Slashdot Mirror
Linux Users Banned From Diablo III Servers
dartttt writes with word that "Blizzard has banned all Linux users who are playing Diablo III on Linux using Wine." Reader caranha adds that these users have been flagged as "using cheating programs," and that replies from Blizzard support staff so far have upheld these bans.
Update: 07/03 16:57 GMT by S :An official response from a Blizzard Community Manager indicates they don't ban people for using Linux. As with most reports of game bans, we have only the word of random gamers that they were banned for the reason they say they were banned.
Linux users who crawl to Blizzard remind me of an cousin of mine who kept going back to her abusive boyfriend.
Yeah, maybe they've changed this time. Maybe they really love Linux now. Why, I bet after 8 years they're going to release a WoW Linux client too, any day now! This time it's going to be different!
Hey, here's an idea, why not support the studios that really *DO* support Linux instead of studios that treat it like a red-headed stepchild? Just a thought.
I mean, if you're going to be a whore to studios who clearly have no intention of supporting Linux, you had may as well set up a Windows dual-boot and play your game software in Windows.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
And that, dear readers, is why Slashdot advice is sometimes unsound. After reading reports of client side exploits (like rumors of item duping via system clock adjustments) and understanding basic limits on server/client communication, it is apparent that Blizzard has to trust the client more than they're comfortable with. So if you look at their "warden" implementation for WoW, you can imagine that Diablo III has a similar "anti-cheat check" component running in user mode where Diablo III runs. And they probably (correctly) identify Wine as being not genuine Windows. It's an emulation. And therein lies the problem. Without setting up a highly invasive rootkit like The Warden, Blizzard cannot know if Wine is emulating Windows libraries correctly. A simple mental exercise is to imagine that the D3 client cannot query the servers every time it needs a time stamp for each event in the game -- to do so would DDOS their own servers so each client must query each user's system clock. The Windows call that does this is emulated by Wine. One could easily insert a dynamic control for this "system clock" into Wine and recompile. One of the achievements in Diablo III is to finish each act in under an hour. So a user could note the time, play to the end of an act and before beating the final boss, simply turn the clock one minute past the starting time and have Wine report that to the client. And if the client is not asking the server for these time stamps, achievement granted. This is a very coarse example for the sake of brevity but I would imagine that system timestamps affect many more aspects of the game. The rumor was that rolling back your system clock after an item sale would return the item to your inventory and you would still have the gold from selling it.
So is there actually a modified version of Wine cheating for you under your Diablo III client using the windows DLL api as a facade? Blizzard doesn't know. They can't know unless they have a rootkit that runs in super user (administrator) mode that profiles and scans all other programs for offending actions. That's how they caught WoWGlider but it would be infinitely harder with individual people like me tailoring their own versions of Wine. I am not saying their reaction is correct, I'm just trying to explain to you why they are employing arcane logic. The solution is for them to natively support Linux but that's a completely separate flame fest for which I really don't have the energy right now.
My work here is dung.
And they probably (correctly) identify Wine as being not genuine Windows. It's an emulation. And therein lies the problem. Without setting up a highly invasive rootkit like The Warden, Blizzard cannot know if Wine is emulating Windows
Wine Is Not Emulation
Foot placed squarely in mouth since 1983.
Blizzard really are doing very well at generating massive amounts of bad publicity for themselves on Diablo 3. They may have achieved some impressive early sales, but I still can't help but wonder whether they're not being self-defeating here.
I think a lot of this stems from their decision to cash-in on what had formerly been a "grey market" around their games, via the introduction of the official "real money" auction house. While it's easy to see things like the always-on connection requirement and the paranoid 3rd-party software detection as being driven by piracy concerns, I suspect the RMAH has at least as much to do with it.
Partly, this will be due to Blizzard wanting to protect their anticipated margins. But as much as that, it's about covering their legal backside. By mainstreaming real-money financial transactions between players for virtual goods like this, they're entering a legal minefield - in fact, more than that, they're entering a different legal minefield for every territory where the RMAH is available.
If a third party exploit reduces the value of the cash investment that players have made in an in-game item or commodity, are Blizzard, as the service-provider, liable? In ANY of the territories where the service is offered? Chances are, questions like this haven't even been tested in most of those territories. Blizzard therefore need to minimise their risk by being as paranoid as possible and accepting as inevitable any harm that they do to the player experience. For Blizzard, absolute control over the game client is now more important than ever.
Actually, even more interestingly, I wonder what this might mean over time for Blizzard's love of tweaking stats and balance. If Blizzard do something that reduces the value of a particular set of items or commodities, are they vulnerable to law-suits? In ANY of the territories where the RMAH is available. Blizzard have an absolute fixation with tweaking stats and balance in their games. In some ways, it would actually be good for this tendancy to get stomped on a bit; their constant meddling with my class was one of the biggest factors that drove me to quit World of Warcraft. But I do wonder whether their development teams might find themselves increasingly frustrated by constraints placed on them by legal and marketing.
I really do wish Blizzard had decided to stay well out of the real money trading thing. There was always a real money grey market in World of Warcraft (and, I gather, in Diablo 2). It was an occasional low-level irritation (mostly when the activities of gold-farmers started to impinge upon "genuine" players), but it was never catastrophic. You always knew that, on balance, it was likely that a good number of the players in your guild had bought gold at some point and that, in all likelihood, a small minority did so regularly. But you just got on and played the game.
Blizzard seem to want to have it both ways; the up-front profits from the "direct sale" model and the profits over time from the "pay to win" model. I always defended WoW's subscription model on the basis that your purchase of the game and its expansions covered "sunk" development costs and your subs covered the ongoing cost of maintaining and incrementally enhancing the game. I still believe that's correct. But I do hope that players don't let them get away with what they seem to be trying to achieve with Diablo 3.
Blizzard surely isn't going to be making this kind of mistake having already managed to avoid this with SC2.
"We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly. We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.
Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will."
This is hardly news. Blizzard has probably tens of thousands of people out there trying to break their games and their economies. If Blizzard doesn't feel it is worth extending Warden (their anti-cheating tool) to work on Linux (because of the marginally increased sales that come from supporting Linux), then they don't have to.
If they allowed Diablo 3 to be played on Linux, but weren't able to properly monitor users who play on Linux, their WOW and Diablo 3 economies would be sunk.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Guess Linux users will just have to wait for the PS3 version!
(Runs and hides)
Summation 2
What's the point of using some overpriced clunky shit like a Mac when it only runs about 5% of software that I need it to?
Apparently the truckload of bad publicity they got from their launch difficulties was wearing off, so they decide they needed to rustle some more up, quick.
...seriously. Blizzard did not provide Wine users enough warning to cover their asses under general standards like implied warranty. If they do not unban or provide refunds a small claims or class action suit will be trivial.
It says it on the box. The system requirements are there. I'm not sure why people complain about the game not working on their platform. If you want to run it, just run a full blown VM and call it a day. Virtual Box is free. That being said I'm using an OS X virtual machine and it runs very well with D3 thanks to a few tweaks.
Running a full blown VM this day and age is not a difficult thing for a hacker to do, and even better, is still as cheap as running WINE if you have a copy of OS X "laying" around.
