Blizzard Unbans Linux World of Warcraft Players

An anonymous reader writes "World of Warcraft players using Cedega (the Linux-based Windows emulator) had their bans lifted after an investigation by Blizzard in cooperation with the Cedega development team revealed that the bans were in fact made in error."

Gotta give 'em credit

The response was a lot more classy than some companies would have done (*coughSonycough*)

Apology AND free play time

The summary also failed to mention that the people who were blocked got 20 days free play time - 2 weeks more than the time they were blocked. Basically, compensation for time lost plus some insane interest. They got some flak for this initially, but now, not so long after the incident in question, they admit to being wrong, reimburse those wronged, and told us they worked with the Cedega folks to get this resolved, thus supporting the Linux community. I don't see that they could have handled this much better after the initial screw-up, and with that last bit, they now come off smelling like roses (or at least a lot less like shit) to a majority of the /. community. Well played, Bliz, and bravo.

Re:Apology AND free play time

Yeah, a little credit for doing the right thing - but look at what it took for Blizzard to admit it was wrong. How many other people are wrongfully banned and Blizzard won't fess to it?

I've seen a multitude of people post on the forums saying they were banned as a Linux user and then posted the confirmation from Blizzard that they *re-investigated* it and confirmed they were using a 3rd party bot program.

If it were not for the overwhelming support of the Linux community I have no doubt there would be no admission and all of those people would be banned.

I hate bots in WoW as much as anyone, but Blizzard needs to WARN people that a 3rd party program is running on their system. WARN them. Every time it's detected.

Imagine when someone makes a virus/spyware/malware/whatever that runs as a process with the sole intent of appearing to be a bot to WoW. It most certainly would not be the first time someone did something for the sole purpose of being malicious and causing innocent web users/gamers harm.

Blizzard needs to do something to make it's customers feel safe - I sure as heck don't. Every time I get in game I do my best to close out ALL my running processes - IM's, VoIP, AV, et al - for fear one of them might do something to cause Blizzard to flag me as a cheater.

Why would a company treat it's customers like that?

Re:Apology AND free play time

if you are determined later to have been tossed out unfairly (by a fairly responsive review team, it seems), you get reinstated and compensated for lost time.

I've seen several cases where people were banned for "cheating" where the people were innocent (though I've also known a few that deserved what they got), and this case with Linux is the first time I've ever seen Blizzard's research come back in favour of the player. They are not, as you seem to think, at all responsive - they will not talk to you at all. I was rather shocked to see the Linux thing go the way it did considering their past performance, and the only thing I can figure is they were concerned about the publicity of so many verifiable false positives.

Re:Apology AND free play time

I would imagine there would be a limit to the number of warnings a player should get, certainly.

Do you seriously think the actual cheaters care? Heck no they don't. Log into WoW on Wildhammer US and I'll show you a dozen bots that have been leveling back up since the ban.

The point is, good honest folk deserve a fair chance.

Another point I was making was that without the great support of the Linux community - these bans would have stayed. Wrongfully so, I might add.

How would that be fair?

It's so easy for people to say a few false positives are okay, until they themselves are victims of a false positive.

People do deserve a chance. Blizzard offers the guise of that chance, but it's not real. This has been proven by all the Linux users who received *confirmation* they were cheating and only with mass support from the Linux community was the truth revealed.

People need to stop looking at this from a perspective of "how do I feel as someone who was not wrongfully banned" and see it more as "what if that was me that lost an account I had spent two years on, banned for something I did not do -- with no way to get my account back".

People also need to stop thinking that Blizzard gives each case the thorough check it deserves. They do not. If they did, why were so many Linux users told their case was *re-investigated* and confirmed they used 3rd party programs?

If you are wrongfully banned, you will STAY wrongfully banned. These people had their bans lifted for one reason, and one reason only; overwhelming support and demand from the Linux community.

I had an account banned four months ago - FOUR MONTHS. Reason: Innaccurate or incomplete billing information. WTH? What was I supposed to do to remedy the sitiuation? Fill out a form with a copy of my ID, have it notarized by a notary public, and mail it in. I did. And I received a response that they copy of my photo ID was not legible, and I would have to go through the ENTIRE process again.

