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."
My Guesses & Opinions (Score:5, Interesting)
The art of doing this successfully lies in knowing what addresses of memory that your client application is using to store data. You change these memory addresses & your client's state is altered. But there's some things you can't change because they're located on the server. Realistically, the client has to do some of the computation and storing itself (and with WoW being some huge multi-gigabyte client, there's a lot to investigate). Obvious, you want to reduce network traffic and give your servers a break so you design this to have minimal communication.
The problem then becomes that users will write applications to modify the data & memory that their client applications are using. What results is signals sent back to the server which aren't true and give that user an advantage. Solution? Enter Warden to check these memory spaces and files for any potentially unauthorized changes (checksums, whatever method they want to use or seeing which threads are accessing that memory). And how do you protect Warden from it itself being hacked? You design it kind of like a root kit--that is the user shouldn't be able to alter or disable Warden & they lose the domain over that tiny bit of functionality of their hard drive.
My guess is that before, they were checking if there were any known scripting or programs that were unauthorized and changing this data. And they were banning those and only those accounts. I fear that it now does a verification on the memory space, files & system registry to ensure that it is not being molested by another application or tweaked at all. I am guessing that they have changed the ban notice to ban whenever this verification stage fails and that Cedegra does not emulate Windows to the point of their verification satisfaction or to the point of Warden being able to query all other running applications. Worse yet, I fear they may look to integrate this with the WGA with Windows & some other means with Macs--though that is pure speculation on my part.
The irony of it all? The fact that a talented programmer with burp or some other styled network tool and use linux on a routing box to intercept packets and change them to give him position hacks. Unfortunately, if you use this too much, I believe that random server side verification checks will eventually catch up with you but I can't say I've ever implemented this or been caught using it.
Which brings me to one last point I'd like to make on this topic. I think that this cat n' mouse game of Blizzard versus the cheaters is good for AI. The last possible domain we have is people writing applications that extract data from video memory and use computer vision algorithms to write if-then-case bots. Yes, bots are bad but this is driving people to a corner where they essentially strive to pass the Turing Test
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!
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Truth or dare? Twister?
Anything that requires tactile interaction between people, although that may be coming too.
Regards,
--
*Art
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I think MMOs, most Racing Games (with the right track design and markers), and most RTSs could be played fairly easily (and extremely well) by a computer with the right program on it. Action games that require a lot of planning (like navigating the newer Prince of Persia landscapes), any Zelda title, or certain adventure games, not so much. T
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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:The Only Winning Move (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The Only Winning Move (Score:5, Interesting)
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However, the place a computer is really at a disadvantage is predicting the behavior
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.
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As contrasted with the "do the same 6 quests to be allowed into the arcane university for every new character" part?
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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 wi
Assuming you're right... (Score:3, Interesting)
There are still better ways of catching cheaters.
The old adage, "Never trust the client..." certainly applies here. The warden should run on the server, not the client. It should authenticate the client across the network.
Granted, you don't want to saturate the network with every little move and detail of gameplay. But fortunately, you don't have to. There is only so much gameplay that a user can do in a given amount of time. The solution is to set a threshold for gameplay actions and client sta
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: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: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
Re:My Guesses & Opinions (Score:4, Interesting)
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:My Guesses & Opinions (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Even better, smack them where it hurts (Score:3, Interesting)
Direct link to Blizzard BBB listing:
(click: [file complaint] down right corner) [labbb.org]
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?
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It's not what you want to do, it's what the game company wants you to do: spend months paying them the subscription fee. And really, in what game does the actual content last months ? None. That's why they need to add repetition, and take a dim view on anyone who automates performing that.
The standard model of handcrafted gameworld simply doesn't allow perpetual
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.
I used to run WoW in Cedega (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, using it via Cedega worked really well once you got it working. I can't say it was "better than Windows," because I've never run Windows on that hardware (at least, not as the bare-metal OS, only in VMs), but it was a lot better than I imagined it would be when I started messing around with it.
I think there are quite a few people who only use Cedega because of WoW, so I expect that the Cedega people will fix stuff pretty quickly, if the Blizzard folks will even tell them what the problem is and what Cedega is doing that Warden doesn't like.
I think it's going to get to the point where "anti-cheats" and "copy protection" are the major things tying games to the Windows platform, because they're fundamentally hard (if not impossible) to implement on a Free OS, because the user -- by design -- can basically modify whatever they want, run debuggers, memory editors, etc.