The system requirements are printed on the box, its their code, and people not reading the TOS leads to this. If you really want to stick to the OSS mantra - this piece of closed source code should not even have touched your system anyway.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
The problem is that no rootkit can truly be invasive enough. The only real answer is hardware trust management where the hardware system vendor and the OS vendor can provide guarantees via known public-key software signing, etc, to the application vendor at the expense of the user not really having any control over their machine anymore. Anything less, and where there's a will there's a way to manipulate the client software and bypass the checks of an invasive Warden-like program, even on "official" Windows.
The *real* answer is that they can only protect their game server-side. It's ok to do client-side optimizations that don't matter much to the integrity of the game, but things like buying and selling items need to be implemented as proper server-side transactions. It's perfectly possible to design a networked game with the right local optimizations to make it playable and the right server-side transactions to make it mostly-unhackable in all important ways. It just requires a lot more coding work and proper design and $$ spent on server infrastructure to support the increased load on their end, and they're unwilling to expend that. The only other logical conclusion is to accept a hackable game. Banning Linux users does nothing to change this fundamental problem.
This new piece of information leads me to believe I made the right decision.
While most of my concerns lay with Activision proper, Blizzard now seems close to the same dark hole in light of their recent user abuse.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
We constantly hear complaints about companies and their inability to deal with the grey market over item resale. Like it or not, they're building digital economies and that means real value is being dealt with. Valve hired an economist for a reason and, likewise, Blizzard has taken a very bold step in their RMAH. Many have praised 2nd Life for its embrace of digital/real value and have talked about it being a model for serious later material, but, honestly, we're still collectively wary if someone actually wants to try it for themselves. The real point to be made is that the "pay to win" model exists regardless of the game itself and the game developer's intentions. As long as you can trade items between players, you create economic incentive to game the system. If you've ever talked a friend in real life into trading you material in-game, you've done the exact same thing, but only with social capital. All that Blizzard has done is bring it out into the light and try and address the mechanic that is in place and clean up the system so that there is a clear standard rather than murky side-dealing.
I like losing arguments, it just means that I can take your point and make it my own.
Err, wasn't the item dupe exploit a rumor to make money on the rmah just before it was released?
"We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly. We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.
Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will."
I have been playing D2 on a Linux box for years using Wine with no problems. Makes no sense that they would ban people from D3 for using it.
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/vyc4z/linux_users_permanently_banned_from_diablo_iii/
There are only one or two accounts that were banned. I think it's fairly obvious that they are just using Wine as an excuse for using cheat engines. Plenty of users are using Wine with no problems at all.
wtf is the point of using some clunky shit like Linux if you're just going to use proprietary software like Diablo 3 anyways? Stop being cheap and get a Mac you bums.
Not sure if serious, or a troll. >
A Mac will run all Windows software, all OS X software (compiled in the last decade or so) and most Unix software that comes as source. I'd say you're way better off with a Mac than some generic PC that can't run OS X programs.
From http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2012/07/blizzard-clarifies-diablo-iii-ban.html
"We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly. We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.
Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will."
Be as pedantic as you want, Wine emulates Windows behavior. Whether it does so by reimplementing the libraries is irrelevant; the thing that is accomplished is environment emulation.
Better rush to get those angry rager page views. Never mind anything else.
?
LOL You're cute.
It should read some Linux users banned. It's possible to run Diablo III in Linux, and Blizzard has already responded to some of the tickets being filed by confirming that Linux, while unsupported, is perfectly acceptable. The ones getting banned are apparently using WINE, and there's no confirmation yet that it was everyone using WINE or just a subset of the WINE users.
Even so, if they did decide to ban everyone using WINE, that's low.
1. WoW
2. Battle Net
3. Linux
(am I missing some?)
Three strikes now.
Too many assumptions here. When cheaters get caught they like to spout lies ... so why believe any of this?
A post from support (a blue) in the thread above:
>> Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will.
A clear and concise explaination for why they might ban Linux users. Only problem? Banning Linux users isnt whats happening here, and they have stated that playing on Linux will NOT get you banned:
http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2012/07/blizzard-clarifies-diablo-iii-ban.html
We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.
Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will.
I dont think Warden works properly on Linux, but then it didnt for WoW either, and that didnt stop it from working flawlessly. Blizzards games have tended to be shining examples of Wine actually working well.
Every EULA ever disclaims implied warranties of all types. Believe me, Blizzard is no different.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Even if Windows were running on bare hardware I could play tricks with the clock, I could hide memory from any program that Blizzard could come up with to attempt to scan regions of memory, I still could pull all of the tricks you just mentioned. How? Using good ol' virtualisation extensions that exist within processors.
Not only that but I own the hardware, I have physical access to the hardware, there is no good way for any program to insert itself at a higher level. I control the boot process so I get to choose where the OS is loaded, I get to change the way it works and interacts. Writing kernel level modules that tamper with time like you are suggesting that would be simple with Wine are entirely possible using straight Windows as well.
Thats the biggest problem, Blizzard doesn't own, they don't manufacture and they can't guarantee that no-one has tampered with the hardware. There comes a point where the software is running on top of the hardware and it has to trust that the hardware is not being malicious. This is how cable box hacks, and satellite box hacks used to work.
Blizzard can write a root kit all they want, if people want to cheat and if there is enough incentive to do so people will find ways to defeat the rootkits behaviour and cheat. Until everything is sent over an RDP like protocol and no code executes client side this is a problem that is going to exist for the foreseeable future.
cat
Cædite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
I'm sure some aren't cheating, but he cash market is going to inhale cheating and full-blown bots like never before.
So..."But **I'm** not cheating!" I think a scene is appropriate here.
Agent: Here are your things Mr. powers. One crushed velvet suit. One Tom Jones album. One Swedish penis pump.
Austin: That's not mine.
Agent: One credit card receipt for Swedish penis pump, signed "Austin 'Danger' Powers".
Austin: I'm telling you, baby, that's not mine.
Agent: One Swedish penis pump warranty card, filled out and signed by Austin Powers.
Austin: I don't even know what this stuff is. This type of thing ain't my bag, baby.
Agent: One book, "Swedish-made Penis Enlarger Pumps And Me: This Type Of Thing Is My Bag, Baby( by Austin Powers".
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If your a GNU/ Linux user who likes to game then why don't you dual boot or virtualize? GNU/Linux is NOT meant for desktop level gaming, if Blizzard didn't release a Linux binary then clearly they have NO interest in you gaming on Linux.
Before someone trolls this post because 99.9% of people don't know what a troll is, I'm a Linux user and even I had to admit that I want to game I'll just reboot into my copy of Windows and game for a bit. Gaming on Linux is like trying to walk using thumb tacks, there's not enough there to make your attempt reasonable.
No, I did it. Selling 19 1514 dps hellion crossbows with 11% attack speed and a socket for 20mio each leave battle tag here USrealm
This is a non-story. It was not WINE, or Linux, but good old fashion cheating. Kudos to Slashdot for falling for some social engineering and posting a story with no factual evidence to back it up.
