Remember when crafting was tedious? botting was rampant and soe first tried banning, then they trivialized crafting to the point where its so easy that the effort of setting up a bot to do it isn't worth it anymore. Remember when illegal plat sale sites where common? first soe tried banning, then they simply turned around and started selling plat themselves through Krono. In other words: If enough of their customers used VMWare they would stop banning for it.
While I am not a VMware developer, the fact that multiple vm machines use the same hardware has to mean that a lot of the heavy lifting is offloaded from the physical card and handled in memory. That would make it infinitely easier to manipulate the stream. Not easy, but far easier. Also far harder to detect than normal. Whereas as EQ2 'requires' windows to actually function you can't outlaw that and they are perhaps packet checking. It wouldn't be impossible either way. I suspect that the 5 people that leave because they can't play on a virtual machine will not bring the entire population to a halt. My guess is that just using a 'virtual machine' changes their packet CRC integrity making it look to the server like the packets are being manipulated whether they are or not actually. (actually VMware probably actually does always manipulate the packets, just not in a way that gives the player an advantage.) Since they can't tell the difference and re-engineering the code to correct for it would be far too costly at this stage they are err-ing on the side of caution and dis allowing it. They do this in all their on line games DCUO etc.
Another point to ponder - there are a number of VMware appliances out there that can be used for packet manipulation
I would say that you can't be so naive as to think that there are only 5 users that played EQ2 on a mac via a VM, but being familiar with your 'work' I won't. The packets that come from a VM are completely indistinguishable from any other packet, they are identical the purpose of a VM is not to manipulate packets to enable people to cheat in online games, you need to stop drinking the cool aid that you are being fed by SOE here. You are doing nothing but taking SWAG's and saying well it 'probably' does this or that and you couldn't possibly be any further off. They are able to detect the VM with the launcher and the client because of the way hardware abstraction works and any and every test that they can dream up to check for can and will be defeated by anyone that is determined enough to cheat or to just do it so that can one up them. So the 5 or so people that were using a VM to cheat in planetside 2 will find a way to avoid the VM detection protocols being used and the other 3 will resort to other methods.
Unless you have intimate knowledge of how EQ2 packets are built with CRC and other error checking, you can't say they are indistinguishable. Certain parts of the packet, in specific layers, might remain untouched. The packet must in some ways be different than a regular packet because at the very least the packet has to be flagged as to which virtual machine it comes back to on that hardware NIC. Bottom line, they are banning on all $OE games for use of VMware use at your own peril. Anyone savvy enough to using VMware should have the capability of using google and determining that for themselves. ToS does not require a change since they can twist that however they want. I suspect if there were truly no differences we wouldn't be having this conversation as no one would have been banned. AND the most likely scenario since people are being banned is that foul play was actually discovered.
It DOES NOT matter how the EQ2 packets are built, The VM does not encapsulate the packet in any special way the packet need not be any different than any other packet for it to get to where it needs to go. If the VM is using a bridged connection the VM has it's own IP the packet comes directly to it. If the VM is using NAT then the Host computers network driver behaves and routes packets the same way a generic off the shelf router would. The fact that you say the packet MUST be different only goes to show that you are in over your head here and have no idea what you are talking about. The point you are missing is Joe Bloe who plays on MAC and has been away for over a year decides to come back to the game, buys the latest expansions via the web site gets set to go, downloads the launchpad, loads it up puts in his name and password and BOOM banned. Why on earth would he expect that he needs to Google "Does SOE STILL allow me to play their games thorugh a VM on my Mac?" I'm sure foul play was discovered somewhere, I am not contesting that, people have been issued bans for the simple action of launching the game in a VM, whether or not they have even been suspected of cheating. It is an absolutely disgusting trap to spring on people. The launcher could detect it, and display a warning and a link, or better yet automatically launch your browser and take to to a page in the support section of SOE's site explaining that the use of VM's are prohibited in accessing ANY SOE game. That is the PROPER way to handle this, not to spring a ban hammer trap on unwitting customers. As to your comments of anyone savvy enough to be using VMWare having the capability to Google it, VMWare Workstation is a sub $200 product, VMWare player is a free product and one does need to be too tech savy to install and use either one, ESX server and vSphere, yeah those require some tech savvy, the other 2 can be installed by anyone capable of installing any other piece of software.
I am a professional software developer, and have been for 20+ years. I have NOT written a NIC driver in a professional setting. Are you a coder? have you written a driver for NIC? Again even with that but no specific knowledge about $OE packet structure you can't say they 'aren't different. That they must be somewhat different in such a way as to determine which virtual machine on the hardware NIC they go to is true. Just due to the rules of the OSI model (the 7 layers of networking).
