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."
Poor Users (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen this happen with PunkBuster checks in some games when you try to run then in another OS as well.
Of course letters to Blizzard go unanswered ... (Score:4, Insightful)
These guys really deserve being knocked down a notch or two. Unfortunately, with WoW being as popular as it is, there's not much chance of that happening for a few years yet.
No Wai !! (Score:2, Insightful)
You are using it on a non-supported platform. Deal with it.
Blizzard has no responsibility to take how Cedega does things
into account. You can whine all you want about it not being fair,
or how you have some 'right' to play it on your Linux enabled
toaster, but you don't.
Blizzard makes the game for Windows. If you get it to work in
Linux, power to you. But if it stops working, tough luck, it
was never intended to work anyway. You may as well complain to
Nintendo about the quality of Snes9x.
The Only Winning Move (Score:4, Insightful)
I choose not to play games that hinge on this so much. Aside from the monthly fees, something like Oblivion's fast travel (or even console commands when the gates got boring) is the sign of a better game to me, instead of one which rewards behavior that can be currently emulated by a computer. It's not a job, it's a game!
Cheating is bad for their community (Score:5, Insightful)
What should have happened? Well, for one, someone from the Cedega project who also uses WoW (chances are pretty good) should get into communication with the Blizzard people in order to work out any issues. Allowing people to use Linux while playing WoW is certainly in Blizzard's interest and since Cedega is doing the bulk of the work, I can't imagine why Blizzard wouldn't at least come to the table to work it out. Cutting users off is likely the side-effect of an automated process not seeing what it expects to see and not some assault on Linux users.
Not at all surprised... (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux gaming, all I need do is point them to this as a good example of why it's not so hot of an idea. And it's
perfectly within Blizzard's rights to do this action- to the point of ignoring any contact with regards to this
whole affair. Doesn't make it good for PR or customer relations, mind- but it's completely within their rights
to do so. After all, they only support Windows on this title and don't have plans to provide support to other
OS platforms. Again, which is their right.
Native ports wouldn't have as many of these issues.
As for the whole affair... It's Blizzard. They've apparently got a singular attitude about Linux users that
started with the period around Starcraft forward. I wouldn't buy any title from them right now and for some
while to come- you just don't treat customers or potential customers the way they seem wont to do.
Re:Not at all surprised... (Score:2, Insightful)
Shouldn't there be a real Linux port by now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No Wai !! (Score:5, Insightful)
Their customers want to use Linux. If they are not going to take account of thios then they will be publicly criticised. The affected users have ewvery right to complain.
Re:Of course letters to Blizzard go unanswered ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Blizzard does not support Linux. It was great that some enterprising people got WoW working, but that doesn't mean you can complain when Blizzard does something that unintentionally breaks it.
My experience has been that Blizzard is extremely customer friendly. I've had a number of issues resolved cocerning game glitches, account errors and more in a timely and respectful manner. Many people complain that "blue" doesn't respond enough in the forums. Given the huge amount of traffic there, and the additional traffic and focus any blue response gives a thread, it would be both impossible (time constraints) and unfair (any thread with a blue response implodes, leaving other worthy threads unread) to increase their interaction.
When Blizzard releases an expansion for WoW which does nothing but raise the level cap by X and doesn't even feature new content but the promise of new content claiming "You'll buy it because it's WoW", when they discontinue the in game ticket system and shut down the forums, when they "have built a line of equity and we intend on spending it", then they will be about as customer-friendly as Sony. As it stands, I don't think you can claim that Blizzard's service is anywhere near as hellish as what SW:G and EQ players have had to deal with.
Re:No Wai !! (Score:3, Insightful)
Then (LinuxDev) != Live.Project
If it costs you more to build and support than the new revenue it creates, it's not worth it.
Re:Cheating is bad for their community (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you considered the possibility that someone using Cedega was found cheating in the game? Warden could have been updated to detect something unique about some users of Cedega, maybe a characteristic others don't have.
Or perhaps in fact warden just flags some Cedega users as "possible cheaters" and some other criteria (like extroardinarily long times of login or activity) was used to classify the player as a probable bot -- maybe there was a manual review involved, and the person reviewing the "information about the system or programs running" saw something they thought unusual.
How is it known for a fact this was all automatic? Especially if it's not happening with all Cedega/Wine users.