I'll be back in a few minutes, going to go post that I found Steve Job's hidden World of Warcraft account on Battle.net forums, then come back here and post the story with link to the firehose. Go upvote me, because it's sensational.
On the one hand, the RMAH does co-opt the grey market in item selling. On the other hand, that appears to be the core of the game; Diablo IV seems likely to be just an auction house, a paperdoll model to see your purchased gear equipped on, and a spreadsheet.
Hey, here's an idea, why not support the studios that really *DO* support Linux
Which such studio offers a video game with professional-caliber production values in the same genre as World of Warcraft or Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3?
The real dilemma: How to play competition games created for an operating system that you deem too offensive to own or install.. Oh the humanity!
Your local municipal judge may or may not uphold that.
They might decide that the UCC actually has some teeth and decide to enforce it despite of what kind of sleazy disclaimers a company might try.
You will never know until you try.
It will cost them more money to defend then it will cost you to persue the issue.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
All three of them?
By how I interpret your definition of emulator, Linux is an emulator because it emulates UNIX behavior. What do I misunderstand?
Just about the only thing they can do to get a significant amount of hate is go after Linux. They should know better, Sony learned: You do not fuck with the kinds of people who run Linux on their PS3s.
What's their incentive to fix it? They already have your money, so, if they flag you as a cheater due to some faulty definitions in their cheat buster, it's much easier and cost effective to simply deny the fact and leave you banned. It's not like Linux+Wine is going to make up a significant portion of their player base, anyway, so potential for bad PR and, by extension, lost future sales, is pretty low.
Vivendi/Blizzard has piss-poor customer service, and always has. The company has been shitting on its customers since the Blizzard North crew left. If you want a good game that hearkens to the days when Blizzard was an awesome development house, pick up Torchlight II, developed and produced by the same folks who brought you Diablo & Diablo II. /They/ are the folks you should be following; not some corporate entity that leverages every IP in its portfolio into dead-horse territory just to make a buck.
I'm not sure why people complain about the game not working on their platform.
That isn't what people are complaining about. They tried to get it running in Wine with full understanding that it might work or might not. They are complaining because they got banned for even trying. A battle.net ban means that they can no longer play any recent Blizzard game they have purchased, multiplayer or single player, online or offline. It would be like a Hasbro coming into my house and stealing all the board games I have purchased from them because they think I used disallowed house rules, when in reality I was just playing on a different table then they expected. It is a gross violation of consumer rights.
A Mac will run all Windows software [...]
[[citation oh so very muchly needed]]
Considering the asian servers were down over a full day to remove duped items and fix the problem? I doubt it.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I don't care about EULA's, they are yet to be validated in a court of law.
What I do care for is this. I buy a single player game. I choose to play it on my own machine. Blizzard does not agree with my choice of OS and therefore bans my account. €45 down the drain! That's like Ford deciding that you cannot get gasoline at Texaco, and if you do, they will remotely disable your vehicle.
It was gold dupe, and it was real.
put item up for auction, get a bid on it.
roll back the system clock (this works on windows btw).
cancel the auction, get your item back plus the bid.
The bidding user may or may not have also gotten their gold back.
> A Mac will run all Windows software
A Mac won't even run all Mac software.
Hardware support for stuff like this is spotty even in Windows. When you are dealing with the trailing edge stuff Apple likes to put into it's machines, gaming can be quite a disaster.
Emulation and virtualization certainly aren't silver bullets either.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
WTF is the point of shelling out big bucks for Mac when I can get a comparable, if not better, pc from HP for less than half the price? The specs and performance of my new laptop blows the doors off the most recent Macbooks. Also, Mac doesn't run most of the software I'd want to use. Third and finally, I hate Apple as a company, its business practices, and the over-zealous culture of its fan-base.
That why Every EULA ever are legally inadmissible, if not illegal, in many civilized countries.
In the EU, for example, the company is bound to certain warranties that cannot be disclaimed by a EULA.
Thats the biggest problem, Blizzard doesn't own, they don't manufacture and they can't guarantee that no-one has tampered with the hardware. There comes a point where the software is running on top of the hardware and it has to trust that the hardware is not being malicious.
So are you recommending that companies like Actiblizzard develop games exclusively for video game consoles instead of for PCs? That'd seem to go against what Actiblizzard said in the past about PCs.
Until everything is sent over an RDP like protocol and no code executes client side
Why do you think Sony just agreed to buy Gaikai? Gaikai's service offers exactly such an RDP-like protocol.
Wonder what the racial preference of Blizzard really is? One one think that the preferred race at Blizzard is 'green' as in USD, followed by 'blue' as in EURO and so on.
Lets see if Anons hack the Blizzard bank accounts. :)
LoL
My new-ish Mac died. It cooked itself to death.
My others don't have good enough GPUs to play any major studio game and can't be upgraded.
I can put any GPU I like into my conventional tower PCs and I don't have to pay a minimum buy in of $2400 to get it either.
I have Macs. They are doorstops in this discussion.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
And if they should just be happening to be charging mobster level service charges on those transactions...
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
When I first viewed this story and its comments, I noticed an ad in the square-ish area to the upper right that seemed to be a D3 Gold Seller. Awesome how the ads tie in with such precise relevancy.
A Mac won't even run all Mac software.
Nor will a Windows PC run all Windows software. Windows 7 Home 64-bit can't run pre-1996 applications because they're 16-bit, and a lot of these are classic PC games that have had no official remake since.
Umm. Many cheat detection programs check the system clock and compare it to the server clock to see that they are runnign at the same speed etc. In linux there is/was a kernel bug related to the leap second. I wonder if that bug could cause the cheat detection to panic?
Clearly, as usual, nobody did their research. I quote the Blizzard Community Manager:
We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly. We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings. Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Why would anyone in their right mind run OSX software? Like Final Cut? The people I know with the overpriced Apple shit only use OSX because it's less of a pain then Linux. And because they feel like hipsters with their round-cornered design laptops.
Totally agree with that.
Solution: have the client certify wine binaries and versioning with one way hashes. Only validate say wine-1.[3-5].x binaries with a generic set of flags available in release notes.
Happy gentooers, case closed.
I have no idea if this accusation of Linux users being banned for using WINE with Diablo 3 is true or not, or if we have all the facts yet or not, but one thing seems quite clear to me - if your account is banned, you can't play the game AT ALL - not even single-player, since D3's single player still has to be played via their servers.
So if, through a fuckup of their Warden software you are marked as a cheater despite being nothing of the sort, you probably won't get any recourse. I mean, why would they bother investigating? Here's the TOS: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/termsofuse.html
"BLIZZARD MAY SUSPEND, TERMINATE, MODIFY, OR DELETE ACCOUNTS AT ANY TIME FOR ANY REASON OR FOR NO REASON, WITH OR WITHOUT NOTICE TO YOU"
This crap isn't unusual, it's actually very common and will become increasingly pervasive as more service-dependent games are brought into the world. And some people wonder why I don't fucking use Steam/Origin and only go with Humble Bundles, GOG and other non-DRM outfits.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
Did you run a fan controller?