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Re:Poor Users (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a long history of folks blaming wine for bannings in WoW, and I would wait to see exactly what happened here, before assuming that Blizzard has gone off the deep-end and started attacking those users who have clearly gone to great lengths to be able to run the game.
PS: If you want to run WoW under Wine, here's what I did on my Fedora Core 5 system using an NVidia card with the binary NVidia drivers:
It now works fine. The only problems that I have are:
On the other hand the benifits are huge:
Overall, I love WoW under Linux. It's a joy compared to some made-for-linux games I've tried to run, and wine really seems to have come along.
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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.
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: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.
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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.
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Read the Community Manager response here:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topi cId=47009071&pageNo=3&sid=1#40 [worldofwarcraft.com]
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For a little while, Cedega and the WoW graphics options dialog weren't playing nice with each other. Every time you saved graphics options, WoW would crash, and your changes weren't saved.
So I figure what the hell, I'll drop Blizzard support an email and ask them for a list of keys for Config.WTF. A couple days go by with no response. I figured I scared them by saying up front that I used Cedega to play WoW.
Nope. Get a nice response four days later, 'Greetings! We don't
Actually Blizzard answered, Cedega OK (Score:3, Informative)
Should be interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
If Blizzard Doen't Ban These Users.... (Score:5, Funny)
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
Nin
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They may be running WoW on an unsupported platform, but they are NOT cheating, they are NOT doing anything against the terms and conditions and they now have their accounts (and their huge playing hours) terminated.
But you can ignore all that and snipe at the people affected if you want. You can make up all sorts of crap if you ignore what's actually happening.
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I'm surprised at the number of subscribers that use Linux(Cedega) for WoW.
If they feel comfortable having terrible public relations because they decided to BAN (not Warn) users about them breaking TOS policy then so be it.
I'm a WoW(Windows) player, upset over something that doesn't affect me; Eve Online is right around the corner Blizzard.
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Then (LinuxDev) != Live.Project
If it costs you more to build and support than the new revenue it creates, it's not worth it.
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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: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.
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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
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.
Re:No Wait !! (Score:4, Funny)
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But that was funny, sort of...
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If he wanted be modded +5 Informative, he would have written, "M$ teh suck."
Re:No Wait !! (Score:5, Funny)
Would you rather it get modded Undead, Tauren, or Orc instead?
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.
WoW & Ubuntu (Score:3, Informative)
Not just the U.S. servers (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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Every cheat (except for client-side visual cheats) affects the server in some way. Want to find speed hackers? Do an x/y/z position check every so often and validate their distance covered against the max theoretical speed based on the character's current state (speed spells, travel form, etc).
Nearly every cheat that isn't totally client side can be detected via some sort of sanity check on the server side. Bu
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Is it? How many people play WoW under Linux, anyways? I'm guessing not a whole lot. Compare the income from those few players to the time and resources it would take to figure out what the problem is, find a solution, test it, and deploy it. Dealing with the issue could very well end up in a loss of money.
So, I'm not sure that it is in their best interests, at least on a purely financial basis. Maybe you should let BLizzard de
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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 "info
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.
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I would agree that it may be legal (due to copyright; IANAL), but not ethical. IMHO, you should be able to play it on whatever platform you can get it to play on. Don't expect support, but don't expect to be banned either.
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Thank the Lord that games are discretionary income. If Blizzard is gonna treat me like crap, I don't have to buy their game. I won't lose money or time or anything. There are plenty of other ways to waste my free time. For the record, "like crap" includes not making a native Linux client (which is why I bought NWN and not NWN2, OK Atari?).
Well, unless it's entertaining enough and on the $10 shelf :)
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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.
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The Marketshare of non-Direct3d platforms in the PC area is not worth the $$$ and development effort in most large developers eyes.
No. (Score:3, Informative)
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This is a thread about an article about WoW players who play WoW on Linux getting banned.
HOW MUCH MORE FREAKING SPECIFIC DOES ONE HAVE TO BE ABOUT NOT GETTING BANNED?
If you're going to troll at least put a little effort into it... you may even get modded funny and not have to hide behind the AC title.
