Report: Blizzard Banning Diablo III Players For Using Linux | Hacker News Reader

Report: Blizzard Banning Diablo III Players For Using Linux

kotaku.com

65 pointsevo_957 comments

Urgh. People like jumping to conclusions way too much. This is like the 3rd time for Diablo 3 there has been internet outrage for reasons that turned out to be completely wrong.

"We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly. We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.

Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will."

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978861022?page=21#40...

Oh lookie, another Blizzard apologist. Wine triggers the VMM detection script in the warden, it IS a false positive.

I'm willing to accept that if you have more than an anecdote to support your position?

He's provided as much proof as Blizzard.

1. Blizzard has their name / track record to stand behind.

2. derpmeister has a month-old HN account, which is backed up by/linked to nothing else.

3. (for example) If Linus Torvalds had posted what derpmeister had, I would be more inclined to take it at face value.

4. derpmeister's post automatically takes itself into 'troll' territory by starting off with the 'Blizzard apologist' comments. This makes the anecdote seem less believable without anything else to back it up.

Nothing you said negates my comment.

It all suggests derpmeister should be taken as a less reliable source than Blizzard, which does count against your comment.

Sure, it's not a deductive proof that Blizzard is right and derpmeister is wrong, but it would be unreasonable to require such a thing.

Agreed. Probably was a worthless comment.

So you're assuming that's malicious? Why would Blizzard care what OS you use so long as you pay?

It's unfortunate that I was right http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3889127 If they use white list approach for their DRM it is not surprising that they flagged wine, but keeping in mind it is permanent ban and there is no way to play D3 offline, and that they refused to give refunds there are reasons to be angry at them. Fortunately personally I did not "bought" d3 because i don't like renting games(and requiring constant connection to server makes it renting).

I also found it surprising that it is apparently possible to modify client to teleport, move faster, and see data that is not allowed by standard client[1]. One would thought that after they went such a lengths to make it online only (making even map generation on server side) they would not trust a client. But apparently not.

[1] http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978861022?page=1 "These programs may increase movement speed or teleport heroes from one place to another beyond what is allowed by game design. It also includes any programs that obtain information from the game that is not normally available to the regular player"

World of Warcraft has the same problems, where it's possible to position your character at random places in the air and stuff like that. (among others used by people advertising for their gold-selling sites by making a lot of characters fly through the air to form words.)

There's a video of a guy being permabanned for doing this within a few minutes of starting, but damned if I can find it right now (it featured a teleport/underground mining hack).

> i don't like renting games(and requiring constant connection to server makes it renting)

You could try the cracked version. I heard that removed this 'feature' from Assassin's Creed, and it is very likely then they will remove it from D3 too.

Of course, chances are that you may not be able to log in from cracked version - and will have to play as a single player game.

Unlikely. All of the "business logic" of the game takes place on the server. Eventually server emulators did pop up for D2, but it took a long time.

Mooege is out already. Not sure how good it is, but it seems to be out for over 6 months now (started before open beta).

AFAIK, it doesn't do anything. You can use it to connect to a server and spawn monsters that stand still.

Diablo 2 actually had all business logic in the client itself because it needed to support single player and LAN play. They were able to just use the BNetD project to run Diablo 2 compatible battle.net servers with very little D2 specific logic.

A better comparison is probably WoW. Like Diablo 3, all of the business logic is server side and it did take awhile for emulators to pop up.

A community manager from Blizzard's response: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978861022?page=21#40...

"Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will."

Yep. This has happened before. This is just more cheaters WINE-ing.

;)

Which sounds perfectly reasonable, but it's not necessarily the truth. As another commenter posted here, this has happened before with WoW users [1].

They claimed that they tried and failed to replicate the failure, but anyone who's done any kind of software development knows this is far from conclusive proof.

A post mortem on the logs of the banned accounts is absolutely necessary. If they're not willing to do that, they should at least refund the accounts.

[1] http://www.linuxlookup.com/2006/nov/22/blizzard_unbans_linux...