Ask and ye shall receive:
http://suite101.com/article/how-to-install-microsoft-windows-on-a-mac-a163167
(Note: "A Mac" is "a line computers made by Apple Computer, Inc." Present versions of said line can run windows directly, ergo they can run all windows software)
And they probably (correctly) identify Wine as being not genuine Windows. It's an emulation.
You should be receiving a barrage of W.I.N.E. Is Not an Emulator hate mail any moment. It doesn't invalidate your point but I thought you should be forewarned.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
And that, dear readers, is why Slashdot advice is sometimes unsound.
That wasn't unsound advice. His advice worked perfectly, as Diablo did indeed run under Wine.
There are only two people to blame here. The first is Blizzard (and all the other game companies for similar games) for making the game the way they did (they can ban whoever they want from their severs, but a single player game should be able to run single-player, and the multi-player aspect should allow any one person to host the game without ever talking to their servers). The second are the people who would buy a single-player game that requires connection to remote servers in order to work.
Queue the people who go, 'Diablo III isn't a single-player game.' Well, considering diablo 1 and 2 were, they should be blamed for that too.
Wine isn't emulating anything. It's a wrapper library. There's a significant difference.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Screw Blizzard. They did this:
https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2002/04/08
The headline: "Blizzard Freezes Bnetd Gaming Platform, Sues Own Customers"
I've never bought anything from Blizzard ever since, and never will.
It's called virtualization. If you don't know what that is, turn in your geek card.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You didn't buy the game you lost the licence to use it for a bit. Linux users just got to the end point first. Imagine a time when you could buy and own a game. What would it be like?
So ofcourse, we all are just gonna trust Blizzard once again.
Apart from very convenient claim they got NOTHING to prove that their hands are clean.
I don't see any reasons, why they are any different than Microsoft or Apple In this matter.
All checks and everything MUST be done from server end. If you put trust into client side, you have already failed security. Blizzard seemed to proove that they failed with this case quite well.
Anything leading edge isn't guaranteed to work everywhere. I'd like to use ThunderBolt as data transfer between my six year old laptop and my server. What do you mean I need new hardware?
No virtualization or emulation won't solve everything. This is how the real world works even if you are in the Windows or Unix world.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Except there have been several lawsuits which have upheld various parts of EULAs - having an unenforceable section does not automatically invalidate the entire agreement or contract.
But people continue to post false absolutes like yours on Slashdot.
Oh wait, you tried to dismiss all those countries you disagree with by calling them uncivilized... yeah, that makes your argument a good one.
dosbox ftw!
Basically it's emulation in the same way that UltraHLE was emulation. You emulate the system at a library level rather than emulating the raw hardware.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
A clear and concise explaination for why they might ban Linux users. Only problem? Banning Linux users isnt whats happening here, and they have stated that playing on Linux will NOT get you banned: http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2012/07/blizzard-clarifies-diablo-iii-ban.html
We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.
Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will.
I dont think Warden works properly on Linux, but then it didnt for WoW either, and that didnt stop it from working flawlessly. Blizzards games have tended to be shining examples of Wine actually working well.
only the initial complaint in the WINE appdb was from a FreeBSD user (who didn't even mention if he runs linux-wine or native wine) so Blizzard's "everything's fine on linux" reply is pretty useless...
The point is if you want to run Windows, OS X, Linux, and Unix on the same box, a Mac is the only way to go. You can get a Hackintosh but it's not guaranteed that all OS X will work. If that isn't a requirement, then by all means use whatever machine that fits the requirement.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
First of all, you are assuming Blizzard is 100% trustworthy. I, and many others, are not so sure, not after Blizzard's behavior over the past few years. Secondly, Blizzard's setup, pretty much out of necessity, assumes everyone is using 100% default, unmodified software. There are plenty of legitimate reasons (million, literally) for Linux users to be using custom software, in every single component from Wine to their kernel, especially when running 3D Windows software in Wine. And finally, the comparison to WoW is poor: WoW is a pure client-server achitecture, which means the server doesn't have to trust the client for much more than user input. Most of the "cheating" in WoW was, in fact, just using bots to replicate false user-input. Diablo III, OTOH, obviously trusts the client far more than that, probably for Blizzard to lessen their load (and because Diablo, at heart, is a single player game, not an MMO).
Which is the final problem: if people want to cheat at Diablo III, why does Blizzard care? Because they are greedy bastards who want to force people to play online so they can use their RMAH, that is why. And that is the real reason people are pissed: because if even 1 person gets false banned because of that, Blizzard are the ones at fault, from the very beginning, because they were being greedy. And that is why I did not buy Diablo III or SC2, and will not be buying anything from Blizzard in the foreseeable future.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
And so you enter the reason I didn't buy Diablo III. (Day-to-day Linux user here.)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
And what's to stop users doing the same thing by modifying windows binaries? Or compiling the source that has been leaked a few times? Or just modify the anti-cheating code to lie to the server? Or just taking control from a lower level (eg hypervisor)?
The fact is the client cannot be trusted, and if you place trust in the client no matter how much effort you go through at the end of the day the client is still under the control of the end users and any trust placed in the client can be subverted.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Seriously, guys. This is getting ridiculous. You don't need to start frothing at the mouth about how horribly Blizzard is molesting its customers every time they ban a couple of cheaters. Remember this? http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/06/12/2017259/diablo-3-banhammer-dropped-just-before-rmah-goes-live?sdsrc=popbyskidbtmprev Why do these articles make it to the front pages so quickly? Other topics take a couple days, if not a week, to make up front. As it stands, this post was duct-taped together with biased and incorrect information, and so we're left with a slanderous title that isn't anywhere close to being true.
The goal of Linux isnt to pretend to be Unix.
I disagree with your assessment. Linux has done a darn good job of such pretending in the marketplace, enough to displace a lot of uses of UNIX servers.
You could send Blizzard a Cease&Desist forbidding them to call you a cheater. And then you demand them to either unban you or refund your game purchase. Wait what happens.
I think what he's trying to say is there is an extra layer that isn't there in Windows
Windows is the Win32 layer on top of the NT layer. Wine is the Win32-compatible layer on top of the POSIX and X11 layer.
Blizzard can be reasonably sure that what Windows is reporting is true
Even if I'm running Windows in a VirtualBox?
Wait, so you're a real fiend for gaming performance but you're running Diablo 3 in an emulator on Linux? You really think that outperforms a Mac?
Oh, and how about that retina enabled Diablo 3? Hows that working out on your "tower pc"?
That why Every EULA ever are legally inadmissible, if not illegal, in many civilized countries.
That statement makes no claim of any country being called uncivilized. Perhaps you should stop defaming geogob.
How well does DOSBox emulate Windows 3.1 and Windows 3.1 apps?
I don't know what's worse, the lying cheaters or the morons on slashdot that believe them.
...seriously. Blizzard did not provide Wine users enough warning to cover their asses under general standards like implied warranty. If they do not unban or provide refunds a small claims or class action suit will be trivial.
Last I checked, Blizzard specifically released and supported software for Windows and Mac, but not for Linux using WINE as a runtime environment. This is pretty clear on their client download page.
I think you'd lose that lawsuit.
Furthermore, the TOS pretty plainly states that they can ban you for almost any reason, so do not get your hopes up.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
That's an extreme corner case. Besides, most of pre-1996 games were DOS games.
