (2O) days credit, which should be visible on your account within the end of the week.
If you have any other questions or concerns regarding this account, please do not hesitate to let us know. We appreciate your extraordinary patience in this matter and hope you will continue to enjoy your time in World of Warcraft.
Regards,
World of Warcraft Support Team
Blizzard Entertainment"
http://www.linuxlookup.com/2006/nov/22/blizzard_u
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/15/ 1334241
Will he get his account reinstated?
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
One wonders if it should have even happened at all? Did they not catch the fact that there were tons of people all getting the beat stick at one time? Couldn't they correlate this with the fact that most of them were on the same OS? Have we moved beyond the stages of "innocent before proven guilty"? Is this how Vista's licensing will be handled as well? "Might as well ban everyone, if they feel they need to get back in the game, they can petition." It seems kind of counter-productive.
Sorry for the rant, but this reflects on the society we are in today. Is it okay to ban someone without first investigating the cause?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
And my friends and I have been playing EQ since 2001.
... they still have downtime problems to this day. Even on medium pop servers. Just last week she was getting disconnected every 30 seconds. She put up with it for 15 times and then gave up in frusturation. Meanwhile my trader in Everquest never disconnected...
And on the flipside (my wife plays WoW)
If only we could get the people responsible for fixing this onto the Druid dev team.
In C++, friends can touch each others private parts.
I imagine that the OSX version is OpenGL. If that's the case, then most of the work to make the graphical portion of the game on Linux is already done.
But Linux is just impossible to support (too many distros, too many configurations, too many kernel versions, too many GUI environments, too many ways to fuck up, etc).
That's why Linux is great if you're in the business of selling support for Linux.
But Blizzard doesn't do that. They sell a "finished" product and hope for no support at all.
Linux violates 235 Microsoft patents.
Would one or two free months kill them? 20 days seems a bit calculated, stingy.
Or using wine in another OS besides linux... what about BSD?
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
... Slashdot ... sig ... EVER
Best
Any word on whether their anti-cheat software detects use of Linux-based tools that can enable cheats, like /dev/kmem? I would guess they do not.
If they don't have the ability to check whether cheat are being used on Linux, then cheaters will flock to it at some point. And the only thing Blizzard can do is observe behavior on their end and try to divine whether someone appears to be cheating, and try to guess if this is the oncoming wave of cheaters. And that's pretty much what happened, and how they described what happened (except they left out the "cheaters may flock to this tool" part).
I'm glad that Blizzard reinstated these folks, because the whining was absolutely unbelievable. It was like an addict denied his methadone. Everyone was convinced that Blizzard was out to get them, and now we see that isn't the case. The acted reasonably, so all the Linux Professional Victims can drop it.
Et In Arcadia Ego
I have NO IDEA what others are running that got them banned. I play almost EVERY day (yes an addict). I have played since about a month after the game was released.
I have never used windoze. Slackware Linux with Cedega.
I never got banned. I read all the posts over at cedega and feared the worst, but never a problem.
Seems to me like the game probably detected that it was running on an environment which was not 100% known to it, and thus thought it was being hacked.
Blizzard goes to some length to detect bots and cheating programs. Looks like CEDEGA got caught in all that checking, but once Blizzard verified the situation, they fixed the problem.
So nothing to get excited about. Just a technical issue and not some anti-linux conspiracy...
I know, this is OT, so I put it in the subject. My opinion on the whole Cedega thing is that anyone who would use it would suck a d1ck. I do not play WoW, I play Guild Wars, and their support for Guild Wars is miserable at best. You have to turn off shading, reflections, etc, etc,. I bought the software, or subscription, whatever you want to call it, and ran it an tweaked it, and suffered through the never ending bullshit from their support and STILL NEVER got it to work. I just wish game dev companies would develop a native Linux client, it might actually help push those of us who have to dual boot windows and Linux push over the edge and wipe the windows partition for good!! Cedega Blows!
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
Yeah, now the next step is to release a native Linux version of the game. After all, it must be portable code since it runs on Mac OS already...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Blizzard has historically done a great job at catching the bad guys without catching innocent people. They probably caught some people who didn't deserve it but they were generally fair. This latest round wasn't like that at all. It would appear that they are currently targeting wow-glider and anti-afk macros so aggressively, they are using unreliable tactics prone to false positives.