I did. It's been almost two months and I've heard nothing back - there is NO PHONE NUMBER TO CALL - no way to check my case status other than email. My emails go in, I receive an auto response, and then nothing.

Not even banned for cheating and I still can't get my account back.

Again, it's nice and easy to sit on the other side of the fence and say all is well.

Are you freaking kidding?

How the hell is parent modded Insightful? Gee, if there werent any people using bots, this wouldnt have been a problem in the first place, either.
If they didnt chase after those people in the first place, this wouldnt have been a problem in the first place.
If there wasnt ever a such thing as a computer invented, this wouldnt have been a problem in the first place.

Or perhaps most astutely of all... If Linux users represented enough of a market share to economically JUSTIFY blizard putting the time and effort into making a linux client, this wouldnt have been a problem in the first place.


I dont think i've ever seen a more fitting place for the line "cry more, noob". Yes, linux is great. Yes, it would be nice if there were more major games for it. No, its not a company's fault that they dont waste time catering to a fraction of their market. Blizzard is already unusual enough in fully supporting macs at launch.

Re:Apology AND free play time

You're a dork. They didn't even have to look into this. Linux isn't even a platform that they support or endorse. Apologizing to Linux users actually goes way beyond their realm of responsibility.

Re:Apology AND free play time

Actually if you link some of the more pesky libraries statically and don't use any kernel functionality that's too new you can get very wide binary compatibility. This is more or less how things work on Windows and Mac, right? You certainly can't claim that GNU/Linux systems have the kind of backwards (or sideways, for that matter) compatibility that Windows does, but it's possible to make statically-linked binaries that run across a wide range of kernels.

I don't know if this is worthy of man-love, but it is one way to do it.

Re:Gotta give 'em credit

It was said from the getgo (by me and many other people) that Blizzard would retract the bans. Many negative things can be said about Blizzard: they take forever to make changes, most of their games are evolutionary not revolutionary (although they're fun and have a lot of polish). The one thing that no one questions: Blizzard takes the relationship with their fans very seriously.

It was pretty much a few people overreacting. As also has been said, Blizzard uses Linux to run World of Warcraft (http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=206732& cid=16855900). So saying this was a targeted affront against Linux users (instead of a targeted affront against cheaters) was misguided.

Re:Gotta give 'em credit

...most of their games are evolutionary not revolutionary (although they're fun and have a lot of polish)

This, in my opinion, is one of the reasons Blizzard enjoys such great success. They may not be very inventive when it comes to new concepts for games, but they will take existing concepts and run the hell out of them. Their games aren't always the best examples of what can be done, but they're always great examples of what should be done.

Well, that's good.

It's good to see Blizzard actually take the time to investigate their mistake and make things right.

I understand based on market share vs. time to develop why Blizzard doesn't have a linux client, but considering that they've got an OSX client I can't imagine the hurdles for porting are that high.

Re:Well, that's good.

That they did. Well, no. It was distributed in an early beta over FilePlanet.

$ for a in *; do sha1sum $a; done;
c9affeeaff43d565513c1240c37d51efb61c0ff9 WowClient
dc288d9f7c88c1b0287387c3bb506ef30fd62b1f libSDL-1.3.so.0
a9178bcd629e3db58d9ca565ee75c0ce85373f70 libexpat.so.0
3c457e00bdbd4f39b547ff9ac8f67a76c7eb4a1d libfmod-3.72.so
dd1f45ca3466b2c77e738b54f7b55e858754181e libfreetype.so.6
56e16ad086c592848d1d53f0b4db2570bb60041e libgcc_s.so.1
3c137e3f7e29223f6535e8b61fabcfdb2340bca3 libstdc++.so.5
c8fae34ab919251d0af382f5557ca70ee9c143bf libz.so.1
a8de29b62f05a71b0fa3761f0441c29081e31cc0 uninstall
8a5670bbc67b6cb72805afdf28bc0c69fc573a3a uninstall.bin
cdd47ffc29bc129da0521da5b98a1af23bbb5f4c wow

I've got the binaries, libraries, and even shell scripts to start it around. No joke.