Yes, but it is not the Microsoft version of the API. Sure it is close, but not everything is 100% perfect and probably never will be. As such the behavior is not identical to Windows. It works, and in many instances it works great. As you said it is a library that calls other Linux system libraries, its behavior is directly linked to how those system libraries behave. With Windows you have a small subset of behaviors to look for. There is Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and possibly some of the various Windows Server versions. With Linux there are so many distros and so many permutations of libraries I can see it being nearly impossible to correctly identify them all as WINE. Blizzard is looking for people who have altered libraries and effected system behavior for the purposes of cheating. The game allows you to sell items in a real world auction house. As such they have to protect their investment, or a bunch of people with server farms could farm items and flood the market with powerful items for shit money. Blizzard said flat out that they were going to be very strict on cheating so it does not surprise me that systems that are not behaving like a perfect version of Windows are getting banned. They were very explicit in the list of supported OSes and Linux with WINE is not one.
According to this thread:
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4879268103
there is absolutely no problem with non-cheating WINE users.
But almost any "Linux Software" i.e. open source UNIX code will compile on OS X so what you say makes no sense. Tell me something that runs on Linux but doesn't run on OS X? Now I can think of plenty of things that run on OS X but not Linux...for instance DIABLO 3! Duh. What a fucking retard.
The only thing enticing about the Macintosh was the PowerPC.
I know Apple stole the name of its i-phone operating system “io” from IBMs system “i”.
I know Apple stole the name of its G series macs from IBMs mainframe processor names.
I know Apple's “Siri” is based on IBM technology developed the in the 90's{ViaVoice} which was merged with “Dragon speaking” and formed the company nuance to better market the technology.
I know Apple renamed is operating system to “System 7” because in the 80s IBM named almost all of its products “System something”.
I know Apple decided to name its arm processor A5 because IBM was developing the A2{18-core PowerPC which uses 55-watts on a 45nm process} processor.
I know Apple's use of the G4{PowerPC which used 13-watts on a 130nm process} before it switched to the Core duo {x86 which used 35-watts on a 65nm process} was because of power efficiency or was it marketing BS, and not because IBM's 970fx {PowerPC-64 which used 30-watts on a 90nm process} was to hot for laptops.
I know Apple users complained about how hot their laptops were getting when using first generation Intel i7 {x86 2-core which used 45-watts on a 45nm process}, Jobs recommended to drink more Kool-Aid.
After drinking the Apple flavored Kool-Aid i to believe Apple is such a Technology leader.
Even if applications exclusive to Windows 3.1 are "extreme corner cases", if there were no "extreme corner cases", there would be no need for product differentiation anywhere.
Your first link contradicts your position. From the section "Types of emulators":
In contrast, some other platforms have had very little use of direct hardware addressing. In these cases, a simple compatibility layer may suffice. This translates system calls for the emulated system into system calls for the host system
Um, that's what Wine does.
Every EULA ever disclaims implied warranties of all types.
Correct. However, implied warranties are at too low a level in the law to be fully disclaimed. Most states guarantee this, but it applies to all. The reason it is boilerplate in most contracts is that some states have strong consumer protection laws that come into play if it is not explicitly disclaimed. Also, in grey area cases it can provide some support. In clear cases like this, however, it makes little difference.
I dont think Warden works properly on Linux, but then it didnt for WoW either, and that didnt stop it from working flawlessly.
Huh?
The Terms of Use agreement sounds just as unreasonable as my regular Dungeon Master... so this is one big "who cares"? Unless, of course, you've never actually had a real DM, then you're probably all up-in-arms... but think about it. You're playing a role-playing game. This is to be expected. DMs that arbitrarily tweak the game world... well that just comes with the territory.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Here's the thing about Linux users
Fuck Linux users
Get off your high horses
Get windows or god forbid even mac if you want to do anything real besides stroke your over inflated nerd ego
THe problem is, Blizzard designed the game to exploit those holes for their benefit, not cover them. Its a shameless cash grab, not an expression of art or good design. Dipping their toe into the river of grey money tainted them as a whole.
Good-bye
Since 2007...
Sure, they sold a lot of anticipatory copies, but the single-player crowd left because they get disconnected from single-player games, there's no way to turn on God Mode, and there's no mod community for the game. The multiplayer crowd left because of the Auction House. The only entertainment value remaining in this game is to periodically laugh at Blizzard. Diablo III was.
The real WTF is why they were using client time-stamps for non-latency sensitive transactions, when they should have been using the server.
Blizzard is dead. THey sold out for NO REASON. They had no real incentive to merge with another company except for pure straight greed. Not increasing profits, not securing the future of the company, but straight up greed.
Good-bye
First of all, you are assuming Blizzard is 100% trustworthy.
I and several others used WoW on Wine / Linux for years with no issues. Ive also seen time and again people complaining that they were banned for technical issues, only for the truth that they were cheating to come out.
So forgive me if all of my experience points to this being yet another case of that. If it were some technical issue, why would Blizz stick to its guns and alienate customers?
Why should we trust Blizzard? Because they have a financial interest in keeping their customers, most of them anyway, happy.
Why should we trust forum posters who have potentially been banned for cheating for "using Wine" while tens of thousands of other users doing the same thing report absolutely no problems.
Wine isn't emulating anything. It's a wrapper library. There's a significant difference.
Not a difference that invalidates eldavojohn's point, tho.
Because they are greedy bastards who want to force people to play online so they can use their RMAH
That is absolutely why. So many things come along with that RMAH, and most of them are the main things that people don't like about the game. But they don't care. I have no doubt that thought was put into "how much money will we make by putting in the RMAH and doing all these things, and how many sales will we lose by doing that?" I am sure it was a very easy call.
I am bored with it, I don't enjoy grinding so I don't really play anymore. Every now and then a friend and I will play hardcore until one of us dies. Oh well, I got $60 of enjoyment out of it....time to wait for torchlight 2.
Title says it all.
Because OS X is a stable, UNIXy OS with a user-friendly GUI on top? Now feck off to a car forum and complain to BMW owners they should have bought a Toyota instead.
Let me rephrase that.... what's the point of using an overpriced Mac when I have to recompile/virtualize/jump through other hoops to run the software I need when it just works on Windows and, these days, mostly just works on Linux.
And it sounds like Diablo III does run on Linux... otherwise why would Blizzard be banning Linux users?
it has been repeatedly reported that there are still Linux users playing Diablo 3 on Wine, but the article says all Linux users running Wine were banned.
Wine isn't emulating anything. It's a wrapper library. There's a significant difference.
Seconded. Wine can be thought of more as translator than anything else, between Window's binary format, and the underlying *nix system. *nix can't make heads or tails of the format, besides knowing it is in fact, a binary, and that binary hasn't the slightest idea what X11 is, or how to initiate a TCP/IP connection. In this Wine fills a similar role to that of hplip for printing to HP printers, changing the postscript calls from *nix, into what the HP hardware understands. Simply translation. That a little more context is needed for the translation to make sense in irrelevant. /rant
Wine doesn't emulate a Windows environment, unless producing a blue workspace with which to view programs, is emulation (and it isn't...). Likewise, wine doesn't emulate DirectX3.14159265359, it just wraps it to sane OpenGL calls. If my OpenGL libraries aren't functional, DirectX doesn't function, because DirectX isn't actually what's running, or what is pretending to run. Those system calls just go and become OpenGL calls, and that's why visual artifacts can occur, since the systems are by definition, not identical.