WoW (Score:2, Insightful)
It's probably for the better (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Of course letters to Blizzard go unanswered ... (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't support it, fine. That's their prerogative. But there's a difference between breaking and banning. This is denial of a paid service when the customer was likely adhering to their end of the contract.
Re:No Wait !! (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, because he's wrong?
Yes, I'm a die hard Linux user and gamer. But I am going to be as completely objective about this as I can be. The accounts are being *banned*. Which is to say: sure, if I try to run EQ2 (what I play instead of WoW) under Linux, and it works for a while and then breaks, all his points are valid. The problem then becomes that I can't go back to my Windows box and play from there. Why?
Because they banned the *account*! It's not like I tried to get F.E.A.R. working and it didn't so "waaaaah, I have to play under Windows!" Rather, I tried to play under Linux and now, even though I paid for the right to play, I cannot play under Linux or Windows at all.
Now, their nazi-EULA probably says they can terminate your *paid* account for whatever reason they want, but if you want to talk about whether there is something to "whine" about, there absolutely is. People's accounts should not be banned because they attempted to get their software working under an unsupported OS. That really is unfair.
I cannot address whether or not any of this is FUD, however, since I don't play WoW and I stopped paying for Cedega. It seems odd that only some of the Cedega users are affected, but not all.
Re:Shouldn't there be a real Linux port by now? (Score:3, Insightful)
So now Blizz has to do testing for each client against the list of 'official WOW Linux builds supported on WoW'.
But now each expansion, the art in it, etc... all has to be tested against that same list. Blizzard's cost of the development cycle just went up, and it probably just got a lot slower. They already have to check playability on probably 30-50 different combinations of hardware builds and OS/driver versions each time a client is released. Think of adding Linux to that mix, kernel versions, driver versions, which distro, etc etc etc....
It gets ugly. Fast.
Re:Of course letters to Blizzard go unanswered ... (Score:1, Insightful)
The question is do linux users violate the EULA? If so, then although the ban came from a broken anticheat, it's justifiable. Last I checked though, it wasn't.
Re:Cheating is bad for their community (Score:2, Insightful)
Losing a customer could very well lose you more than their money.
Sometimes you have to spend money to make money. Once upon a time IBM was the evil empire. How did they achieve Imperial status? Largely by making sure their customers were always satisfied, even if it cost them money.
And hence nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. That was worth a lot of money.
KFG
there is always an exception to the rule (Score:5, Insightful)
I accuse her of being a bot- it's the most mechanical thing you've ever seen.
she writes down many EXP points she got per baal run, then does it again,
then does it again, then does it again, then does it again, then does it again, then does it again, then does it again, then does it again, then does it again, ad infinity..
to a 'gamebandwidth' counter, that'll look VERY suspicious
(BTW some of the repetions above I typed by hand, some I did by cut and paste- can you see where I switched to cut & paste above?---riiiight.....)
Re:who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/09/07/world-of-warcra
Number of people who watched The Sapranos premier = 9.5 million
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fusea
So I wouldn't say that the game is unpopular.
Of those that play using Linux, Cedega is a probably method-- the most popular so far as the anecdotal evidence I've come across. Let's say for the sake of argument assume half are using something else though.
If 1% of World of Warcraft subscribers use Linux to play then there are about 35,000 people playing under Cedega.
At $15 USD per month that's $7,000,000 per year in subscription fees.
GG Troll, L2P.
Re:Of course letters to Blizzard go unanswered ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Blizzard does not support Linux. It was great that some enterprising people got WoW working, but that doesn't mean you can complain when Blizzard does something that unintentionally breaks it.
Sure you can complain. Just means they don't legally have to do anything about it. But it is bad customer service not to listen to your customers whether they have to listen or not.
Re:The Only Winning Move (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:My Guesses & Opinions (Score:4, Insightful)
That's trivial to get around. Run it under VMWare or qemu. Now the control of the user's machine is back in the hands of the user. When will people understand that you can't control software that's not entirely in your own hands?
Anyway, the solution to this problem of being banned is trivial. Chargeback. As soon as they start losing money and their credit card processor starts asking questions, they'll start addressing their customer's complaints. If chargebacks don't work, take Blizzard to small claims court. Even if you lose, they'll still waste time and money sending their lawyers to defend themselves. Eventually they'll get the idea.
Summary: You own your computer, not Blizzard. Money talks, letters don't.
Re:My Guesses & Opinions (Score:3, Insightful)
You take them to small claims court. You win a default judgement.
