I know this has been answered, but it's 2019 and with 75% of businesses running Virtual Server now, I am hoping that our developers have a better understanding of virtual infrastructures can do. I am tired of using Windows 10 and Windows 7 isn't going to be supported after the year ends. Can we have an honest discussion about why VMWare/Hyper V/VirtualBox/Wine isn't allowed? Cheaters cheat and they don't use Virtual machines to do it. Thank you.
I think/assume virtual machines are banned to help enforce True-box rulesets? I don't understand why the typical gamers would NEED these programs or would have a setup like this. EQ's core customers are gamers, not businesses. The bulk of the people that would benefit from this are people/small companies running RMT gigs against the EQ terms of service. Have you considered just creating a small Windows 10 partition to play EQ (and other PC games), that wouldn't take much time
Wine isn't officially supported but it's not against the TOS that I am aware of and I wouldn't understand why it would be. It doesn't help in anyway shape or form with cheating. Wine allows windows programs to run on another OS. I dual boot windows and ubuntu and run EQ on ubuntu via wine.
Aww... thats cute, someone is sad because they implemented better vm detection last patch... whats the matter? Can’t multibox on selo and mangler anymore? Just drop it, you don’t need to use virtual machines to play eq unless you are trying to bypass truebox restrictions. We all know it.
not against rules to run wine, however it is against the rules to run vms, due to the fact that their system that checks taskmanager for other programs, cant run its check on a virtual machine.
and what os are you planning on running in this vm? can dual boot linux to avoid using windows, its not against the rules to use wine, its just not supported, so you either know how to make it work, or you dont.
Many times I have wanted to play EQ in the background while I was playing something else (ie, camping nameds in old zones...specifically Dragon Necropolis where the named spawn rules are very screwy). Guaranteed trying to play Skyrim while EQ was running crashed EQ (that's what I was trying to waste time with while waiting for the nameds). The bigger question is why are you so hostile to virtual machines? More and more people run them at home. I have a 20 core server with 64GB of memory running unRaid in my back room...why shouldn't I be able to play in a virtual machine? ...ok...so I googled "truebox" and wtf...this is about boxing? You don't need virtual machines to box. EQ runs at least two nodes just fine (that's the most I've ever tried to run). Virtual machines seems like an incredibly overcomplicated way to box...and it doesn't seem to stop people who are boxing. This argument sounds like BS.
Welcome to the community Lyrik, it’s good to see a fresh forum name. Yes, someone can easily box even on a somewhat old laptop of they’re willing to tune down their graphics. A lot of the virtual machine pushback is from players that enjoy the Time Lock Progression experience but don’t like botters disruptive behavior. Imagine camping a mob for 12 hours and then seeing a scripted army of mages run in and kill your target when it finally pops. People often want/try to leverage virtual machines because it’s been used to circumvent the system checks/rules requiring 1 client per PHYSICAL computer. Not supporting or allowing those VM programs helps mitigate the bot program users (often businesses) that farm items for Krono and then try to sell the Krono for cash on their own or other third party sites. I don’t get why anyone would even need to box on a TLP given how high the populations are, finding a group shouldn’t be hard. Even on Live servers, I still prefer grouping to boxing because the social aspect of grouping is more enjoyable even if I don’t get as much loot out of it. Third party RMT and botting is a constant battle that MMO developers have been fighting for ages. Again, nearly all consumers don’t NEED a virtual machine to play a 20 year old game. The arguement that “because many have access” to virtual machines isn’t a real arguement in my mind.
So now I got curious and started googling about Truebox and why it relies on VMWare. There are already guides out there how to get around these checks. The people who get banned don't even really care because they are throwaway accounts (I would imagine downtime due to banning is a cost of doing business). Meanwhile, I could get banned just because I'm doing something the devs didn't think about with probably no recourse. If the problem is Kronos, don't let people earn them in game (I've been playing for 20 years and I've never seen a Krono...the game is playable without them). Plat is cheap...is there still even a market for this? Is powerlevelling still a thing (I'd only consider it if I was coming back to the game and my characters were inaccessible for some reason)? The problem is that Sony has incentivized this behavior...the same way powerful video cards and expensive cryptocurrency incentivized the crypto craze. Since my last post, I was thinking about other reasons I have wanted to run VMs in the past: 1) before nVidia allowed Freesync, you could get your nVidia card to use Freesync if you installed a cheap AMD card, installed Linux and ran a VM manager, run your machine as a VM and ran some software that would pipe your nVidia graphics through your AMD card. Very low latency...it was amazing. 2) getting this big gaming PC's out of the room my wife and I use our computers in. Convert to VMs and just run a thin client attached to the back of our monitors. I'm glad I didn't try any of this stuff in case I lost my 20 year old account because of this. Technology is moving on...if DBG decides to ban me over that then it was time to quit anyway.
I don't see how you are breaking ToS by running a VM and playing EQ from that one VM and no other VM along outside it on the same machine. Wine isn't supported however I'm sure all those Linux folks can get anything they want working off of Wine.