It could be considered library level emulation, if the libraries actually ran directly into the OS, with no wrapper between it, but this is not the case. *nix doesn't know or care what embedded Tridant (Implimented by slyly twisting the Gecko library) has to say, until wine takes it, and makes it look like something with a semblence of sanity.
We have only the word of Blizzard that they banned people for the right reasons. There is no third-party review whatsoever.
Basically it's emulation in the same way that UltraHLE was emulation. You emulate the system at a library level
In that sense, Windows XP emulates Windows 98 at a library level. How would that be a wrong claim?
Yes, but it is not the Microsoft version of the API.
So are you defining "emulation" as any implementation of an API other than those published by the first mover?
a bunch of people with server farms could farm items and flood the market with powerful items
Then the game's economy is inherently broken. If I farm crops in real life, that doesn't break the economy. (Why do you think they call it farming in the first place?) There's a reason CCP hired an economist for Eve Online: to help find how an in-game economy might break.
They were very explicit in the list of supported OSes and Linux with WINE is not one.
What game should people who run Linux be playing instead of Diablo 3?
Because the company that owns Blizzard bought Activision and thought it was a good idea to merge them?
It's not like Blizzard had much of a choice in the matter.
Your local municipal judge may or may not uphold that.
They might decide that the UCC actually has some teeth and decide to enforce it despite of what kind of sleazy disclaimers a company might try.
Sure. Anyone could try. But precedent would not be on your side.
You will never know until you try.
It will cost them more money to defend then it will cost you to persue the issue.
That doesn't mean it won't bankrupt you, or be, at a minimum, a colossal time sink. See, no lawyer will take the case unless you happen to throw enough money that them to make it worth the time.
So forgive me if all of my experience points to this being yet another case of that. If it were some technical issue, why would Blizz stick to its guns and alienate customers?
I don't know, why would Blizzard stick to their guns and refuse to put LAN into SC2 or Diablo III? Because they don't care what a (in their eyes, anyways) relatively small number of their customers think if they think they can make money doing something else. They haven't for years: maybe Blizz did once, but not anymore. And, unlike WoW, they don't even really lose money off a banned customer: they've already paid for the game, and there isn't a monthly fee. They might figure they lose a few dollars of RMAH by having fewer players, but they also figure it is better to have an overly aggressive banning system rather than lose even more off of cheaters. It makes sense, from that point of view, it just ends up possibly screwing a few innocent people over.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I run D3 on Wine and Wasn't banned. Pherhaps I'll have to wait for the next ban wave?
By that definition, was Lesstif a Motif emulator or a free implementation of the commercial Motif graphics library?
The games run natively under your regular hardware in wine, just as they would if they were Linux games. You could say "but they have libraries that translate Windows calls to Linux system calls and libc routines" but that's what any library does, whether it is Lesstif or LibXML2 or dsound.dll.so. Wine provides free implementations of windows libraries, enough to get Windows programs running.
That statement makes no claim of any country being called uncivilized. Perhaps you should stop defaming geogob.
That's not defaming, geogob emphasized the word civilized for a reason. Otherwise why even bring it up?
pretty lame of blizzard, when i bought WoW fresh from the shelves 2 years ago i installed wine
ran WoW in ubuntu and after 1 month suddenly my account was banned with the reason of using 3the part software
i think the real reason behind this is they cant figure out who is using wine or who is using software to cheat so they ban both
Stop being cheap and get a Mac you bums.
Probably better to just dual-boot Windows, the D3 mac client isn't so hot.
A feral druid blog I follow had this to say about the banning:
(Full source here)
Blizzard doesn't make a point of banning Linux users. The same source claims that there was an incident a few years ago where they inadvertently banned everyone using Cedega to play WoW, but when Cedega contacted them they determined the bans were false positives and not only lifted them but credited them with 20 days of game time.
Of course nobody reads the FAQ! If people read the FAQ, the Questions wouldn't be so Frequently Asked.
What useful software "just works" on Windows? The only "Windows exclusives" I can think of are games. Macs are for professionals, PCs are for g4mer d00dz and housewives. And if you are in fact a g4mer d00d then why would you bother running some crap like Linux?
there is a significant difference, but it doesn't change his overall argument. just because someone doesn't explain something the right way it doesn't invalidate their overall argument. if you still doesn't understand his argument, then its just that there's an extra layer between blizzard and the libraries and it's possible to completely modify that behavior. that part of his argument is valid. so yes, this thread is just a bunch of people being pedantic about someone calling wine an emulator, which, with modification, wine *can* become an emulator. you just put a different library in there. the app talking to the wrapper won't know the difference (assuming the replacement library is written well enough).
Why would they ban a user who bought the game to run on emulation software? After they bought the game, they for the most part couldn't care less what you will do with the game as long as you don't resell it to someone else or use it to hurt the enjoyment of others playing the game. If you could get it to play on linux, why should they really ban you from playing as long as you are paying them to play?
More than likely, these users are using the better programming platform of linux to create robots to play the game for them and then sell items for money in the game. This pisses me off and personally, if this is what Blizzard is doing, I would like thank them to kick off all those users.
You could rollback your client and cancel your Auction but you could not receive gold. There's been no proof of this yet.
i remember playing WoW and wine users were hit with the ban hammer due to 3rd party apps, a few weeks later blizzard came back and allowed them to come back.
As an analogy Windows Vista emulates previous versions of Windows, for compatibility sake, right?
Just because it offers compatible interface to the piece of software it doesn't make it an emulator. It's not a specially crafted environment that imitates the original environment in a way that makes them indistinguishable. First because it doesn't offer the entire API set(like drivers support) and second because it also offers some access to the underlying platform.
uhm...
I have no reason not to trust Blizzard. The gold farming community is so big that every time they lose a method of exploiting for gold, they attack Blizzard. They've been on a campaign to debunk the authenticator since it came out because it eliminates a large chunk of their user base who they exploit. So of course, a few gold farmers got banned and they try to make this as news that Linux is not allowed. Misdirecting the responsibility and the problem. That's what they do. Lie, cheat, steal, profit and repeat. I have two friends that have been botting in D3 for about 2.5 weeks and they just got banned (Windows). Serves them right. One of them was banned in Wow for nearly the same activity.
Reading comprehension 101: A emulator mau use a compitablity layer instead of emulating, but that does not turn a compitablity into a emulator. Ergo: No contradiction.
And allow me to extrapolate:
" As with most reports of game bans, we have only the word of random gamers that they were banned for the reason they say they were banned."
and had I taken even a single course in journalism, I probably would have contacted Blizzard before posting this to what has become The Enquirer of "tech news".
MC
/. finds me to be 20% Troll, 80% Funny
... then tell THEM what the cheat was. Or better yet, get THEIR permission to make it public how D3 thinks they cheated.