I've been paying attention to this latest wave of bannings because my guild's main tank got hit and he has no idea why. I've talked to him at length and tried to figure out possible triggers. Nothing we've come up with yet would explain things. The most likely candidates include logging in from friends machines but he's talked to them and nobody seems to have installed any of the types of cheats that I know about.
Right now Blizzard's justice system is operating in a black box. They hide behind email auto-responders that claim to have "reinvestigated" their "extensive in-game logs" and technicians who handle appeals but don't seem to be given any details beyond "cheat detected". We don't know what their evidence is. We have to trust that when they ban it's legitimate.
Legally, Blizzard hides behind WoW's terms of service that says basically that they can yank your account anytime they feel like it with or without a valid reason. This is only part of the agreement between Blizzard and us though. Before investing hundreds and thousands of hours into characters that they can rip away at any time we expect them to be fair about doing so. We expect them to have a good reason and reasonable evidence and until now, they have upheld that.
In this latest round of bannings Blizzard banned unfairly. They banned innocent people based on flimsy faulty evidence and called them cheaters and lairs when they complained. The evidence that this was happening was there before this announcement but this is irrefutable proof. Unbanning the people who got banned for using Linux is a good start but what about all the other people who were innocent and got banned? Are we to believe that these are the only unfair bannings? The only mistake made happened to be in a tight active community with commercial representatives? Doubtful. I want to see Blizzard chow down on a big piece of humble pie this Thanksgiving and start actually looking at the evidence against people and un-ban the innocent victims of their latest dragnet banning scheme.
Blizzard usually does a great job at balancing protecting it's customers and protecting the gaming experience. This latest round of bannings stands in stark contrast to that. Someone, somewhere obviously got overzealous and decided to ban based on flimsy faulty evidence. I won't have any trust in the fairness of Blizzard's system until I see more people get un-banned.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
I am sorry but "Sorry" is not enough for me... This will happen again and again and again. I am sure its nothing against Linux, just their paranoid ways.
I had been playing WoW from Friends and Family to present (well about 6months ago). I stopped playing as it became a serious pain to play WoW over wine. Yeah I know Cedega.. blah blah. I do not support that crud. So I stopped playing. I had at that time 3 60's and was pimped out. I just could not bring my self to hack wine to play wow every time I needed to patch.
Reading the "WoW banned Cegeda players" made me very happy really it did.
I was hoping enough of the players from the Linux community would push blizzard to finally release their Linux client. (Yes there is one) and we could play with out all the needed hacks. I would instantly reinstall and play again if I was able to do it native. As the way it is now I just stopped paying for something that I had to support my self... Not the reason I play a game.
Blizzard if your reading this (like you care) I am sure many of us would use the Linux client and expect no support from you except patches when you do version bumps. Forcing us to emulate a win32 env. is not the way to go. It does not play well.. period.
my two bits.
Off to do something else with my *nix box.
Cheers.
As far as I understand it, every single Linux user who got banned was running it under Cedega, especially since Blizzard has been known to (or at least claims that they have,) worked with the Cedega team in the past to fix issues with WoW (like the old minimap problem.)
I haven't heard any accounts yet of anyone being banned while running under Wine. Myself included.
They didn't ban you because of your leetness and also because you possess the "Sword Of A Thousand Truths"
And the whole point of an MMO is network effects. Hardly any people use linux to play WoW. But think of how many players have a friend or guild-mate who plays using linux... they had to fix it.
I quit!
How the hell is parent modded Insightful? Gee, if there werent any people using bots, this wouldnt have been a problem in the first place, either.
If they didnt chase after those people in the first place, this wouldnt have been a problem in the first place.
If there wasnt ever a such thing as a computer invented, this wouldnt have been a problem in the first place.
Or perhaps most astutely of all... If Linux users represented enough of a market share to economically JUSTIFY blizard putting the time and effort into making a linux client, this wouldnt have been a problem in the first place.
I dont think i've ever seen a more fitting place for the line "cry more, noob". Yes, linux is great. Yes, it would be nice if there were more major games for it. No, its not a company's fault that they dont waste time catering to a fraction of their market. Blizzard is already unusual enough in fully supporting macs at launch.
get all Linsux users in concentration camps and destroy them.
