Devs - Do people use VM ware for work?

Okay Boomers....

I'll start this off by stating that none of my accounts have been suspended or banned, and I currently do not use VM ware on any of my machines that play EQ. (though it is installed for my work, but haven't had the need to log in for work remotely in several months).

I think it's important to level set the current status of VM Ware as it pertains to your customer base.

1. VM ware is not just used for those "IT work at home folks". The vast majority of the employees at the company I work for are working from home and logged in via VM ware. None of them are IT people, except for a few desk top support folks that need log in on the night/weekends to fix problems. The remaining 1k+ employees are in no way involved in IT or technology groups.

2. VM ware is far more common for work now. Gone are the days when the company sends all of their employees home with a laptop. Laptops are expensive to use large scare, get broken, lost or stolen, and are more difficult to push software updates and hardware upgrades to.

3. Work at home is far more common that it was 5 or 10 years ago, and continues to grow. More employers are opting for work at home for jobs that don't require face to face interaction or manual labor. Work at home makes recruiting employees easier as travel is a non factor, reduces late arrivals and call ins, and reduces the required real-state to support your employees in addition to the overhead costs of having a larger building or multiple buildings.

4. Consider your demographic - EQ is played mostly by adults (even though some of them don't act like it) with full time jobs where they may be using VM ware. Additionally this is an old school MMORPG, and if we're being honest this type of game is going to be more popular among the IT professional crowd....people who are going to need to have VM's running in the background for testing, monitoring, compiling, etc..

With this being said I think you should reconsider your approach to how you handle VM Ware ban waves. Consider the risk vs. reward. While using VM ware to get around true box rule sets is a problem, I think of the list of problems EQ has this doesn't even make the top 100. Even if you boil this down to only the problems that pertain to cheating/exploits, using VM Ware to play multiple characters on a true box server has little to no impact on the the community vs. things like AFK farming with macros, warping, ghost killing, map hacks, etc...

Focus your time on things that will be more impactful, especially with such a small development team. It's not like you have a whole team of people dedicated to cheats and exploits, your resources are limited and are better spent elsewhere. Additionally this recent ban wave and all the feedback people posted on the forums is a great indicator to the points I made above.

Thanks.

But how many employers have a policy saying that while your “working” from home you can also be playing a video game all day? Employers should be the ones scanning your computer (well they really do on most company machines).

But at the end of the day, having other software running that doesn’t interact, change, modify, etc any part of the games code should never be terms for a ban. Doesn’t really matter what that software is.

When has DBG shared what their approach actually is? How can we recommend they reconsider their approach, when we.do.not.know.what.it.is??? This whole wave may have been a 95% success - consider that. Sure, there may be some false positives in this wave, but how many true positives were caught??

I feel for the people who are caught up in this that weren't actually doing anything wrong - and I hope they can resolve that with DBG without need for animosity. There's not some person sitting behind a screen targeting players with a "suspend/ban" button - and they don't have the resources to tackle these individually.

Like it or not, they DID exactly WHAT WE ASKED THEM TO DO... with some collateral damage.

DBG doesn't need to change their approach, they just need to work with some of those impacted to hopefully correct the situation.

Depends on the dynamic of your job - and really that's up to your employer, not DBG. When I did log in for work regularly on VM Ware I also had EQ up. This was usually at night, I would be working on a project and think of something on the drive home that needed to be done and I would log in real quick and add it. There were also urgent requests I would receive on my day off and log in real quick to get those sent off. Projects I worked on that required mass system access granted I would log in from home and send those files over when IT was running scripts for mass adds at 10pm.

I think we can dispense with the "But what about THIS" to try and punch holes in the point I'm trying to drive here, which is VM Ware is far more common for tasks that do not involve loading extra toons on one PC.

That was the second part...there is literally no reason to ban anyone for any software not interacting with the game. Banning someone for running a VM is as stupid as banning someone for running Chrome.

I think this is my point exactly - there is no way to individually target players that are obviously using VM Ware as an exploit. It's such a small team - this is not a top priority. As to DBG not needing to change their approach, I think that's a bit one sided. Just because it benefited you in some small way, and you didn't get banned doesn't mean that this is the right approach. It's customer service thing - they don't have the team to support working with those who are impacted. These are paying customers who are loyal to the brand. Treating them as collateral damage and forcing them to try to appeal to a small team that will not be able to quickly rectify the problem is not the right move.

It is pretty obvious this is not what they did though.

I don’t think so either but I still agree that doing it would be stupid.

Actually good employers don't care as long as you're hitting their metrics, lets say you work for Rogers Mobility in Canada. From my understanding a bunch of their call center is actually work from home. If you're on call quality is high, you have good customer service metrics and you're answering the right number of calls what does it matter if you're playing a game in the background.

Companies actually save a lot of money when they hire people for 100% remote work, they're able to pay people less because they can hire in lower wage markets ex: Imagine being a company in San Deigo but having remote work from home call center employees in rural Louisiana. If your remote worker wants to move to another city because their spouse got a new job and needs to relocate with them well they're a remote worker anyways they might just need to use some vacation time during that move. If you have remote workers you don't have to pay for that office space, you don't need to pay for the electricity that person uses or light their area. Heck the OPs company doesn't even provide them with computers.