I play on Povar. Thanks for assuming. I would like to move to Ubuntu and dual booting is an option but a pain in the butt to reboot my computer to play EQ.
Gina and Gamparse doesn't work well with Wine. I'd like to keep my game VM separate from live system. If the developers wanted to do an IP Check for boxers on True TLP servers you would have better luck catching people. Guess that could be bypasses by a VPN as well. My point is Cheaters are going to cheat. Windows 10 sucks for security and game play old game like EQ.
VMs are a standard protection mechanism. They are not limited to business use any more than locks on doors. DBG bans them because they effectively prevent DBG from controlling and spying on your entire computer. WINE is, essentially, a poor man's VM. I've never understood how people can get away with posting about using it here on these forums and not get banned. Run Linux in your VM's and run WINE on your Linux, and you can play EQ in your VMs all day long and DBG doesn't care. WINE is software that is used to get around the requirement of using Windows and effectively defeats TrueBox. Since EQ is going to run much better on Windows than it will under WINE, I don't understand why you would want to do this unless you wanted to keep DBG/EQ separate from the important data you keep on your Windows partition. That's the exact same reason that everybody wants to use VMs. TrueBox is nothing but marketing and spying for DBG. DBG doesn't like VMs because VMs keep you safe (they keep DBG and everybody else from spying on everything that you do). Frankly, I don't think DBG understands either technology (VMs or WINE) any more than they understand how CAPTCHA is supposed to be implemented on this website.
I have no issues running EQ through wine. I can 3 box and I see no performance loss compared to my windows installation. I use ubuntu because I'm a developer that needs to run software that isn't available for windows. I don't boot back into windows unless I have to run some other games/programs that don't run under wine. However, there is no way to play EQ on a linux OS without wine or playonlinux. If they ban these programs, they ban everyone that plays on all those OS's and I doubt they want to get rid of all their linux players. It's not that hard to figure out if a VM is running on a linux OS anyways if they really want to detect them.
I have never played on a true-box server and only done normal live and beta servers. The policy of VMs is not new. My wife's account got temp banned I think 4-ish years ago. We contacted customer service at the time to see why and they asked if we were using a VM. The answer was that we were using VMWare fusion on a MacBook. They said they don't allow it. We had never heard that before and had been doing it for over a year when traveling. It was never clear to me as to whether it was new when it happened or their restriction had existed before that and we never knew it. At home she now has an iMac and dual-booting is not a realistic option as it is also servers up stuff like iTunes for our home. I hope some year that they do allow it. I have only one Windows 10 system and that is just for running EQ and Gina. I have a powerful enough system to run EQ in a VM and even my 2011 laptop was fine running it for raids over a hotel's not-too-great Internet connection. If they ever do allow it, then I can get rid of a native Windows machine and run everything on my Linux machine. I have the setup for that totally automated so that I can reinstall my Linux system from bare hardware complete with my desired installed apps quickly. Between that and being able to use a separate VM for a browser (none that I have tried really like Allakhazam without hanging eventually or my router blocking access to some questionable site - yes even Ad blocking extensions don't seem to help me there). A separate VM for just EQ/Gina/Gameparse would be perfect. I would not have to worry about some other program messing up the system or being unable to totally uninstall some program. In fact, my system thinks it has multiple EQ clients and beta EQ clients installed right now even though I only have one live EQ actually installed. Running the uninstall scripts doesn't totally clean it out and has left copies on my app list. With a VM I can start with a fresh Windows install and get EQ running and completely set up before deleting the previous VM. (without dual booting a 2nd Windows install) Due to random artifacts being left on the system over time, whether something I forgot or something that didn't totally clean up, I like the ability to do a refresh to make sure I don't have things lingering around. I also like the VMs to better isolate rogue programs. Oh well, the rules are the rules. Just hope that they change (and let us formally know that they change).
I never saw any reason given, or even an official announcement. But in this post, just before Phinny's release four years ago (which was the first server to make the TrueBox claim), I state that I could not find any mention of virtual machines anywhere on the DBG website. And I state that I was able to use Microsoft's free Windows virtual machines to play EQ without any problem. Sometime later, DBG added actual wording specifically banning the use of VMs. So apparently, if people did get banned for VMs before this time, DBG was banning people for unpublished rules...AKA anything they wanted, willy-nilly. Which they actually do all the time. #CactusGate. #NeverForget
I'll never find the actual post now, but it was posted somewhere, and confirmed by a Daybreak person that VM's made it very easy for people to "see" everyone on a Planetside 2 game. Launchpad is shared among all the games (as are accounts)... so the ban is shared across all the games. And yes, they did a terrible job communicating the fact VM's weren't allowed anymore. They just started banning accounts. If they want to change something like that, communication is a very nice thing.
VMWare Workstation/Fusion with Unity is one of the coolest programs you can get. Imaging the ability to isolate browsers and programs so they can't crash your computer. If any developer wants to talk about this I won't charge my usual 200 dollar consulting rate.
And for the record there are guides out there to get around this. Which I have chosen not to use. I want to get this officially fixed.
