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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.
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.
Why would they release a Linux client for WoW when WoW has been probably the best supported program with Wine for the last 5 years? You DO know they made the decision to go with both DirectX and OpenGL graphics paths, when they could have just done the windows only DirectX, right?
I mean, if there were things that didnt work with WoW/Wine, yea maybe they could fix it, but it was flawless, with only occasional patch-day issues. Addons, graphics, everything "just worked".
Complain about the diablo 3 issue, but complaining about WoW's linux support? Seriously?