They're claiming it's not the same thing. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978861022?page=23 Seems like they're confident that the people involved were cheating.

Also, other WINE users are posting saying they've had no issues.

The story's being spread around now, so I guess we'll see one way or another because other users with the issue will either show up, or they won't.

There are multiple versions of Wine out there, and the exact results potentially depend on the user's Linux distro, the exact versions of packages installed, the compiler version it's built with, ... One of the problems Wine developers have is that DRM is often very fragile and sensitive to software changes that are outside their control.

This happened before with World of Warcraft and the users were unbanned: http://www.linuxlookup.com/2006/nov/22/blizzard_unbans_linux...

Still, you would think they learned after the first time.

Don't rush to judgement. I doubt this is about DRM, this is probably more about protecting players from hackers. Clients have to be analyzed for modification, it's the same as what any Punkbuster game goes through. Banning wine may just be a consequence of Blizzard keeping the game safe, which is a worthwhile effort.

Diablo games are notorious for being hacked, and I assure you that if you happen to lose valuable items or characters due to a hack, you will not be happy.

If wine users are unfortunately axed because of this they could be angry at Blizzard not having a Linux client (which they shouldn't because I doubt it would be worth their while to support) but they should not be angry about not being able to use Wine.

Not sure I buy this argument. "Clients have to be analyzed for modification" - why? PB works mainly on FPS-style games where you don't want people to run around with auto-aim bots. Does it still matter in Diablo?... maybe to a small extent, but I wouldn't care that much.

"Diablo games are notorious for being hacked" - do you mean server security? This has nothing to do with the client.

"I assure you that if you happen to lose valuable items or characters due to a hack, you will not be happy." - yes, I would not be happy, I would be furious if they allowed it, since it's the server that should control and verify those kinds of issues, not my client. If I don't explicitly allow a transfer, server should deny it. If someone tries to kill me in a way that game-physics disallow, server should deny it.

It's not like you need the official client anyway - the way to interface with the server is already known. There's an unofficial game server available and being developed since late 2011 (http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/showthread.php?813096-SPO...).

In short - I don't believe disabling the client on one specific platform will help anyone in any way. People can and will write bots that work around such protection. This is more like DRM.

The basic problem is autopilot bots. If you don't have rigorous protection all the way down to the operating system, it's not particularly difficult to make a bot that will run Diablo 3 bosses for you. If Diablo 3 were merely a single-player game this wouldn't matter, but they have made the auction house and the game economy an integral part of progression in the later stages of the game.

Bots may not be as directly harmful to other players' experiences as instagibbing anyone that pops up on the hacker's screen, but anyone who can successfully run an autopilot bot is devaluing the game for everyone. There's a real and measurable difference in the accomplishments of farming and selling a rare item for $50 on the auction house and selling the same item with the same time investment for $5. Because Blizzard wants the time people spend playing Diablo 3 to have more worth, they must aggressively police any automated bot activity, which might mean hitting some false positives here and there.

I see your point but don't agree with the method. The protocol is known and can be decoded. If they protect the client, it will just result in better standalone bots. Actually it will make them available quicker and in better quality if the client hacking is possible.

Humans play something like 1 million hours a week at lvl 60 and people running bot's want them to also have good items to farm faster so it's not clear that bot's harm the economy as they would buy and sell just like a person who plays a lot. Assuming bots gather both cash and items the only possible issue is they are a larger drain on blizzards servers, but I have a hard time believing it's that significant as the player base has already been cut in half.

  > the player base has already been cut in half.

By? Am I missing something?

The end game is not all that fun so it's been losing 10% of it's population a week. Granted, there is no subscription costs so you can come back at any time.

https://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5968886836

if they stated as offical policy, you cannot use wine, or you will be banned, that would be fine. However, they are banning people for using wine with absolutely zero warning, and zero recourse, refund, or appeal. That's absolutely terrible customer service.

Apparently they have a note regarding Linux/AmigaDOS as not being supported in their legal section in their website. They warn that such usages are prohibited. This could have been updated recently, however.