They have a functional WoW Linux client. I have no doubt of that.

They didn't ship it due to legal reasons.

#!/bin/sh
#
# Run World of Warcraft

# Function to find the real directory a program resides in.
FindPath()
{
fullpath="`echo $1 | grep /`"
if [ "$fullpath" = "" ]; then
oIFS="$IFS"
IFS=:
for path in $PATH
do if [ -x "$path/$1" ]; then
if [ "$path" = "" ]; then
path="."
fi
fullpath="$path/$1"
break
fi
done
IFS="$oIFS"
fi
if [ "$fullpath" = "" ]; then
fullpath="$1"
fi
# Is the awk/ls magic portable?
if [ -L "$fullpath" ]; then
fullpath=`ls -l "$fullpath" | awk '{ ORS=" "; i = 11; while ( i fi
dirname "$fullpath"
}

# Unfortunate hack until we figure out why TLS glibc breaks us
if [ -d /lib/tls ]; then
LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.19
export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL
fi

cd "`FindPath \"$0\"`"
LD_LIBRARY_PATH="`pwd`/lib" exec ./WowClient $*

Apparently, "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 20.9)." Not that I'm surprised, after posting a bit of bash script. Even after adding that line, it's still not enough!

Huh, I'm up to 23.3 and even then that's still not enough. More meaningless text, just to bump it up a tad bit. I should probably drop the punctuation, but hey, oh well. It seems that even 24.5 isn't enough for it... how about 25? Maybe? Please? Okay, more than twenty-five. Time for copy/paste of random text to bump it up. * Please try to keep posts on topic. * Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. * Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. * Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. * Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) I understand based on market share vs. time to develop why Blizzard doesn't have a linux client, but considering that they've got an OSX client I can't imagine the hurdles for porting are that high.

In other news...

The linux community reversed it's announcement last week concerning the early release of 2.6. Now they have pushed back the release date by three years, and possibly four depending on "how awesome the Blood Elf race is."

Amazing...

It's amazing to see Blizzard actually re-instate these accounts, and I'm damned glad they did. I've been avoiding trying to get WoW going under Cedega lately due to the looming threat of Warden and how people thought it was react to Cedega.

This certainly isn't the first time they've mass banned people due to "mistakes" in their detection programs. Almost my entire guild was banned last year when one of their programs to check for cascaded raid timers was set for 7 days instead of 6; even then it would have been wrong due to Blizzard resetting all raid timers during a patch the week before. After raising a stink on the forums plus a number of calls to Blizzard, they reversed all our bans with a measly 24 hour credit.

Great News

Finally, we can sleep at night knowing that the 15 people who play WoW on Linux can once again have their freedom.

Good news for gold farmers

1) Run Cedega
2) Run your new Linux bot
3)
4) Profit!

Linux not working on the desktop

Its amazing that this hasnt happened more often. I would imagine that running a "Windows Game" on linux isnt in violation of most EULA's that come with todays games. Of course, it would seem pointless to alienate a customer base that solves this technical problem on their own (without having to spend time and money porting your product to another platform), but stranger things have happened. I wonder if it would be legal to revoke someones liscence or CD-KEY for playing a game developed and liscenced for Windows on a Linux platform (therefore violating the EULA)?

20 days free? Thats it?

They should give a better comp than just a few free weeks of play. Something like an ingame penguin pet... Ya, that'd be sweet!

One company that (sort of) gets it?

I have to give them credit as well, they heard about the problem, acknowledged there was a problem, teamed up with Cedega and then FIXED the problem (reinstated locked accounts) and then gave them 20 days credit as well.

Would I be pissed if I played and had an account locked/banned by this? Hell yeah. Would I be somewhat mollified by 20 days of play tacked onto my account and an e-mail apology with an admission of "We screwed up, sorry" to boot? Hell yeah!

A lot of companies these days don't listen to their "base" and ignore the customer as nothing more than a $ and a number. Blizzard isn't perfect on this account, but they're better than a lot of the major playors out there. Kudos to Blizzard for realizing their cash cow was supported by multiple _people_/players and not just a bunch of $$$ and random numbers called credit cards - and willing to work to fix the problem! Keep up the good work.

