Linux Users Banned From World of Warcraft? 515
Turmoyl writes "Many Cedega (formerly WINEX) users claim to have been mistakenly caught up in a security sweep of the U.S. game servers performed by Blizzard's World of Warcraft Game Master (GM) staff. Affected users received the same strongly-worded 'Notice of Account Closure' email messages that true bot users did, in which they were accused of the 'Use of Third Party Automation Software.' While diagnosis of this event continues early speculation points to Blizzard's use of the Warden anti-cheating spyware application that is bundled with World of Warcraft, and the odd things that may have been produced by it when it was run via Cedega. Emails to World of Warcraft's Account Administration staff continue to go unanswered while the list of affected people continues to grow."
WoW & Ubuntu (Score:3, Informative)
Not just the U.S. servers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No Wai !! (Score:1, Informative)
Blizzard's intention never has and never will be to force users away from unsupported platforms - why in the hell would they give up all that revenue, simply to antagonize Linux users?
No. (Score:3, Informative)
A bit more (still no) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No Wai !! (Score:5, Informative)
Don't say that it isn't supported. No, officially it is not, but it is unofficially.
As for him being modded as a troll--it would seem he is a troll. He is speaking out his arse without any knowledge nor history on the subject.
Re:The Only Winning Move (Score:2, Informative)
Red means the mob is a much higher level than you and you will probably die trying to kill it.
Amber means that the mob is higher level than you, and you will have quite a fight on your hands that will probably end in your demise.
Yellow means the mob is within a few levels of you.
Green means the mob is lower level than you, and you will get reduced xp for killing it.
Gray means the mob is way below you and you will reciev NO xp for killing it.
The only reason for grinding gray mobs is for cloth, or other crafting supplies.
Re:Not at all surprised... (Score:5, Informative)
What you just said would make sense if they weren't RUNNING WOW ON LINUX SERVERS. Their database environment has been Oracle on Linux since the game was released.
http://www.blizzard.com/jobopp/senior-oracle-data
Blizzard has nothing against Linux users. Their main beef is with cheaters, and I'm sure these accounts will be reenabled. But some Linux users (incorrectly) jump to conclusions that they're being targeted.
Their previous beef was about bnetd allowing people to play online without buying games. They could care less if people played the game on Linux, they just wanted to make sure people went through official servers and paid to play the game. Again, some Linux users jump to conclusions that Blizzard was targeting the Linux userbase in general.
Poor assumptions make poor arguments. Incorrect assumptions make faulty ones. If you're assuming Blizzard hates Linux or Linux users, you're incorrect. They wouldn't be using the OS themselves if that was the case.
What's the problem? (Score:1, Informative)
I've spoken to at least two GMs about the issue, asking whether this is legitimate; they tell me that I might be flagged, but that if I tell the account management team that I'm just using Wine, they can confirm that. I've also posted in General about it, with a couple of green posts afterwards, and no one locked the thread or anything.
When using the Blizzard Updater, I'm noticing some Warden-looking stuff to stdout, in the form of 'I see Blizzard Updater 52%\nI see Wine Systray Listener'... not exactly sure if that's all it does, but it seems harmless enough for my purposes.
I'm curious why Cedega is specifically being targeted. I'm also wondering why people use Cedega over straight Wine for this particular game...
Re:My Guesses & Opinions (Score:5, Informative)
Your analysis falls down when you consider that there have been no reports of any Mac users being targeted by this. There is no Warden process or anything resembling a rootkit on my system when I start up the client. Just one process: World of Warcraft. I suppose they could just be excepting any client that reports as being run on a Mac, but if that were the case, all of the people working to hack the system would just switch to running on a Mac. I suspect there is a bit more to the method that they're using and have heard rumors of them using things like 'multiple logins to the same account from different IPs' and other indicators. Perhaps the linux emulators are doing something that trips one of these other detection mechanisms.
I believe that for the most part Blizzard is handling the cheating by making the client as dumb as possible and not trusting it for anything other than 'requests'. The design philosophy is centered around the client 'asking' to do something and the server saying 'yes' or 'no'. There isn't a way for the client to say 'Put this character at position x,y', there is only a way for a client to request to move along a vector. The server then reports the current position back to the client. That doesn't mean that hacks haven't ever happened - but those have been cases of the server not strictly following this model and are subsequently patched.
Of course, this doesn't stop anybody from writing their own client that allows them to automate the request process given they were good enough to spoof being a 'real' client to the server.
Re:no answers (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Only Winning Move (Score:3, Informative)
Also, Blizzard doesn't ban people for using the built-in scripting language, unless of course they find some exploit that lets them do crazy things.
What they are banning for 3rd party apps.
Re:Anti-cheat is NOT spyware (Score:1, Informative)
Now what about CPA's, or others with sensitive information on the same pc.