This is a general overall problem with all the online services. They ban people and never say why other than BS about "violated terms"? They need to answer with WHAT ACTION violated WHAT TERMS. They need to start answering these VERY IMPORTANT questions if they don't want to be thought of as just banning people for the fun of it. If the person they accuse consents to it, make these PUBLIC (so we know the accused is not making it up).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
First it: Warden. Second it: Warden. Third it: WoW.
I've always been a big fan of Blizzard, but some of their moves recently are very questionable. For instance, I've played Diablo II for so many hundreds of hours I can't even begin to tell you how many, all on Wine of course. Now, with Diablo III, you are forced to play online with no offline capability. For this reason, I'm not going to buy the game. There are excuses but overall I don't buy them. Make the game work offline already. It's sad.. very sad.. that even Blizzard is no longer a great game company it once was.
Yeah, that 'System Requirements' thing (right on the box, and also on their web page) totally doesn't say anything about requiring Windows. Oh wait, it does. While you're at it, why don't you also start a class action suit against them for not doing your taxes - they don't give any warning about their failure to do that either.
Just logged into Diablo 3 on Ubuntu 12.04/POL/Wine.
Ah. I had pegged all 3 its as Warden, which made my brain divide by zero. Thank you for parsing that sentence for me.
Since software is apparently protected much like physical goods, then what is the difference between this and someone revoking your rights to a physical medium?
I don't think that this issue is as simple as you're making it out to be, or companies could effectively commit outright fraud on consumers for failure to perform on the contract. A reasonable person would not expect the ban to fall so easily and without any apparent explanation or recourse.
Also a good lesson: do NOT gather all of your games under a single account on any service, or you could have your rights revoked to ALL games.
Not a story is not a story.
Why not ban them? The customer already paid the money, while relieving any responsibility of support from the developer. It's not an MMO where they need the same customer to keep paying.
> Anything leading edge isn't guaranteed to work everywhere.
Who said anything about "leading edge"? I was merely talking about mainstream games in general.
With a real PC I don't have to make excuses. I can just get myself a suitable expansion card and laugh at you while you make excuses for your state of deprivation.
Who needs Thunderbolt? I can install a cheap USB3 or eSATA card.
Your horizons seem a lot wider once you take the blinders off.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The difference implies a huge difference in scale, and when his point is dependent on this magnitude this means it DIRECTLY influences the argument.
If you think it doesn't, then that means that you are the one who does not understand.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Even in a rootkit they can't know. You've described a turing test at best. At worst...it's way worse.
I could run windows in a hypervisor or VM. Pause, snapshot, edit VM settings. Swap memory out from beneath it.
Now -- there's code to detect and break out of VM's. Don't be like two old friends who did operating system's research and said "that's impossible, it'd be a horrible bug and be fixed" --the exploits have already been written up.
Beyond that, there's now BIOS level rootkits.
The bottom line is blizzard's warden is attempting a technically impossible task. It can at best, do a "reasonable best effort". Trying to validate windows or taking an antivirus type approach to its own binaries is a good starting point, but the knowledge to get around it has existed for decades. People that are going to cheat are going to cheat. If I want to break your machine I'll write soemthing polymorphic, and patch the interrupts around your memory scanning routine to return something that is known good.
Warden's only protection was that you were likely to get banned if they caught you analyzing it. Once again, something trivial to do with a good VM -- even if the logging would be damned slow. The only defense they'd have is having the warden sign and validate itself and check against version numbers and updates... but without blizzard resorting to virus-author style polymorphism and self encryption... such changes are trivial to reverse for a professional. Usually security professionals can reverse a microsoft patch within an hour. Without radically rewriting the code to require a total reverse engineering, warden updates can only accomplish so much.
How to put it, much like door locks... warden only really keeps honest people honest. Yeah, they can scan my system to detect a debugger--I can hide it. They can check if they're in a VM -- I can change the os call's return. Even the security companies can't win this arm's race... Blizzard definitely won't. But they'll catch the trivially dishonest.
I suppose you also bitched that Final Fantasy XI didn't have single player because all of the first ten games did.
The argument that D3 isn't a single-player game is sound. The previous iterations in the series are not relevant to the discussion. That I am aware of, at no point anywhere in the Diablo 3 interface or marketing is there ANY function, description or reference to a single-player mode.
Maybe the problem is their 15% fee. Would any fee be reasonable, though? At a point, they're trying to make money and there's a reasonable point for them being able to profit a reasonable amount from trade of equipment in their game, especially if they're the ones providing the clearinghouse. Maybe they should take their 10% like God.
I like losing arguments, it just means that I can take your point and make it my own.
Unfortunately, that significant difference is not "they can't use Wine to hack the game, run bots, and generally cheat" so I would bet they're staying banned. Plus, who plays modern 3D games in Wine? That's just asking for instability let alone bans. It reminds me of running games an early Parallels version. REALLY fun that one was.
I have no reason not to trust Blizzard.
A couple of years ago, they banned a bunch of Cedega users and were just as adamantly claiming that they were all cheaters, and they had checked and verified this, and refused to talk to the banned users. A week or two later they had to reinstate the accounts when it turned out that there were false positives.
They've done exact same before, and then they were lying. That, I think, is a good reason not to trust Blizzard.
I play D3 in Wine and I am still able to log on and play.
Oh yeah, I don't cheat....
I suppose you also bitched that Final Fantasy XI didn't have single player because all of the first ten games did.
I probably would have, if I knew anything about Final Fantasy other than that, 'it exists'
The argument that D3 isn't a single-player game is sound. The previous iterations in the series are not relevant to the discussion.
The reason for making a sequel to a game, instead of a brand new one, is to get that built-in audience that liked the previous games. I liked Diablo 1 and 2, but Diablo 3 didn't have a single-player mode. Therefore, it never interested me, and they lost one of the customers in their demographic.
I'm not saying Blizzard doesn't have the right to create a non-single player game. This is why I'm blaming the people who bought it (at least those who bought it and complain about it. If you're happy with the game, more power to you). Based on the complaints I'm hearing, a lot of the people who bought the game were expecting the Diablo 2 experience, and claim their multiplayer economy is really adding nothing to the experience.
Be as pedantic as you want, Wine emulates Windows behavior. Whether it does so by reimplementing the libraries is irrelevant; the thing that is accomplished is environment emulation.
You mean like how my light bulb above my desk emulates the sun?
Be seeing you...
Be as pedantic as you want, Wine emulates Windows behavior. Whether it does so by reimplementing the libraries is irrelevant; the thing that is accomplished is environment emulation.
Or how that tranny down the hall emulates a woman?
Be seeing you...
Wine isn't emulating anything. It's a wrapper library. There's a significant difference.
Sort of like how we had Glide to DX wrappers back in the day.
We didn't emulate that we had a 3DFX card, we just had a wrapper to redirect the Glide calls to something DX understood.
3DFX ftw!
Be seeing you...
Blizzard is not a bad guy. It's just that they have other things on their mind. Other things to do. Sometimes, we fight, but it's usually my fault. I mean, maybe if I could make linux a little more attractive, they would spend more time with linux?