Blizzard is good about these things

Blizzard has always been good with communicating bugs, errors, and others issues to and with its customers. Pre World of Warcraft Blizzard saw numerous bugs, hacks and errors posted and discussed on their forums where open communication with the actual developers was the norm. Sure, many game companies do the same now, but Blizzard was a huge company before WoW and you would often see discussions with the top dogs of the company. Rob Pardo use to reply to balance issues in a discussion format(forum) instead of just a static post. While Blizzard has grown and changed, many would still agree they still prize a good product for their customers and making sure it remains good.

I have my issues with the new Blizzard that made WoW, but deep down I know they still care about making a quality product for their customers.

Cedega OK... What about wine?

I recently installed WOW on linux using Wine... It works great. I hope I don't get banned just because I'm using a different emulator. Does anybody know if they can tell the difference? I didn't see any mention of Wine in the article.

If anybody has a clue on this, please reply.

Blizzard "supports" an unsupported environment ...

No anti-cheating effort will be 100% error free 100% of the time. I think judgement should be made on how often errors occur and how a company handles reports of errors. The statements before and after indicate a pretty decent handling of the situation. Especially for an unsupported OS. Apparently not all Cedega users were banned, the problem must have been intermittent. This is consistent with what many Cedega users were saying, that they have been playing and everything was fine.

So, they test in an unsupported environment and promptly investigate problems and address them. IMHO Blizzard is showing Linux some respect, as they did many years ago for Macintosh when most people laughed at it. Hopefully history will repeat itself.

What they said before the investigation when the report of problem first came in:

"We have been testing our security software with Cedega. Cedega was used and tested before the security procedures and during the security procedures. From this testing we have yielded no hits, meaning Cedega, by itself, does not incur an account suspension. We have accounts of several Cedega users who have been playing normally during the time that these processes are running. Again, these people are not being suspended simply because of using Cedega or Linux. We are in contact with the people at Cedega and following up with them regarding individual accounts. To answer the OP's question, no it is not against the ToS to use Linux or Cedega. We continue to monitor the situation to prevent cases of false positives and to rectify them if they do occur."

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topi cId=47009071&sid=1&pageNo=3 [worldofwarcraft.com]

What they said after investigating:

"Greetings,

As you know, Blizzard Entertainment traditionally makes a serious commitment to protect the World of Warcraft community from players who gain unfair advantage through hacks and exploits. Last week, our administrators implemented bans on a large number of accounts that were identified acting against the terms and the spirit of the game.

However, it has since come to our attention that a very small percentage of those accounts should not have been banned. This case of mistaken identity seems to be isolated to users of an unsupported, Linux-based Windows emulator called Cedega.

Once this pattern was brought to Blizzard's attention, our staff worked directly in conjunction with the Cedega development team in a rigorous and thorough review of the situation. We have since determined that your account was one of those accidentally flagged, and as such we are immediately reinstating your account to fully playable status.

Blizzard Entertainment deeply regrets the error, as we understand that this brief account closure presented you with an inconvenient and highly frustrating experience. We remain firmly committed to enforcing our regulations and suspensions for those exploiting our game, in the interest of ensuring that our legitimate customers have the best possible play experience. In this case, however, we regretfully caught a handful of innocent customers in the process, and for that we offer you our genuine apology.

In consideration of our error, we are applying a credit of two weeks play time onto your account, in addition to crediting back the time that your account was locked. This comes to a total of twenty (2O) days credit, which should be visible on your account within the end of the week.

If you have any other questions or concerns regarding this account, please do not hesitate to let us know. We appreciate your extraordinary patience in this matter and hope you will continue to enjoy your time in World of Warcraft.

Regards,

World of Warcraft Support Team
Blizzard Entertainment"

What about this poor guy

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/15/ 1334241 [slashdot.org] Will he get his account reinstated?

Nobody caught the error before the bans?

