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.
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.
Oh yeah, and apparently an official statement by Blizzard has claimed Wine users have not been banned and will not be banned, it is merely unsupported. They tested reported configurations and could not reproduce a ban.
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
http://www.lgdb.org/list_games
"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."
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.
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."
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.
Read past the first link, and you'll see that actually, cheaters using wine were banned. There are plenty of regular people still playing on wine.
Heres the blue-post (Blizzard statement)
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978861022?page=21#402
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.
Blizzard doesnt have a track record of cracking down on Wine usage, and its not like they dont know it exists.
By how I interpret your definition of emulator, Linux is an emulator because it emulates UNIX behavior. What do I misunderstand?
Generally, the 3d performance is TOTAL BULLCRAP in VMs.
So, no, it doesn't.
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.
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.
Win8 is going to support hardware 3D accel in VMs with modern GPUs and near-future GPUs will support proper context switching and virtualization, which will allow seamless 3D access in VMs.
Is Linux going to have this soon(tm)? I hope it does, would be nice to have Windows has a guest instead of a host, but Linux typically lags in GPU driver architecture.
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
My suspicions are that they are using bots and using Wine as their excuse.
Your suspiciouns are correct. Blizzard already confirmed, even before this appears on slashdot, that wine users will not be banned and that the only people banned have been cheaters. The fact they ran wine on Linux is strictly beside the point.
Long story short, there absolutely is no story here and the only people who care about the story are suckers and losers.
This /. post should probably be deleted or edited, since it is False. Here are several relevant quotes from the comment section of the linked article:
Foo
WINE user here, not banned. Sensational journalism here, move along.
Kamezero
Blizzard is well aware of Linux, they've actually tested D3 in wine to see if they'd get any false positives.
"And as far as anyone can tell, there have been exactly 4 people affected. Does anyone here actually know someone who was banned just for being on Linux? I've played D3 in wine and am still able to log in just fine.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
It does not work 'very well'. It functions, experimentally.
Good-bye
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.
This argument has been bandied about for almost a decade, now. Simply, the market base for Linux users is simply too small (and the subset of that contingency that uses Wine for gaming is even smaller yet) for any conglomerate consideration of that markets buying power to matter worth a damn to any of the large studios.
Small indie houses, maybe. But nobody is going to go out of business not selling to the Wine userbase.
The reality of the situation sucks, but given past trends, it's safe to conclude at this point that it will never change.
It's the truth. There really is no profitable market for Linux gaming. Of all the Linux users who actually play games, half will cite "Software should be Free" and won't spend a penny. 25% would rather boot to Windows for maximum performance and the final 25% will purchase the game. With lack of driver support for Video card articles being posted once a week it's a surprise anyone really believes Linux gaming will be a reality.
They don't appear to have banned all wine users. I run diablo 3 under wine and I just logged in and verified that i haven't been banned.