Linux sucks. It is an underground OS that is completely unstandardized. Linux geeks, get the fuck over yourselves.
I hate bots in WoW as much as anyone, but Blizzard needs to WARN people that a 3rd party program is running on their system. WARN them. Every time it's detected.
I believe Blizzard's WoW launcher does so to a degree:
"Automatic Trojan/Cheat-Program Scan"
"If a Trojan or third-party World of Warcraft cheat program is detected on the system on which the Blizzard Launcher is running, a message will appear with additional helpful information. Trojans are hidden programs designed for a number of malicious purposes, such as spreading computer viruses and stealing World of Warcraft account and password information. The Blizzard Launcher is intended as an additional level of security against these programs, but we strongly recommend that players also install dedicated anti-virus software on their computers."
"Third-party cheat programs are designed to give players an unfair advantage in World of Warcraft. The scan that the Blizzard Launcher performs is provided solely for your protection and to give you an opportunity to remove any detected cheat program before you play World of Warcraft. It does not report any information back to Blizzard. If you choose to bypass the Blizzard Launcher (see below) and run World of Warcraft without removing any cheat program it might have identified for you, you risk having your World of Warcraft account closed if the cheat is detected while you're in game, regardless of who was responsible for installing it."
"We've often found that players whose account information had been compromised by a Trojan program or whose World of Warcraft accounts were banned for using a third-party cheat program while playing were unaware that these programs existed on the computer they used to play the game. This scan will be particularly helpful to those players who share computer access with multiple users, as is the case in Internet gaming cafes and single-computer households."
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/misc/launcher.html
Linux users that requested refunds and wanted to cancel their accounts after their accounts were reinstated got this:
If frigging Gmail wasn't down I'd post the GD email that says basically that Blizzard doesn't do Refunds.
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
They could produce a Linux client rather than making people use crappy for-pay versions of Wine that is unsupported.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
TOS = Terms of Service.
i cId=47009071&sid=1&pageNo=3
"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?top
As well there are X mouse and key clicker programs. I made a toy script back in the Everquest days to respond to "heal me" type phrases. The process list API stuff in Wine probably can't see what's going on in the Linux side. Hmm...
I bet you half the people congratulating Blizzard here are the same people that called for a boycott a few years back when they took down that open source battle net server project. How easily we forget..wussies.
"..that the bans were in fact made in error.." :] definitely a feature
It's not a bug, it's a feature saving Linux's people from the useless WoW
While Blizzard has 'fixxed' this small goof on their part, and many ~geeks~ on this board and on others around the world have forgotten something.
This is the same "Teh Evil" company that fought bnetd.
Yes I am sure that after needing a shovel to move the mountains of money out of their way just so they can get to their desks, the Blizzard Execs are quaking in fear at my protest, I take pride in this stand.
In many battles the soldiers hope that the effort is not in vein.
Lest we forget.
One more group that will never see a dime from me again.
Microsoft.
Blizzard.
Nike.
Sony.
Chrysler.
General Motors.
The list is growing.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
So they credited them two weeks, plus the six days they were banned. So if they are on the monthly plan($14.99) this comes to refunding the time they were physically unable to play and then saying I'm sorry to the tune of $7.50.
Keep in mind, they aren't even sending them a check for $7.50... they are just agreeing to take $7.50 less of their money this month. If any of them are so pissed off by this episode that they decide to cancel their account they get bupkus. Personally I think this is almost an insult.
"We called you a cheater, and banned your for nearly a week. Charging you $7.50 less this month should make everything right again."
When this happened, there were a lot of comments saying that Blizzard have the right to do whatever they want, and theres no justification for whining. They do have the right to do what they want, but it was still unfair, so people complained. Now Blizzard have reversed their decision. Would they have reversed their decision if there wasn't the outcry from slighted Linux users? It's possible, but I think not.
You do realize that there is a Mac WoW client, right?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Wait 60 minutes after the detection of the "Bot" by Warden. Then, pop up a message on the screen saying said bot was detected, client refuses to respond to ANYTHING until an "I agree to contact XYZ and/or remove bot" button is clicked. This gives innocent people notice that somethings wrong with their PC and needs investigating. True bot users can't just start the bot and walk away without expecting to time out after an hour...
