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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
By how I interpret your definition of emulator, Linux is an emulator because it emulates UNIX behavior. What do I misunderstand?
If your a GNU/ Linux user who likes to game then why don't you dual boot or virtualize?
Probably because they don't want to spend a few hundred dollars for a Windows license and have to reboot every time they feel like playing a game into an operating system that they're uncomfortable with.
Sure, Linux isn't the ideal gaming platform, but look at it from this perspective: if it does what you want and you prefer it over Windows, why not use it?
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Linux does fine with desktop level gaming.
Like any other class of application, it is entirely dependent on whether or not some crass corporation is willing to dedicate the resources to a Linux version.
Platform suitability is at best a distant 2nd when compared to the issue of supporting any non-monopoly platform.
This is why Macs had their great dry spell in this regard.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
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.
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
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.
"Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned â" cheating will."
The problem with this is that they don't tell what is and isn't cheating.
Is running two paid for copies at the same time so you can hand items from one to the other cheating?
Is overlaying a latency counter cheating?
Is identifying a profitable run and grinding it repeatedly cheating?
Is using advanced macros cheating?
Another problem is that Blizzard absolutely refuse to say just what they've found that's against the rules, only that they found something against the rules. Users get support replies like this:
"Unauthorized third party software was found to be being used on your account. Because this is a breach of the terms of service, we will not be providing a refund to you, and the license is permenantly banned. As this issue has been reviewed by multiple representatives, it is now considered closed. Should you have any questions regarding a different account or issue, please feel free to contact us again. However, further inquiries regarding this issue will no longer receive a reply."
Surely, this can not be legal, no matter what the EULA says? They should be required to point to an infringement, and not just unsubstantiated claims?
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?
I never said buy Windows, I said boot into Windows.
Ahh, I get what you mean.
Let me rephrase what I said, then: people like you are a plague on the software industry and don't deserve to play games in the first place.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
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.
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.
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