Some Linux Gamers Using Wine/DXVK To Play Blizzard's Overwatch Banned - Updated

[ElectricPrism]

Yes, because they cheated, read some games disclaimers. I was once banned from a game because my mouse can record a down move and compensate 90% for recoil. A friend banned because he stitched a red dot in the center of his screen to compensate for the close range of the sniper. It happens.

You gotta do a hardware mod using scotch tape and a sharpie to mark the center.

[eydee]

It's two people, not exactly much evidence.

For all we know they were hacking.

But we also know that the name "Blizzard" actually equals "Activision". For all we know, Bobby Kotick decided to f***ck some people, as he always does, because he takes pleasure in others' suffering.

[Luke]

These "Punkbuster/Warden/etc" anti-cheat programs are all unavoidably spyware. In order to detect cheats they have to read and report back things like RAM contents. Because of this it is unsafe to permit such software or any games that use it to coexist on the same machine as your emails or anything else you consider to be private. Supposedly some games have servers both with and without these antifeatures and others only with. If you either play the latter or need the anti-cheat managed servers with the former, you should strongly consider using separate hardware or at least separately bootable / and /home partitions for just the games involved.

Once the game and its anti-cheat program have been declared unsafe to run on your otherwise secure Linux box, the need to be able to run them under WINE is reduced. The worst thing about Windows 10 is that it phones home. The worst thing about the anti-cheat scanners is that they phone home. I won't run either one, and this kind of shit makes me glad I have never once bought a closed, proprietary game.

[torsionbar28]

I remember that years ago, World of Warcraft (Blizzard) players reported that they got banned because the combination of Wine and a programmable keyboard was mistaken for a bot by the anti-cheat. I never got banned myself but only used Wine, not a programmable keyboard. This seems to be just a new occurrence of the same kind of issue.

Years ago, I spent way too many hours playing WoW via Wine. Never had a problem. Of course its doubtful my circa 1981 IBM Model M keyboard would be mistaken for a programmable one!

[puleglot]

These "Punkbuster/Warden/etc" anti-cheat programs are all unavoidably spyware. In order to detect cheats they have to read and report back things like RAM contents. Because of this it is unsafe to permit such software or any games that use it to coexist on the same machine as your emails or anything else you consider to be private.

Have you ever heard about virtual memory?

[DanL]

WTF are you talking about?

This is the appropriate response to about 6,000 of 6,360 Qaridarium posts.

[Hi-Angel]

These "Punkbuster/Warden/etc" anti-cheat programs are all unavoidably spyware. In order to detect cheats they have to read and report back things like RAM contents. Because of this it is unsafe to permit such software or any games that use it to coexist on the same machine as your emails or anything else you consider to be private. Supposedly some games have servers both with and without these antifeatures and others only with. If you either play the latter or need the anti-cheat managed servers with the former, you should strongly consider using separate hardware or at least separately bootable / and /home partitions for just the games involved.

How about:

1. Having `/proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope` set to 1 (which is the default), which means your anticheat software won't be able to attach to an arbitrary process in your system.
2. Using AppArmor to limit wine's access to only its WINEPREFIX

[L_A_G]

If you're at all familiar with the way Blizzard deals with people using bot software or just plain trying to hack the game by editing what's in-memory (particularly World of Warcraft does a ridiculous amount of stuff client-side, including things that really shouldn't be done client-side*) you'll know that they're known for being very heavy handed in checking that no outside applications are modifying local memory. This includes stuff like people having their World of Warcraft accounts permanently suspended because the anti-bot/hacking software (called "Warden") misidentified people's anti-virus doing a sweep of memory as a hacking or bot application.

So when most sane developers try to deal with cheating using methods like server-side hit detection Blizzard instead just tries to detect everyone trying to hack their games by constantly scanning accesses to local memory, which has lead to massive amounts of bans given out based on false alarms.

*This includes things like the player-world physics simulation, which enabled some really interesting hacks when you could change the models for items including ones you can interact with enabling you to get into interesting places by doing things like replacing the model for a user-placeable campfire with a huge staircase. Actually, come to think of it the whole physics/collision system in World of Warcraft was always kind of wonky with things like so-called wall walking that allowed you to literally walk up the sides of cliffs and mountains.

[kpedersen]

I actually find it odd that Blizzard is actively blocking the "hacking" community. There is likely a large proportion of users that would prefer to play the game with hacks such as speed hacks, memory hacks, save game hacks, etc. I am surprised that Blizzard isn't capturing that in a similar way to the Diablo II "open Battlenet". For now they have to opt for private servers which is exactly what Blizzard was trying to crack down on.

But yeah, Wine often triggers anti-cheat detection mechanisms. The simplest one is checking if a debugger is attached which as far as I know is the default in Wine.
And unlike Windows, you can modify Wine to lie to the software so in some cases it could be a cheat tool. In a similar way that there are plugins to OllyDbg and IDA Pro to hide themselves from the target software.

[Sethox]

This thread is all over the place, you can clearly see the upset/extreme, the theoretical/bias, and the skeptical/normal. What happened to proof and that without proof the person cannot be a liar. Every person here that plays a game and get banned know that a simple picture is good enough but thinking a little further it can be manipulated.

But come on people, even DXVK readme file mention "use at your own risk":

Online multi-player games

Manipulation of Direct3D libraries in multi-player games may be considered cheating and can get your account banned. This may also apply to single-player games with an embedded or dedicated multiplayer portion. Use at your own risk.

Source: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/blob/master/README.md