14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard is still banning people running Diablo 3 on Linux, but the community is starting to take action.
We reported a few times in the past that Blizzard was banning, indiscriminately, people who were playing Diablo 3 legitimately.
The theory is that the Linux emulation done through Wine is somehow misinterpreted by Blizzard’s servers as a hack. The company has always had very strict rules about cheating, so they've issued permanent bans, shooting first and not asking any questions later.
When these problems started, a community manager stated that only cheaters were being banned and that Blizzard had no problem with gamers using Linux.
“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,” stated Bashiok, a community manager.
According to cinemablend.com, this turned out not to be true, as more and more players have gotten banned from playing Diablo 3 and any other games attached to those accounts.
“We cannot tell you specifically what is causing you what to get banned. I can give you an idea of why it is banned based on an educated guess. Since you are playing the game on an unsupported Operating system, the way it is communicating to the servers is throwing out "cues" similar to that of a hack program.”
“If you bought another version of the game and played it on LINUX again, it would likely result in a ban again, since we do not test or support LINUX and would not be able to verify if you were using a bot or not,” stated Zalmanarr, community tech representative, in a private discussion with a banned Linux player.
The guys behind PlayOnLinux, a graphical frontend for Wine, have started to investigate the problems and have opened a topic forum in which players are asked to participate. Hopefully, the Wine problems will be identified and remedied.