Shouldn't there be a real Linux port by now? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't see how that could really hurt them, Transgaming gets a secured revenue source
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So now Blizz has to do testing for each clie
which linux should they port too? (Score:2)
I am curious. Whom do they support? Should they tell the user that they support WOW only on paticular brands of Linux? Or should tbey just throw Linux versions out there on "best of luck"?
Sorry, but Linux is not gaining as much popularity and many of you believe. I think its along the same line of "everyone I know is quitting wow, soon they won't have anyone" type quotes.
WOW works fine on Mac and Windows. Both of those platforms offer two things the Linux platform does not, support and consistency
A bit more (still no) (Score:5, Informative)
Lets try some logic. (Score:5, Interesting)
Naw, cant be.
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.
who cares? (Score:2)
number of people who play Wow =small
number of people who use linux = small
number of people who use linux and play wow even smaller
number of people who use linux TO PLAY wow = tiny
number of people who use linux TO PLAY wow with cedega = absolutely tiny
I doubt blizzard cares. Its a tiny number of customers who are trying to play wow on an unsupported platform. My SNES games dont work on my NES WAAAH!!
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http://www.joystiq.com/2006/09/07/world-of-warcraf t-hits-7-million-subscribers/ [joystiq.com]
Number of people who watched The Sapranos premier = 9.5 million
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseac tion=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=40982 [mediapost.com])
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 usi
WoW (Score:2, Insightful)
Read the sig! (Score:2)
I'm a Linux user (Score:3, Interesting)
Do it the fair way (Score:2)
There's no substitute for a face-to-face [penny-arcade.com] with a dirty cheater.
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
It's probably for the better (Score:2, Insightful)
To Blizzard. (Score:2, Interesting)
I Am Amazed... (Score:2)
no answers (Score:2, Funny)
How terribly surprising! After the amazing track record of Blizzards customer support, this is totaly unexpected!
Old news (Score:4, Funny)
Slashdot at 11, we put a man on the moon.
A few updates and corrections. (Score:4, Interesting)
An operating system would not produce a false positive, no.
As a final word to those here concerning their account being closed I can only recommend that you contact our Account Administration team by e-mailing wowaccountadmin@blizzard.com which is also included in the e-mail you should have received.
As I said we take enormous steps to ensure that those we remove from the game are specifically and properly confirmed as being in violation of our rules and agreements before doing so. I still urge those of you who feel you have been wrongfully banned to contact our Account Administration team.
Now, I have two co-workers who were banned who I know don't run bot clients, cheat programs, or anything of the sort. They do run cedega though.
Some people have mentioned that they weren't playing on Linux at the time of the ban but that they were actually on Windows. This doesn't really matter though as the GMs and CMs have said that they don't ban clients as they are individually discovered but rather they build up a large list and weild the ban hammer at once. So, if you were banned it may not have been for actions you were taking at the time of the banning, but instead could have been for something that happened a month ago. My instinct is to blame the period around October 29 when Blizzard made a change to their warden on the server side and it caused all cedega clients to crash upon login. Two days later Transgaming released a fix, but I wonder if a number of clients were incorrectly flagged for those warden-related crashes.
Also, if you were not banned it doesn't mean that your account hasn't been flagged, correctly or incorrectly.
I'm always suspicious of cheaters crying foul (Score:3, Interesting)
More Blizzard follow-up (Score:5, Informative)
How in the heck... (Score:3, Insightful)
Might help to make a big stink about it in the meantime though.
The scammers are scamming slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)
http://forums.wowglider.com/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=16
This is a program that automates warcraft. Blizzard can no doubt just cough up $25 and get themselves a copy. People on this slashdot aren't stupid. If blizzard had access to the program and warden has full access to the operating system then nothing can hide. If it tries to hide, blizzard can reverse engineer the thing and find how it hides. No false positives, no mixing up linux users - they can without doubt target such a program. No need for blizzard to seek out strange memory access or whatever - they can just go straight for the program.
The thing is many people put years of work into their characters and have been caught cheating. Now they're trying to scam their way out of their problems - like theyve scammed their way through the game. Don't beleive these idiot posters.
Possible reason for banning only some (Score:3, Interesting)
Can anyone who got banned comment on this? Were you playing the game in managed mode rather than fullscreen in Cedega, or was it unmanaged and in fullscreen mode?
Many people play under linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Purely An Art Issue (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)