Wine's been fine for a long time. Still unsupported - but you'll find more using Wine than Cedega there.
From TFA (and google):
World of Warcraft Gold
Cheap gold and All servers in stock 24/7 instant delivery & Live Chat
WoW Secrets Revealed
Level 60 Players Tell All Master your Server in Days!
World of Warcraft Gold
$9.57/100 gold on most of servers, Powerleveling 1-60 only 13 days
Now that Macs run Intel processors, what would it take to create a cross platform Mac-to-Linux version like Wine? After all, OSX makes more use of OpenGL than Windows does.. there would not be as much need for DirectX conversions and such. I know Apple has their own 3D kit and audio kits that are only loosely based on standards, but it's got to be less work than windows.. perhaps Apple could help out a little?
It actually runs very well under wine. If I'm doing something else in the background that requires a lot of I/O like burning a DVD the frame rate drops, or something that requires a lot of CPU like transcoding video both the framerate drops and sound gets a bit weird - but just having the game and a web browser going is no problem. One thing I really like about the game is you can hear when the flights finish or if someone on your list logs on so you can drop what you are doing and go back to the WoW screen.
It is probably not in the spirit of the game to switch back and forth to a web browser with lists of skill progression, maps and what critters drops that turtle scale - but under linux it is easy to switch screens back and forth with no noticable time lag. Those flight scenes are astounding but I have to admit I use the time to read slashdot.
Perhaps I am oversimplifying it - I wasn't playing WoW when that happened.
"The issue of false positives were related to a single build of Cedega, so this affected only a subset of Cedega users." -- Tseric, Blizzard Poster, posted here.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Blizzard has a horrible history when it comes to catching bad guys (hackers) and letting the good guys (legit players) go. When WoW came out people would be banned because they found and 'exploited' bugs not knowing they were even bugs. Blizzard still bans people for accessing uncompleted areas using LEGITIMATE means. Blizzard DOES NOT ban players for using map exploits in Battlegrounds despite its obviously disruptive results (people have reported Arathi Basin matches taking hours due to this problem.)
Even during beta testing, Blizzard would ban players for finding bugs and exploiting them weeks after reporting the bug. Blizzard doesn't give a shit about public relations because the masses are too stupid to realize that their so-called 'hard on cheaters' attitude is all smoke and mirrors.
Now THAT would be totally cool...
This is great that they have acknowledged the cedega community as legitimate users, and i salute them for eventually making the right decision, despite initial blunders. But what about users (like myself) who use vanilla wine as opposed to cedega to play wow? I would hope that in their infinite wisdom they would allow us the privelege to pay them money every month just like windows/mac/cedega users can.
WINE strives to be more like Windows. Cedega just wants to make games works (focuses on DirectX), so if WoW gets updated and needs something from Windows and not DirectX, WINE will have a better shot of having it.
WoW got updated and Cedega users got constant crashes after ~1-5 minutes of game time. Warden bans accounts who's client keeps crashing. The most hardcore WoW players would just keep logging in and crashing until Warden banned their asses.
WINE didn't have the bug, only Cedega. WINE users weren't banned over that WoW update.
As long as they're getting rid of cheaters, some innocents getting caught in the mix don't bother me. It's just a video game, it doesn't really matter.
But... did anyone get The Sword Of A Thousand Truths as compensation?
I recently installed WOW on linux using Wine... It works great. I hope I don't get banned just because I'm using a different emulator. From the FAQ :
2.2. Does Wine emulate a full computer?
No, as the name says, Wine Is Not a (CPU) Emulator. Wine just provides the Windows API. This means that you will need an x86-compatible processor to run an x86 Windows application, for instance from Intel or AMD. The advantage is that, unlike solutions that rely on CPU emulation, Wine runs applications at full speed. Sometimes a program run under Wine will be slower than when run on a copy of Microsoft Windows, but this is more due to the fact that Microsoft has heavily optimized parts of their code, whereas mostly Wine is not well optimized (yet). Occasionally, an app may run faster under Wine than on Windows. Most apps run at roughly the same speed.
Cedega aka WineX are based off of wine. There should be no discernable difference on their end.
You should have nothing to worry about what so ever except where Cedega has better support which can't be released publicacly which wine it self does not posses.