I know sometimes Blizzard doesn't do what they say they will do, but they are really busy, working hard, so I can't expect them to drop everything just to do what I want them to do. That would be selfish.
Besides, you just don't understand. Blizzard is soooooo cool. The colors of his panorama's are so exquisite. I just really miss Blizzard when Blizzard is away. You just don't get it, because you've never felt a "real connection" like I have with Blizzard.
So don't judge me. I stand for true love, just like Rhianna says in that new song with Chris Brown.
They may SAY you won't get banned for running Wine, but since their bans are final, unappealable, and will not under any circumstances be lifted or explained, you are pretty much forced to trust them, and since it's impossible to distinguish cheaters from compatibility victims, Blizzard can snake-talk their way into saying they support linux, ban you anyway, and nobody would be the wiser.
And since they reserve the right to ban anyone at any time for any or indeed no reason, you have no recourse if they screw up and ban you by mistake. Hell, you could get banned for wearing purple hair IRL, or suing one of Blizzard's corporate buddies.
Because linux users are such a small share of the market that anyone bitching, rightly or otherwise, about getting unfairly banned is liable to get booed into silence by the normal gaming crowd that thinks linux users are nothing but hackers to be snubbed at every opportunity.
The whole OtherOS debacle surrounding the PS3 is proof of that. It wasn't just gamers not giving a crap, they were HAPPY that Sony decided to screw them over. They think linux users are just pathetic pirate dweebs that *deserve* to get ass-raped.
Given this, it's very difficult for Blizzard and the like to get bad PR from backstabbing linux users. Therefore, they will be happy to do it if it helps them.
and im happy about that.
Will keep playing d2 over VPN with friends.
What's the point of using some overpriced clunky shit like a Mac when it only runs about 5% of software that I need it to?
What's the point of using some free clunky shit like Linux when it only runs about 5% of software that I need it to?
Parts of it is, or are you saying its all native Windows?
"we have only the word of random gamers that they were banned for the reason they say they were banned"
Against only the word of a for-profit corporation trying to roll out a real money auction house that won't provide any details about how the bans work for security reasons. Sounds like a toss-up to me.
Wine Is Not Emulation
Of course it is
I thought is was called "Wine" after the Linux users who found out their games wouldn't play.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
You could not dupe by turning your system clock backwards. What happened was that users could cancel auctions beyond the initial 5 minute window to do so because it was only "blocked" on the client side. People had already found they could cancel auctions beyond the 5 minute mark by calling the command in memory, but that could theoretically get you banned for cheating whereas Blizzard can't really justify banning people for turning their clock back. You could never dupe doing this as the game had already been coded to correctly react to canceling auctions. What happened was that on a cheat forum where turning back the clock was initially found/posted, someone speculated that they could use it to dupe, but nothing came of it.
As for the bans, this happens every time Blizzard does a ban wave against cheaters. Some cheaters think that if they run the game in Linux they won't get caught. They're wrong. They get caught. They go to the forums claiming Blizzard bans Linux players to try and deflect the blame and get their accounts unbanned or just generate bad press as "revenge."
Captcha was "obvious."
And there have been false positives in the past that were unbanned almost immediately. If they really were banned due to a bug, they'd be unbanned by now. They were cheating and are just butthurt about getting caught and wanted to cause a ruckus.
If they don't mind losing some sales because they're not willing to support, say, Offline mode in a single player game (a rather large proportion of their userbase and very nearly everyone will be playing single player in D3), then why do they care about losing some sales because people have pirated them and hacked their own server?
Next time they whine about lost sales, remember what you've said here.
Please stop pulling figures out of your arse and waving them in our faces.
so you can still hate Windows and play their games.
I have learned long ago that OS hate is as productive as pissing into the wind.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If they don't mind losing some sales because they're not willing to support, say, Offline mode in a single player game (a rather large proportion of their userbase and very nearly everyone will be playing single player in D3), then why do they care about losing some sales because people have pirated them and hacked their own server?
Next time they whine about lost sales, remember what you've said here.
What exactly is that supposed to mean? I assume you are implying some sort of contradiction but I'm not seeing it.
"You will play with my toys only the way I tell you to or you can fuck off" is 100% compatible with whining about piracy whilst simultaneously alienating potential paying customers.
Captcha is "fascism", hmm.
And if you need all that to run a *GAME* then it's no longer a game and nothing I'd want to play.
Oh wait, that's right, I'm already boycotting all Blizzard (and Sony for that matter) titles.
First of all, you do realize you can install Windows on a Mac and dual boot right? If that isn't for you, you can use virtualization. Second, if you think USB3 or eSATA replaces ThunderBolt, you should educate yourself what TB is. The three overlap functionality but they are not the same.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Writing kernel level modules that tamper with time like you are suggesting that would be simple with Wine are entirely possible using straight Windows as well.
Possible!=Easy
Maybe you could do it, but many people couldn't and fewer still could do it well enough so it couldn't be detected. Blizzard don't need to make cheating impossible, just too difficult and risky to be worthwhile, just like locks, my lock doesn't have to be impossible to bypass just difficult enough to deter most burglars.
Queue the people who go, 'Diablo III isn't a single-player game.' Well, considering diablo 1 and 2 were, they should be blamed for that too.
That would be "Cue the people who go..." unless you think they are going to start waiting in a line for some reason.
need counselling
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKBRG_QgEAM Enjoy.
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
Which is the final problem: if people want to cheat at Diablo III, why does Blizzard care?
Because a large number of cheaters playing any sort of online game pisses everyone off. People who game a lot actually evaluate future purchases of games based on possible cheater potential.
One of the main reasons people are reluctant to buy online shooters that do not support dedicated servers is that you lose the ability to have an admin on duty at all times who simply bans suspicious players from that server only rather than wait for the anticheat tool to do it. This is much quicker that waiting for valve or pb or whoever.
The simple fact is that if Blizzard got a reputation as being hacker (ie - bot users) friendly it would kill their main market. In light of this they have to be seen to act against cheaters occasionally.
And that is why I did not buy Diablo III or SC2, and will not be buying anything from Blizzard in the foreseeable future.
Ahh, I see now. You are an anti blizzard fanatic who just wanted to rant about how evil and greedy they are, Cool. It's a shame you didn't make that clear earlier in the post though as I would have skipped reading it.
I dont read
An additional WTF is that they are awarding the bid on a canceled item to the seller.
If only there were useful programs for OSX
Stop Wineing ... lol
That's funny, because Wine originally stood for "WINdows Emulator" and it loaded the Windows Binary into memory to allow for callbacks between Windows APIs found in 16/32-bit programs and the Windows Binaries -- which is emulation. It's altered its core a tiny bit, but it's playing the same game.
They only changed the meaning of the name, in 1993, because they wanted to distance themselves from Microsoft's product.
With Linux there are so many distros and so many permutations of libraries I can see it being nearly impossible to correctly identify them all as WINE.
Presumably, if wine compiles on the system it will fine the proper linux libraries to link to. If those are not available, wine won't compile properly.
I don't know. No one ever compiles wine anyway. Dependencies are all resolved via repository magic nowadays.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.