Lots of people also work in more results based work, I'm a system administrator. I have some normal daily task work, I have some project work and I get tickets plus I might get emergency calls. As long as I'm doing all my work what does it matter if I camp a bad guy in a video game and kill something every 15 minutes. People in offices sometimes spend 2-4 hours a day in 100% waste of time meetings where they actually have 0 to contribute.

Remote work is about performance and the company saving money several ways. Companies know their average remote worker is around but people around in the office too. As long as the worker you're doing all the things your employer wants then you're good.

Everyone I know with VM software on their computer didn't get suspended. They also don't cheat. Coincidence?

My best guess is this - it may be right or may be wrong.... so I'm not stating this as fact.
If you launched the game there was a check done for some specific known VM ware processes running while EQ is running. It's possible that who ever implemented the checks for this had a list of known processes to look for. Other VM Ware programs that might be less popular did not get listed. Similar to how netflix will recognize some IP addresses for popular VPN services and won't allow you to log in from another country. Other lesser known services will still slip through.

I received a 7 day suspension on Tuesday. I have 100% never run EQ in a VM. I believe 2 things made me a target.

-I run 2 VMs for purposes unrelated to EQ.
-I have another account that I occasionally play on an old laptop. I was playing both accounts on Monday night, the night before the suspension. This account was unaffected.

Based on this I suspect the recent suspension criteria is this:
1. VM Software running on the same computer as the EQ client.
2. More than 1 toon logged in from an IP.

This would make sense as to why some folks who run VM software were unaffected and others were.

I also received a 7 day suspension on one of my accounts and have not been cheating or using VMs to play EQ (ever!), here is my story:

I recently returned to EQ and made a new character on Mangler (truebox server), which I played for a few days (no boxing, just solo). Then, me and my brother thought it would be fun to start playing EQ again, with boxes. We got together (LAN) and decided to start on Firiona vie (not truebox) and both played 2 characters, meaning we had four characters using the same IP.

Of the four accounts we used, the only one that got suspended was the one which I had previously used on Mangler. All the other accounts are fine.

I contacted support and asked for further details on the matter and they said my account was suspended for using VMs on a truebox server.

I have a VM installed on my PC for very specific work tasks, but haven't used it for maybe half a year.
I've reached out to dreamweaver who is looking into the matter, I would suggest other people do the same. It is great they are trying to prevent cheating, they just threw too wide a net.

I'm Sorry if I misrepresented myself there. My point is, we don't know what approach they took to target individuals who were impacted... we cannot say they need to change this approach without knowing what it is. However, from a CS perspective - they should never implement a policy that is not communicated to their customers and then arbitrarily enforce said policy. I will agree that this approach could be re-evaluated in an effort to reduce player impact.

They do need to more clearly define and communicate what is suspendable/bannable, especially after this round. This didn't benefit me in any way, except to hope they provide an explanation so I know whether or not I need to look at what is installed on my computers, and uninstall something if necessary.

This seems like it would have a high probability of being close to what happened.

To others points here - there were some people who were probably breaking the rules, but I don't think your assessment that because your friend didn't get hit the others must have been cheating.

There are several credible people who would have posted, and this is nothing like the previous ban wave for usage of a specific program that we don't name. I think I even saw a post from a person acknowledging that they did in-fact use the program and wished us happy trails. I don't recall any back-lash posts stating they were falsely banned at that time. Usually cheaters know they got caught and take it on the chin and move on, you don't see waves of people trying to figure out what the heck they did wrong.

You do see the risk and issue with communicating this and why it makes no sense right? That information is just abused by the cheaters to evade detection.

No, they do not need to define their practices for detection, or the intricacies thereof... what they SHOULD define is whether or not it's punishable to have a VM program installed, or running concurrently with EQ. I mean, use of VMs to play are bannable on Live also, so we aren't just talking about people trying to circumvent Truebox rulesets here.

Right now the only thing stated is that you cannot run EQ from within a VM - there's nothing about having a VM running alongside it (or in the background, or even installed) for purposes unrelated to EQ, and that seems to be why some people got hit. If this is the case, it needs to be communicated.

You already have your answer. It is not. There were plenty of people that run VM's and were not banned. Which means there was something else taken into consideration here.

Were there 1 or 2 people who got nailed accidentally? probably. But having a direct answer from DBG wont change what you already know.

Honestly we could use a follow up on this and not just the generic automated email replies.

I'm... probably going to regret this post. Even though anyone can do this without much trouble

I watched what the game did as I logged in and played a bit. Its not really looking for things like vmware player. Its looking for signs that your running inside a virtual machine. I'm not going to say any more, but you can verify this yourself with whatever process monitor you prefer. What I saw is also likely not the sum total of what they're doing, but who knows and I'm not going to keep looking.

I satisfied my curiosity that using vmware player/workstation doesn't seem to be what its looking for. Running inside a VM is.