What do you do now? You will never... ever... collect the judgement.
Re:Strong AI and the WoW Turing Test (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct, in 10-20 or so odd years the technology maybe available that is undetectable nor traceable by any server to find if a person is an AI or human.
Lets say in 15 years you have on computer with WoW2 installed on it.
On a second one that isn't even hooked up to the network you simply take the VGA/DVI output to it and then OCR the text states and by able to recognize objects in the virtual world much like Stanley's robot car is able to recognize objects on the road.
Then your AI could simply feed the other computer commands through a USB keyboard.
If the WoW client had sufficient DRM and rootkit abilities then perhaps it could detect such a hardware setup.
But even then perhaps if you had a robotic arm and a camera giving the input making it impossible for another program to detect an AI.
Suffice to say... It will be something Blizzard or any other game company can defeat unless they require game players to physically come to game centers.
Even then... How would you know if the player didn't have an AI chip implanted in his skull?
Re:Lets try some logic. (Score:5, Insightful)
Two of my coworkers were banned. Again, no pirated or hacked software, no dodgy addons. These were innocents.
A disturbing trend during this whole thing has been the attitude from those who weren't banned that if you were accused of something.. well, obviously you must be guilty of the accusation.
Re:The Only Winning Move (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the place a computer is really at a disadvantage is predicting the behavior of other players. People are really good at this sort of thing, but nobody's quite sure how to even write a program that attempts this, let alone one that does so quickly. Predicting behavior requires a set of skills largely centered around common knowledge. This is what makes Counter-Strike stealth games so much fun in the absence of cheating; near the end of a round its a game of predicting your opponent's behavior and capitalizing on that while not being predictable yourself. It becomes a game of letting information (sound primarily) out intentionally to mislead your opponent and knife them in the head.
This is slightly different than "strategy." Strategy can be something as simple as noticing that the key to winning Starcraft is the investment curve, and avoiding dents in the curve, or noticing that 1 battle of 10 vs 10 units will fare worse for you than one battle of 11 vs 10 or ten battles of 10 vs 1. (aka the concept of concentrated fire and superior numbers). Essentailly, what people are far better at than computers is the strategy of manipulating your opponent.
Another example of a bad computer game is Pictionary. It's not so much about vocabulary as it is communicating based on common knowledge and perceptions. A pair of robots could perhaps use bar codes or other common knowledge communication schemes to circumvent the rules, but a robot and a human pair would have significant disadvantage.
The author's heart is in the right place, but they need to keep thinking on that for a bit. I'm sure they can come up with several such games.
How in the heck... (Score:3, Insightful)
Might help to make a big stink about it in the meantime though.
Re:The Only Winning Move (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the keys to avoiding cheats is that the game must be composed of mostly non-trivial, non-repetitive decisions.
Almost every MMORPG is composed of completely trivial decisions. During a fight, at any given point in time there is a definite "right" decision to make, a definite order in which the character's abilities should be used, and a definite opponent that is optimal to attack. Buttering toast requires more difficult decisions than World of Warcraft has ever presented.
Starsiege: Tribes never had a very successful bot created for it because the game requires the player to make decisions that a bot simply couldn't make quickly or predict accurately. In almost any scenario, there wasn't a dominant choice. You frequently had to choose among a range of equally attractive options, drawing only on past experience, intuitive knowledge of how physics works, and common sense about how people behave.
Re:No Wai !! (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing the point.
This isn't a problem with support. It isn't a matter of whether WoW.exe will run or not - it does run under WINE/Cedega. The issue is that Blizzard is closing game accounts. You can still run the program, you just can't log in to your account. Doesn't matter if you reformat and reload your machine with Windows or MacOS to appease Blizzard, you can still run the program, you still can't log in to your account. Worse, the account is being closed because of cheating. That's what it'll say in your account details - hacking/cheating. Not "didn't pay his bill", but "caught running cheat/hack program". Much harder (impossible?) to get such an account re-activated.
My bank doesn't support Firefox on Linux for viewing my balance on-line. They have a list of supported browsers and operating systems and Firefox/Linux just isn't on it. Because of that I will not be surprised if I cannot view my balance on their website...I will not be surprised if the page renders incorrectly or isn't functional - it isn't a supported platform. That's fine. I'll go view my balance on an IE6/Windows machine instead. But I most certainly will complain if they close my bank account because I tried to view my balance with Firefox/Linux.