Blizzard Admits to Wrongfully Banning Diablo 3 Linux User, Refunds His Money

Blizzard finally understands that there are a lot of Linux users out there playing their games in Linux distributions, through Wine, and that they are banning them wrongfully.

We reported a while back about the open conflict between the Linux community and Blizzard, the publishers and developers of Diablo 3.

Blizzard didn’t view this conflict as a legitimate dispute. They practically ignored it with a few presumptuous statements, never addressing what seemed to be a real problem.

When Blizzard launched Diablo 2 a decade ago, or even StarCraft 2, in 2010, there weren’t many people playing them through Wine, in Linux operating systems.

In the last couple of years, Wine has evolved a lot and Diablo 3 can be made to run in Linux distributions with little to no effort, by a lot of users.

Blizzard’s servers and gameplay (keep in mind that Diablo 3 needs a permanent connection to the servers) are protected against cheaters and other nefarious users, but the software in charge can also make mistakes.

A user on the Wine forums, who calls himself ‘vexorian’, has reported that Blizzard admitted to banning him by mistake and refunded his money.

The user in question has played Diablo 3 through Wine, and was aware of the risks. Blizzard finally hit him with a permanent ban. He submitted a ticket, but the response was essentially the same everyone else got. It’s over.

Not deterred by the problem, he bought a second copy and started playing that one through Wine also. Lo and behold, Blizzard contacts him a second time, apologizing for the permanent ban and refund him for both games.

“We recently closed the Diablo III license on your Battle.net account listed above. However, we’ve found evidence that the closure may have been a mistake on our part so we will re-open the license for play as soon as possible. We humbly regret the error and hope that you will accept our sincere apologies.”

More details about the discussion between Blizzard and the lucky user can be found in the official Wine forums. We hope that Blizzard understands that times have changed and that Linux players are now more numerous than ever.