Yes I am a programmer, no I have never written a NIC driver. I myself have a hair over 25 years, my experience in programming has little bearing on my knowledge of networking. I'll say it like this and I am not going to argue with you any further on it the TCP/IP communications that SOE uses is STANDARD the contents of those packets can be in any imaginable format it is irrelevant. The communications gets routed to the VM just like it would to any other computer, the VM either has a dedicated IP or it shares an IP with the host if it shares an IP with the host then the VM is assigned an IP address on a separate private network and it uses NAT to route the traffic. If your host already has a private IP using a router it is 100% identical to placing a NAT router behind another NAT router and you absolutely can not distinguish between the two by the structure of the TCP/IP packets. The mechanism that SOE uses to detect a VM has nothing to do with TCP/IP packet structure, they may use more than 1 in fact I'm sure they probably do but 1 can easily be identified without resorting to any sort of disassembly, reverse engineering or anything that would violate the ToS.
I think networking has nothing to do with it. Having no control over who reads or even writes the game memory would be a far bigger problem. There are ways to detect this within an OS, but outside of the (guest) OS is where it gets interesting. Back on topic, on Linux there are ways to look in program code too, and I doubt that will be detectable in the game. Which makes the question as raised by the OP very relevant.
That isn't true, each router adds a wrapper (or return path) to the packet so that the route back can be determined by the host. You can think of each router etc as wrapping the packet in a m&m coating on its way to destination. This is what allows 'tracert' to work for instance. And that is why there is sometimes a 'maximum' number of hops for a packet. 30 in tracert. Without that 'wrapper' packets would not make the return trip through a NAT. Rothgar (I think it was) a long time ago talked about how they 'order' the packets before transport etc. You may have the last word if you desire. As Ritten mention, I believe there are ways to manipulate one virtual machines memory from another virtual machine. Or perhaps they just don't want 23 bots running around on a computer with 23 virtual spaces and one live person doing the entire raid.
Interesting conversation, but fairly irrelevant to wine. I would add that every other non-SOE online game that I have investigated since my last post explicitly allows (but does not support) playing on Linux or OSX using wine. I don't know about VM's, but I wasn't looking for any information about them either. I suppose it would be interesting to find out. Anyway, I'm done, enjoy the debate.
Sorry we did kinda derail the thread. I'm not sure what to tell you, I'm sure someone on the forums plays or has played through Linux, I would say create a new F2P account and see if you can play on it w/o any troubles. WINE doesn't exactly function as a hypervisor like VMWare does so it may OK just not supported.
I wouldn't say derail, VM's are definitely a related subject. I could easily have likely fallen foul of the VMware product ban (are VM products from other companies also banned?) because I have at times used Player quite regularly for perfectly legal and ethical reasons... I'm sure there are many EQ2 (and other SOE games) players that are on Linux or Mac OS that run the game clients through wine. I am just not willing to put my account at risk and pay them a lot of money only to have my account banned if they decide to end their unofficial tolerance. That really is a poor way to treat customers. I can imagine a rather frustrating conversation trying to explain how WINE and VMware Player differ to a SOE CSR, no thank you.
Everything you just stated there is not uncommon at all for them. No clarification can be gotten, although I am sure they would consider any Hypervisor product banned. It is like they don't even have a grasp as to what the products are or what they do, for one it isn't VMWare, it is VMWare workstation, or VMWare ESX server, or vSphere so the wording they use is just as poor as the implementation of the policy. I assume they mean all VMWare products. I can say that several people on the forums have had their bans lifted after (lengthy?) back and forths with customer service. I don't even think there is any back and forth, I think you just say I want to appeal this ban and they forward your case to the ban appeals department and whenever they get to your case you'll get the results from customer service, you probably never even talk to anyone in the ban appeals department. I think one of the devs (maybe an old one used wine) there was a thread in the old forums but they are no longer available here Feldon (EQ2 Wire) has them archived and probably a better search facility for them so maybe you could find more there.
I do occasionally play on linux/wine and I've never been banned. By the way it works pretty good for solo questing, but grouping/raiding does not work, the game lags to a halt when too much is going on. Still it would be nice to get an official SOE statement, as the reasons I can think of for them to ban VMware players would also hold for linux/wine. (I.e. tampering with in memory data, trying to locate the network encryption key and such things).
I've got decent hardware. I'm trying out Rift right now, it's running pretty well nearly maxed out. I did one of those big events with at least one full raid participating with no lag, though there are some odd graphical glitches here and there and the cut-scenes don't work. I suspect EQ2 would work well enough for what I do. It is just frustrating to not be able to get a straight answer.
What? No...in most respects a Virtual machine behaves much like a bare metal machine. Encrypted packets coming out will be no different. If you are going catch and modify packets in a stream you will redirect them on the router or gateway to somewhere for editting...or just have some software do it right on the machine with the EQ2 install, but that would work the same on VMs or host machines. The anti-virtual machine stance has no defense. There is no advantage for cheaters to use VMs. Beyond the trial and error advantage. A VM makes it much faster to "restore" a system from a snap shot. That is the only reason I can think of as to why cheaters are using VMs. If you botch up the game...no need to reinstall. Just reload the snap shot and the entire OS is back the way it was in a minute or so. Though if they are only modifying EQ2 game files they would have been smarter to use RAM drives.
If there really was no difference to bare metal, people would not be banned and this thread would not exist. One thing I learned a long time ago, just because you can't do it, doesn't mean it can't be done.