One wonders if it should have even happened at all? Did they not catch the fact that there were tons of people all getting the beat stick at one time? Couldn't they correlate this with the fact that most of them were on the same OS? Have we moved beyond the stages of "innocent before proven guilty"? Is this how Vista's licensing will be handled as well? "Might as well ban everyone, if they feel they need to get back in the game, they can petition." It seems kind of counter-productive.

Sorry for the rant, but this reflects on the society we are in today. Is it okay to ban someone without first investigating the cause?

Now..

If only we could get the people responsible for fixing this onto the Druid dev team.

They must be run by accountants

Would one or two free months kill them? 20 days seems a bit calculated, stingy.

Now The Winers Can Stuff It

I'm glad that Blizzard reinstated these folks, because the whining was absolutely unbelievable. It was like an addict denied his methadone. Everyone was convinced that Blizzard was out to get them, and now we see that isn't the case. The acted reasonably, so all the Linux Professional Victims can drop it.

Bannings based on flimsy faulty evidence

Blizzard has historically done a great job at catching the bad guys without catching innocent people. They probably caught some people who didn't deserve it but they were generally fair. This latest round wasn't like that at all. It would appear that they are currently targeting wow-glider and anti-afk macros so aggressively, they are using unreliable tactics prone to false positives.

I've been paying attention to this latest wave of bannings because my guild's main tank got hit and he has no idea why. I've talked to him at length and tried to figure out possible triggers. Nothing we've come up with yet would explain things. The most likely candidates include logging in from friends machines but he's talked to them and nobody seems to have installed any of the types of cheats that I know about.

Right now Blizzard's justice system is operating in a black box. They hide behind email auto-responders that claim to have "reinvestigated" their "extensive in-game logs" and technicians who handle appeals but don't seem to be given any details beyond "cheat detected". We don't know what their evidence is. We have to trust that when they ban it's legitimate.

Legally, Blizzard hides behind WoW's terms of service that says basically that they can yank your account anytime they feel like it with or without a valid reason. This is only part of the agreement between Blizzard and us though. Before investing hundreds and thousands of hours into characters that they can rip away at any time we expect them to be fair about doing so. We expect them to have a good reason and reasonable evidence and until now, they have upheld that.

In this latest round of bannings Blizzard banned unfairly. They banned innocent people based on flimsy faulty evidence and called them cheaters and lairs when they complained. The evidence that this was happening was there before this announcement but this is irrefutable proof. Unbanning the people who got banned for using Linux is a good start but what about all the other people who were innocent and got banned? Are we to believe that these are the only unfair bannings? The only mistake made happened to be in a tight active community with commercial representatives? Doubtful. I want to see Blizzard chow down on a big piece of humble pie this Thanksgiving and start actually looking at the evidence against people and un-ban the innocent victims of their latest dragnet banning scheme.

Blizzard usually does a great job at balancing protecting it's customers and protecting the gaming experience. This latest round of bannings stands in stark contrast to that. Someone, somewhere obviously got overzealous and decided to ban based on flimsy faulty evidence. I won't have any trust in the fairness of Blizzard's system until I see more people get un-banned.

Still will not go back.

I am sorry but "Sorry" is not enough for me... This will happen again and again and again. I am sure its nothing against Linux, just their paranoid ways.

I had been playing WoW from Friends and Family to present (well about 6months ago). I stopped playing as it became a serious pain to play WoW over wine. Yeah I know Cedega.. blah blah. I do not support that crud. So I stopped playing. I had at that time 3 60's and was pimped out. I just could not bring my self to hack wine to play wow every time I needed to patch.

Reading the "WoW banned Cegeda players" made me very happy really it did.

I was hoping enough of the players from the Linux community would push blizzard to finally release their Linux client. (Yes there is one) and we could play with out all the needed hacks. I would instantly reinstall and play again if I was able to do it native. As the way it is now I just stopped paying for something that I had to support my self... Not the reason I play a game.

Blizzard if your reading this (like you care) I am sure many of us would use the Linux client and expect no support from you except patches when you do version bumps. Forcing us to emulate a win32 env. is not the way to go. It does not play well.. period.

my two bits.

Off to do something else with my *nix box.

Cheers.

