Diablo 3 Gamers Banned For Using Linux

[Zeven]

So apparently Blizzard's anti cheat mechanism "Warden" is banning Linux users running Diablo 3 via WINE. Here's the source. Sounds insolent, no?

[kalniel]

Yeah, their anti-cheat tools for D3 don't currently work on linux systems so if that's trying to run and failing you'll be blocked:

http://us.battle.net/support/en/arti...roubleshooting

As ever, if you don't meet the minimum requirements you shouldn't buy the game really.

[Zeven]

I understand where you are coming from. Nevertheless, one user did argue against this, saying the following:

Unsupported just means if you call and complain about bugs in-game they won't be able to help you.... banning people would be under unACCEPTABLE OS, which is not the case. There needs to be something said regarding this, it's not the first time it's happened in their games.

[kalniel]

Well yes, if the anti-cheat tool happened to work on your unsupported computer then it'd be fine. But you can't force them to make their programs work on unsupported computers.

They're not being banned for running linux, the anti-cheat system just isn't currently working for linux. Once (if) they get it working it should be fine, just like it is for some of their other games. Whether they can ever make D3's anti-cheat tool verify that the Windows emulation is as secure/trustworthy as native Windows is another matter - for the numbers of people it might not be worth the development cost.

edit: That said, a quick search reveals entire forums full of bot programs and VM setups for running multiples of them, so they've got some way to go to stamp it out.

[Zeven]

Well yes, if the anti-cheat tool happened to work on your unsupported computer then it'd be fine. But you can't force them to make their programs work on unsupported computers.

They're not being banned for running linux, the anti-cheat system just isn't currently working for linux. Once (if) they get it working it should be fine, just like it is for some of their other games. Whether they can ever make D3's anti-cheat tool verify that the Windows emulation is as secure/trustworthy as native Windows is another matter - for the numbers of people it might not be worth the development cost.

edit: That said, a quick search reveals entire forums full of bot programs and VM setups for running multiples of them, so they've got some way to go to stamp it out.

I see where you're coming from. If the anti cheat tool itself is not supported, you can't blame Blizzard if the game runs but the anti cheat tool does not. Still, why did it take so long for the anti cheat tool to kick in?

[kalniel]

Still, why did it take so long for the anti cheat tool to kick in?

Conjecture: they don't have it run all the time as that'd eat resources, presumably it can still be effective with just occasional sampling.

Of course, could be they just made a change one day that causes it to flag windows emulation as a problem, in an attempt to block multiple VM clients perhaps.

[.walls]

I read this on slashdot yesterday and even though I have little interest in D3 (or any mmorpgs for that matter), I actually RTFA, now it sounds very much like a small number of users (four) were banned whilst using Wine - certainly not a blanket ban. In fact, they [Blizzard] explicitly state "Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will." (BTW, Blizzard apparently test their clients in various Wine configurations and are aware when a user is running an unsupported OS)

TBH, we don't know the full story and probably never will, as Blizzard will not discuss the details of the ban with anyone other than the account holder, however it really comes down to one of two things:

1) The four users (out of how many D3 players running in wine) were cheating.
2) The four users were also running something in wine that the anti cheat system picked up falsely as a bot.

Sensationalist journalism at its "best".