I refuse to make my multi-thousand dollar computer a standalone WoW client.
Re:The Only Winning Move (Score:5, Informative)
As you can see most add-ons revolve around giving the user more information. The closest thing to botting there is the auto-curing, which is on its way out.
More Blizzard follow-up (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Of course letters to Blizzard go unanswered ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The eternal struggle (Score:3, Informative)
Bottom line, it costs more than it's worth.
Re:Of course letters to Blizzard go unanswered ... (Score:3, Informative)
Read the Community Manager response here:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?top
I got banned, and I run windows XP. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:My Guesses & Opinions (Score:3, Informative)
We're talking about different classes of cheaters here. The casual cheater is for sure going to be using pre-written Windows based stuff and would never consider switching platforms. However, there is another segment of cheaters - the professional farmers. These people make a lot of money and would not hesitate to switch platforms if it meant it would further their aims.
While I'm sure Blizzard wants ALL cheaters stopped, they primarily focus on the farmers with these retaliations as they are the ones that have the largest impact on gameplay for the rest of their users. Historically, they accompany these mass banning announcements with commentary proclaiming some number of farmers were caught in the net.
Re:My Guesses & Opinions (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, your parent poster is right. There are some things which the client has direct control over. Movement is one of them - game hacks do allow you to access otherwise inaccessible content. There was a case a few weeks ago of an entire guild being banned because they used a client-side hack to fall through the floor of a dungeon and skip a large amount of content to just fight the boss at the end.
Actually Blizzard answered, Cedega OK (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Only Winning Move (Score:1, Informative)
Glider is easily detected by anybody who has ever seen it in action, and the GMs catch players and ban them for using it all the time. Glider's own forums acknowledge that much. There isn't a bot around whose play is even difficult to differentiate from a player, even for a novice. Bot authors will generally give you tips for avoiding players and tell you not to bot AFK (which ruins most of the point of botting).
Simpler programs that simulate mouse clicks and such are used for gaining rep/honor in BGs by avoiding going AFK, for skilling up weapons, and perhaps for slightly automating the process of killing a mob. They don't play the game for you, and there are no Lua bot scripts I'm aware of that can use one of these programs to do so. They might exist -- like I said, it's not outside the realm of possibility -- but if they do they're barely a drop in the bucket compared to external programs like Glider. They will also die for good with the 2.0 patch.
By the way, playing using a bot is perfectly legal here. It's just against the terms of service and will get you banned under Blizzard's own policy. I assume the same situation exists in Korea, and that the enforcement is either more lax, that people don't report suspected bots as much, or that there is just some cultural difference that doesn't get people in Korea upset when their fellow players cheat.
Really, the only problem I have with it is that it causes people to arrive at 60 having no idea how to play the game. People who play legitimately aren't generally much better, but at least they have some idea of what their class is good and bad at (except paladins...).
Re:No Wai !! (Score:3, Informative)
The guy I commented on was highly uninformed and he made an negative comments about WoW gamers on Linux. In my opinion he's out of touch and he fails to exercise enough self-discipline regarding matters when he has no facts.
I completely disagree that most people that comment on
Let's lay it out:
1) WoW was written on the Macintosh and ported to Windows (from all I have heard)--indicating that Blizzard recognized that there were other platforms that would be running this game (e.g., on OSX and potentially Linux).
2) There was a Linux client available before the game went live--indicating that they had initially wanted to release it on Linux.
3) Blizzard worked with Transgaming to correct bugs in the product when it was made clear that the way certain aspects of the game were written caused problems. Blizzard and Transgaming worked together to resolve the issues and those issues were resolved. From my understanding the cooperation between the two companies still exists.
4) There's a switch to WoW that allows it to be run in a mode other than DirectX and the Macintosh doesn't support DirectX. Thus opengl is the alternative they provided. Even though PCs support Opengl this switch most likely was intended for other environments other than PCs running Windows.
5) World of Warcraft has run under Linux since Beta and was in use by Linux users for the approximately 2+ years that World of Warcraft has been live, hence most users had a valid expectation that their continued use of the program under Linux would not result in them being banned.
6) Cedega is a known entity and it is prominently known as a commercial program used to allow users to run DirectX games (and other Windows games) on Linux. Transgaming has been in business for years.
The poster appears to have made no investigation into these facts, nor did he allude to having any hint of prior knowledge about these factors. These facts were not included in his post where he essentially dumped on every WoW user running it under Linux. Also, he did not have any direct information from Blizzard as to why their accounts were canceled or whether Blizzard planned to reinstate them.
He blatantly acted as a Troll and hence he was modded as a troll. This clearly is in direct opposition most other posts on slashdot. Even so, he never came on and retracted nor did he admit going overboard with his conclusions.
Re:Poor Users (Score:3, Informative)