By the Way...

Linux users that requested refunds and wanted to cancel their accounts after their accounts were reinstated got this:

If frigging Gmail wasn't down I'd post the GD email that says basically that Blizzard doesn't do Refunds.

The bans were made by ERROR???

"..that the bans were in fact made in error.."
It's not a bug, it's a feature saving Linux's people from the useless WoW :] definitely a feature

Short Memory...

While Blizzard has 'fixxed' this small goof on their part, and many ~geeks~ on this board and on others around the world have forgotten something.

This is the same "Teh Evil" company that fought bnetd.
Yes I am sure that after needing a shovel to move the mountains of money out of their way just so they can get to their desks, the Blizzard Execs are quaking in fear at my protest, I take pride in this stand.

In many battles the soldiers hope that the effort is not in vein.
Lest we forget.
One more group that will never see a dime from me again.

Microsoft.
Blizzard.
Nike.
Sony.
Chrysler.
General Motors.

The list is growing.

Two Weeks?!?

In consideration of our error, we are applying a credit of two weeks play time onto your account, in addition to crediting back the time that your account was locked. This comes to a total of twenty (2O) days credit, which should be visible on your account within the end of the week.

So they credited them two weeks, plus the six days they were banned. So if they are on the monthly plan($14.99 [worldofwarcraft.com]) this comes to refunding the time they were physically unable to play and then saying I'm sorry to the tune of $7.50.

Keep in mind, they aren't even sending them a check for $7.50... they are just agreeing to take $7.50 less of their money this month. If any of them are so pissed off by this episode that they decide to cancel their account they get bupkus. Personally I think this is almost an insult.

"We called you a cheater, and banned your for nearly a week. Charging you $7.50 less this month should make everything right again."

And that's the power of the press

When this happened, there were a lot of comments saying that Blizzard have the right to do whatever they want, and theres no justification for whining. They do have the right to do what they want, but it was still unfair, so people complained. Now Blizzard have reversed their decision. Would they have reversed their decision if there wasn't the outcry from slighted Linux users? It's possible, but I think not.

Anyone notice the irony of the google ads?

From TFA (and google):

World of Warcraft Gold
Cheap gold and All servers in stock 24/7 instant delivery & Live Chat

WoW Secrets Revealed
Level 60 Players Tell All Master your Server in Days!

World of Warcraft Gold
$9.57/100 gold on most of servers, Powerleveling 1-60 only 13 days

Single build?

"The issue of false positives were related to a single build of Cedega, so this affected only a subset of Cedega users." -- Tseric, Blizzard Poster, posted here [worldofwarcraft.com].

but what about vanilla wine?

This is great that they have acknowledged the cedega community as legitimate users, and i salute them for eventually making the right decision, despite initial blunders. But what about users (like myself) who use vanilla wine as opposed to cedega to play wow? I would hope that in their infinite wisdom they would allow us the privelege to pay them money every month just like windows/mac/cedega users can.

South Park

But... did anyone get The Sword Of A Thousand Truths as compensation?

Re:Game Police

"Ban gays"? please. They did nothing of the sort. I know this is an on-line forum, but it isn't Fox News. A little restaint on the hyperbole please. And yeah, just up to 7 million players. They are really eroding that player base.

Re:But they were cheating!

Bah, stupid AC. I can burn my Karma, so can you.

I don't have everybody. I think the Wine/Cedaga team is pretty cool. I think the standalone Blizzard games were fun to play. I think WoW was a great game... when I played it in 1992. When it was called "DikuMUD". But static classes, continual grind and trivially automatable gaming (But banned if you do!)? That's hardly 'fun'.

If we're trying to see who's the best at something a computer can trivially do, let's have a game where you just get two numbers and add or multiply them! It'd be FUN! You get 1 point for each correct answer, and 0 for each incorrect answer, and there's a leaderboard that shows how many you did. Throw in a horribly bloated but graphically pretty client, and draconian anti-cheating measures. Require a webcam to prove you're not using a calculator or getting help... or outsourcing to china.

It sounds like FUN!

Re:What we should do is...

Is that you, Ballmer?