It was rather surprising to see AmigaDOS even mentioned.

A relic from Diablo 2 perhaps? My Amiga was still kicking around at that time, though my x86 compatibility option was putting a Windows PC in the same tower as the Amiga!

I, too, assume that this is related to preventing in-game cheaters and not DRM or security.

Blizzard is pretty strict with the anti-cheating checks, which may be part of this. It's also very annoying that you can't run Diablo 3 on OS X if you have Filevault enabled, for example.

That doesn't sound right, I've had Filevault on the entire time I've been playing Diablo 3... unless that's come in on the latest update cause I haven't played it in a couple weeks.

Unsure if it's new or not, but it's on their website: http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/diablo-iii-installat...

"This error is caused when FileVault options are enabled, or if a volume is formatted as case-sensitive. These options are not supported for installation."

"If FileVault is enabled, then Diablo III will not install."

I've had Diablo 3 running with File Vault, until a couple of patches later when it just refused to install the newest patch. Now, I can't even install it anymore. I'm unsure if it is a connection problem or related to File Vault. (Trying to install it on an external unencrypted Firewire drive failed too.)

Nice title. Makes it sound like they are checking to see if the OS is Linux and banning based on the result. More likely they are just checking for 3rd party programs, assuming they are hacks/cheats, and banning, catching WINE along with the riffraff. HN needs less sensationalism.

The bigger news here for me is that Diablo 3 runs on WINE at all, I've had very limited success with games on WINE in the past and never rely on anything that I run with WINE continuing to work long term.

Are these permanent bans and if so how do these affect other blizzard games that people might be using with the same account etc?

I would imagine the logic behind this is that WINE re-implements many of the Windows APIs and a common vector for game cheats is to run modified versions of DLL files that contain extra functionality to read "hidden" gamestate etc, so it becomes difficult to differentiate a cheat from a WINE lib.

There are 5459 "Games" listed on appdb.winehq.com, including all versions of Diablo:

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application...

I'm usually dubious of that list. From my experience their "gold" standard often means "basically runs but with frequent graphical glitches, 50% of the original framerate and occasional segfaults"

> Are these permanent bans and if so how do these affect other blizzard games that people might be using with the same account etc?

They only affect the Diablo 3 license on your battle.net account, and from what I have read the mail you get when you get banned states that you can buy another license to play again, though you will lose all your ingame progress.

> The bigger news here for me is that Diablo 3 runs on WINE at all

Things changed a lot a few years ago and there have been massive improvements. I'm a CrossOver (Mac) customer (which is Wine packaged and with a front-end) and I'm impressed by the rate at which they announce support for new games.

Lock out under wine seems reasonable. Ban under wine seems unreasonable.

Oh well, looks like it's time to go steal a copy of windows.

Is the corollary from this that Diablo III installs a rootkit? Or is that not necessary for checking for 3rd party software?

I don't think the tech Blizzard uses is called a root kit, but judge for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warden_(software)

Within Wine lies the secret of bypassing blizzard's always-online requirement. ;)

Sad how the headline is just an attention grabber.

This is confirmed to be bullshit. That sensationalism... sad HN. Not even sure how people can believe something so stupid so fast and jump on the hate train.

Oh, great! Do you have a link to the confirmation?

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978861022?page=21#40...

"This is confirmed to be bullshit." - Where? For a real confirmation I always use the Wikipedia check: Reliable third party. Sorry, but Blizzard is not a reliable source for an conformation in this case.

If blizzards confirmation isnt enough then who are you even going to believe? I can't think of anyone whos actually more reliable blizzard in this case. You prefer to believe random angry people on the internet who got banned for cheating?

I completely believe Blizzard, but are you seriously suggesting that any time anyone is critical of that company, if the company says "not true" they must be correct?

Im simply saying that blizzard wouldnt lie when they say that playing on linux will not get you banned. I did say "in this case" specifically, because im not going to claim that they never ever would lie.

Would you confirm your anti-cheat system could ban honest players? I'm not saying there's some conspiracy, but it would make them look foolish.

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