Blizzhackers

A month or so after the initial release of Diablo III, you may remember me talking about players' running Diablo III under Linux/Wine getting banned. Maybe you read about it somewhere else (though it hasn't been in the media as much as it should be), or maybe this is the first time you've heard about it. You may even remember Blizzard having to deal with this same issue with World of Warcraft. It was around the time of thousands of accounts getting hacked, and the atmosphere regarding this issue was the same: Deny and put the blame on users while ignorant fanboys claim the issue is nothing more than user-error while Blizzard is at no fault. The fact is that Blizzard is straight up stealing from people. Of course, fanboys in the Battle.net forums are quick to defend Blizzard with absurd facts, e.g., "well, the game list no support for Linux." Still to this day people are paying $60 for this game, playing for a while, having money involved with their account, and losing it all to a baseless ban under Linux WITH NO REFUNDS WHAT SO EVER. If this happens to you and you post the issue on the forums, you will be met with post after post of flames up until the time your topic vanishes and you get a forum ban as well (in some cases). Blizzard doesn't want people talking about this. In fact, they have been straight up lying about it from day one. There were times they said that playing on Linux was thoroughly tested, and there were no issues or false positives. Therefore, you must be playing with third-party hacks, and the ban will not be annulled. (This is also what they said when it happened with WoW.) Many Blizzard reps, including Bashiok, claimed that extensive testing was done for instances of possible false positives, and "Playing the game under Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned -- cheating will." However, recently a ticket was filed for a Linux ban, and GM Zalmanarr had this to say:


Uh oh, looks like we have some collision of facts. This also isn't the first time someone said Linux was never tested. It *is* possible that Zalmanarr had his facts mixed up -- it happens. His good, educated guess makes a lot of sense, and it is what a lot of Linux users are assuming happened, but Blizzard will not acknowledge any possibility of "false positives" -- just like when this same incident occurred with WoW. It seems unlikely that Blizzard would scheme to take money from people and run citing system requirements, ToS, law, etc., but they have certainly done it in the past. Just look at what happened with region-locked accounts and misinformation they gave when pre-oders were taking place. Even more, look at what happened to Iranian players.

Blizzard's terms specifically cite Iran as a region that is not authorized to connect to Battle.net, but they still sold copies of WoW, SC2, and D3 to players all over Iran before restricting service to Battle.net to those same players at the end of August. Refund? Haha, no. Is your $60 copy of online-only now uselss? Haha, yeah, sucker.


The sad part is that the forums are so filled with fanboys that look at this as baseless hate towards Blizzard rather than fighting for consumer rights. Blizzard just hides behind their terms and license agreements and write up their own rules and laws without worry. Meanwhile they show how stronk they can be just by throwing around all that money they are scheming from people. They don't even have to worry about user security, security of the game's economics/environment, or good software security when they can just bully people causing those problems by using their terms and license agreements to run guys like this through the mud. He is one of about a dozen just in the last few months. While I certainly don't agree with profiteering from exploiting some company's video game, I certainly don't agree in peddling fear and using gray areas of the law to get your way, or strong-arming regular people instead of working on fixing your issues like a good developer should.

let's discuss how shitty Blizzard is ITT

what a bunch of douchebags

I love Diablo III, therefore I love Blizzard. What a bunch of awesome people.

Dude, you're not doing it right!

huh, so they went out their way to ban Linux users? I remmeber hearing about a Linux ban but didnt pay much attention.
That could cause some problems for them down the line, not to mention more bad PR.

I had this same problem with my ISP with intermittent connection issues, and they(like almost all big companys) have a policy of making you check all ur hardware like your a compleat idiot before they send a technician out on a £100 charge if its found to be ur hardware policy (But refuse ur conditional charge of £100 to them if its their hardware - after all, the technician just checks what you have already checked - he charges £100). I got so pissed off with them I made a point of phoneing them a few times a week for long ranting calls - somthing I do with alot of companys :p, and 1 card a number of more experienced support agents try in these situations, is the "we cant help you because we do not support your brand of router". Altho in those cases it was mostly because they want to sell me their own brand of router and going down that path, before going down the technician dispatch path.


The "we do not support your brand of router", or "we do not support your brand of OS" is tippical misdirection. Unless you want support with your OS, that has nothing to do with anything.
If they block your account, you need account support, not OS support.
If you argue that im pretty sure it will boil down to that line in the terms of use where it states somthing like "GREEDY COMPANY MAY BAN ACCOUNTS AT ANY TIME FOR ANY REASSON"
The fact of the matter is, for example, they did not sell their product in america, they sold their product in the united states of america, a body politic and thus are bound to that political jurisdiction and all its acts and statutes - Many that goven transactions, exchanges, goods and services and all the rights and dutys of all involved partys.
It would be a counter productive statement to write "GREEDY COMPANY MAY BE SUED BY ANYONE AT ANY TIME FOR ANY REASON" yet it would be equaly true and equaly irrelevant.

imo it boils down to fair use on their side, vs discrimination on the users.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/7004031692
^ Guy gets jacked by Blizzard and is being put through the endless loop of "filing a ticket" without ever getting his money. Man, I remember laughing at people having this happen to them when RMAH came out. And a month after that. And two months after that. And last week. And yesterday.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/7004341689
^ Wall of hard truth. Blizz: "LoL~!! Goblins don't like all caps, sillay *locked*" A typical response.

