Blizzard bans linux community

**holastickboy** · November 4th, 2012

I play WoW, SC2 and Diablo 3 on Linux, and have never been banned. They have confirmed numerous times that it has nothing to do with Linux either, and they have modified their Warden program to detect Wine installations.

That doesn't mean I am calling you a cheater either. Your account may have been compromised, or hacked into, and used for cheating purposes without your knowledge. This recently happened to a friend of mine, I noticed he was online at a time that he was normally at work. I chatted to him, but no reply. I went to the zone he was at and he was mining nodes, and was clearly a bot (was running into walls, etc). I told him and he called Blizzard asap, which was lucky because he did get an infringement notice (72 hour ban), which was overturned once he had an actual case.

So it's not Wine that's the issue here

Edit: I should probably mention that I have been playing wow on Linux for years now. I have been banned in the past, in the very first Wine ban, but that was actually acknowledged by blizzard and the bans were lifted. These other threads have been confirmed to be not as a result of using Wine (further investigation into their account has shown this, and has been communicated to be so by Blizzard).

**holastickboy** · November 4th, 2012

Here is a link to a recent statement about this "Wine bans" thing

http://www.gamepolitics.com/2012/07/...e#.UJbKsRKmUWM

**ergo-proxy** · November 4th, 2012

Originally Posted by holastickboy

I play WoW, SC2 and Diablo 3 on Linux, and have never been banned. They have confirmed numerous times that it has nothing to do with Linux either, and they have modified their Warden program to detect Wine installations.

That doesn't mean I am calling you a cheater either. Your account may have been compromised, or hacked into, and used for cheating purposes without your knowledge. This recently happened to a friend of mine, I noticed he was online at a time that he was normally at work. I chatted to him, but no reply. I went to the zone he was at and he was mining nodes, and was clearly a bot (was running into walls, etc). I told him and he called Blizzard asap, which was lucky because he did get an infringement notice (72 hour ban), which was overturned once he had an actual case.

So it's not Wine that's the issue here

Edit: I should probably mention that I have been playing wow on Linux for years now. I have been banned in the past, in the very first Wine ban, but that was actually acknowledged by blizzard and the bans were lifted. These other threads have been confirmed to be not as a result of using Wine (further investigation into their account has shown this, and has been communicated to be so by Blizzard).

I used to play WoW on linux without any issues, my account wasnt compromised either :/ I was playing for the whole Thursday and on Friday morning I got the letter. My all credentials still work. It must the warden stuff and something (I heard) about ptrace memory vs 32 wine vs 64 bit kernel. Just look at all whining on winehq which started in Oct/Nov. I had the same feeling as yours when I heard about linux ban in July, I was thinking "huh, cheaters got banned" but now it happened to me, and I'm not a cheater and I've never used and never will any "third party malicious software". That's why I'm pi**ed off

**holastickboy** · November 4th, 2012

Originally Posted by ergo-proxy

I used to play WoW on linux without any issues, my account wasnt compromised either :/ I was playing for the whole Thursday and on Friday morning I got the letter. My all credentials still work. It must the warden stuff and something (I heard) about ptrace memory vs 32 wine vs 64 bit kernel. Just look at all whining on winehq which started in Oct/Nov. I had the same feeling as yours when I heard about linux ban in July, I was thinking "huh, cheaters got banned" but now it happened to me, and I'm not a cheater and I've never used and never will any "third party malicious software". That's why I'm pi**ed off

While a great deal about Warden (the program responsible for scanning your Blizzard games for cheats) is left unknown, it is accepted that Warden scans your dlls. This should not differ for different kernel versions. The other thing is that while Blizzard does not provide support for WoW or the other games on Linux, it is an accepted way of running the game (and if you are a forum regular, some of the moderators actually run the game on Linux too and have helped people with issues regarding Wine). Blizzard also replicates reported setups in regards to Wine before they do a ban. Get them to check your logged in IP addresses and see if there is a huge difference there (such as a login from a different country).

I should've mentioned that I also play wow on x64, with a Wine64 installation, and using the Wow-64.exe executable, and no ban here. Surely if it was a system flaw as described with the way Wine works with p-trace everyone should be getting it?

**jerome1232** · November 4th, 2012

Yes Blizzard, a company who wants to make money, banning Linux users out of spite after showing a clear and more than called for attempt to ensure Warden isn't flagging wine users as cheating.

Take your conspiracy and shove it imo. Sorry if that's a bit strong.

Time for some digression:
Reminds me of all the people saying "HP is trying to prevent Linux from running on their computers by making 4 primary partitions"

HP uses their own little Linux to power their quickweb feature, I don't think they hate Linux.

**ergo-proxy** · November 4th, 2012

holastickboy: I've been using PoL D3 wine which is 32bit patched version, been using it since the beginning, maybe that's the reason... Alerts on winehq and PoL forums and the link you provided clearly indicate that's something is on.

jemore1232: Nobody makes any conspiracy theories rather showing a pattern.

**holastickboy** · November 6th, 2012

If you are in need of some MMO fun, that works well on Linux, Rift is great. Not to everyones liking, but it runs smoothly on Linux, and is very similar to Wine. The community is also great. You can play until level 20 for free if you want to test it!

**Dougie187** · November 9th, 2012

Originally Posted by jerome1232

Yes Blizzard, a company who wants to make money, banning Linux users out of spite after showing a clear and more than called for attempt to ensure Warden isn't flagging wine users as cheating.

Take your conspiracy and shove it imo. Sorry if that's a bit strong.

Time for some digression:
Reminds me of all the people saying "HP is trying to prevent Linux from running on their computers by making 4 primary partitions"

HP uses their own little Linux to power their quickweb feature, I don't think they hate Linux.

Jerome,

I don't think anyone is talking about conspiracy theories. I say this because I was also banned and didn't do anything illegal (cheating/botting/hacking/etc). The reason people are talking about their greed is because the actual ban notice has the following solution

"Moving forward, this Diablo III account and any Heroes or items associated with the account are no longer accessible. The only way to continue playing Diablo III is to purchase a new license, or to attempt to recover access by appealing account closure. While closure overturns are very unlikely, we advise that customers pursuing an appeal hold off on purchasing a new Diablo III license until the appeal process has completed. If you add a new Diablo III license, a new account will overwrite your old, without any prior Heroes or items from the closed account."

Which to me makes it obvious that they really only want your $60.

I'm not saying they are banning users out of spite (I don't think anyone in here is trying to say that). There actually appears to be a bug, and we're merely trying to get it fixed.

**jerome1232** · November 9th, 2012

I apologize if I seem doubtful, this happened with WoW and they reacted to fix it. It was found out many people claiming to be banned for using Wine then were in fact using 3rd party cheats. Remember everybody you talk to in prison will tell you they are innocent.