I truly agree with you DM.
More than that - they also banned a 'clean' accounts of botters for nothing. We were just storing there our items.
Oh, yea, and these accounts aren't "banned" - they are "suspended" forever...


Fuck their rules.

stop hacking d3 on linux
play on windows
d2 still #1
blizzard ban legit players never no one

How about capping SC2 clans @ 50 members.

It's like they're lashing out against their consumer.

We ask for something, they give us a small portion of what we want with a mountain of bullshit on the plate.

Its a simple case of real developers leaving and these decsions being left to busy bodies with no actual game experience.

There should be a tribunal for that cases. Tribunal like in League of legends, where everybody can vote to punish or forgive a player.

i got banned from the forums for calling out all the fanboys and posting so much legit problems with the game. i got banned for a week for "trolling/spam." and the forum post they attached that was flagged for "troll/spam" was a topic i created that was breaking down all the things wrong with the current state of the game (this was like 2 months ago). since then, i havent bothered replying to any forum posts really because of how bad the entire community is. for every topic on the forums, in general discussion anyway, theres always (AT LEAST) 1 fanboy to speak against you, theres always 1 guy that agrees, always 1 guy that trolls and reports every topic in the thread, always 1 guy that questions your post, always 1 guy that adds to it with his stupidity, etc etc etc. really comes down to the point of, why are you posting on the bnet forums if your post doesnt change anything except to fuel the fire that always burns on said forum???? really disappointing. you ever read the suggestions to the game by some people? the best one i came across was this guy that wanted "repair" mechanic to be removed. meaning all items will break, you cannot repair anything, hes going on and on about how it will help the failing economy of the game, etc. i replied with only copy/paste with the source link to the diablo2 wiki regarding ethereal items and runes (zod) specifically. kid still tried to say his idea was better and even admitted he didnt play diablo2. pfffffffff gotta cut the rant cuz im gettin pissed just thinking about the mass amounts of stupids on the forums.

people these days....

that forum post wall of truth text linked by DM was pretty legit, and its what i've been saying all along.

good luck to any of you that are stuck in ticket limbo.

game is trash and after getting my 2nd (and last) hellfire ring, being pretty godly for a barb, on the 2nd night of the patch... i really havent had any desire to play anymore.


-edit- not sure a tribunal would work in d3 too well. you would have alot of false reports (noob vs elite reports, vice versa) and the typical "honor all" guy.
it will work in cases of someone partying up with someone to do mp7ubers just to do the first machine and bounce before they have to "use theirs." i know i did this to everyone, got a godly account bound ring without ever having to farm more than 1 machine! but what would happen if i were to be punished by said tribunal? a logical response from blizzard would probably be "FIFTY MAGIC FIND MINUS" or something really retarded. or... wait for it...... LONGER COOLDOWNS ON YOUR CHARACTER!! yeah, that sounds like something blizzard would do.

Botting in diablo 2 was giving me more fun than playing d3 itself. If D2 would have RMAH, I wouldn't play anything else.
btw Natural Selection 2 is great

Because that system is not total shit.

[/sarcasm]

Oh, you called that kid who went 0/18 a noob?

*You have been banned.*

But more on topic--I think we are all forgetting what has been said about Diablo III:



And the direct response from Jay: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4079872821

Awwww shit y'all

Word on da skreetz be dat Blizz admitted they MIGHT have made an error and unbanned PLUS refunded some guy's account.

Funny really, I've been blessed in that regard. Something always happens in my life that avoid retarded blizzard games.

When WoW came out, I wanted to play it so much, but ended getting so pissed off that I didn't even started it. Blizzard helped a lot on that regard.
Years later it turned out I was spared constantly paying to be pissed on by blizz marketing policy.

Then early d3 footage came out and I instantly knew they've severed any good ties with d2. For none explicit reasons I didn't get it, and now its just a blatant stinking outrage.

Starcraft I never really liked so, getting it off torrents to finish the campaign was more than sufficient, tough i can't say satisfactory. Especially sc2.
They've probably put more work in cinematics and maps crafting anything more interesting than an auto-attack campaign finish.

Maybe they need to learn from past experience... If diablo 3 had a editor like say warcraft 3. People would undoubtedly create an experience that would standout. Then instead of just leaving it as is, they can endorse it and build upon it. As apparently they've run out on useful brain matter to do a half descent job of d3. Lets face it the only cool thing about d3 is the terrain ahah.