Thank you very much our good Halfling! I hope it never occurs, but if such a time comes when WINE is deemed unacceptable, it would be very much appreciated for there to be some warning given before bans started being issued.
You will try your best??? Seriously??? You would ban the accounts of people who are using your service in a way that you approve of without giving them a warning that you no longer approve of it?
I don't think you went quite far enough over the top, anathema. or if you were serious, read this: Nothing down the road's ever guaranteed in a corporation. Piestro doesn't have absolute final say, so what he said is the absolute best possible response we're going to get, and I very much appreciate that (even with as fuming mad as I'd be if it did go down.)
While you have a valid point there Nessari, it it really unacceptable for arbitrary bans to be issued. I can only imagine how I'd feel if I attempted to log in and discovered I had been banned. It is also a concern for me because I DO run VMware on my host, I just don't run the game in there, so if they decide change their stance on that and no notification I could get hit. I depend on VMWare for my job, EQ2 is a source of entertainment, I can easily afford a seperate rig for gaming but I don't want one, I don't want the noise, the heat or to lose the extra space it would take, I guess if push came to shove I could do a dual boot but I hate dual boots that is just one of the reasons I use VMWare. It's a legit concern, and I've asked repeatedly and still have no answer confirming their security team has no issue with VMWare being installed on the host and the issue is purely with the client being ran inside. I'm sure it has something to do with the stance on not revealing why people were banned so exploiters don't get tipped off, but it is taking that policy to an extreme. I also know that Piestro is not the one that makes the call on that but he is a player advocate and clear concise wording on it is needed.
I don't know if it was over the top or not, but it definitely made me mad. I don't know how many hundreds of dollars that I have sunk into my account over the years or how much time that I have spent developing the characters on it. It would make me very mad to lose it without warning because of an arbitrary change that I was not informed of. It sounds like Sony hasn't taken the time to develop a coherent policy before they started enforcing it. If they had then definite answers about things wouldn't be so difficult to obtain. They don't like "VMware" for whatever reason, that's plain. What happens tomorrow if someone cheats using WINE?
They will either A) have learned from their mistakes, or B) not have learned from their mistakes. If A) we get a 30 day, can't miss it, warning before banhammers start falling from the sky. If B) some team will institute the ban silently. Only after band members come to the forums in droves, will the community service staff (Like Piestro) know something has happened. Piestro will push the matter, but be told not to discuss details as it involved an active exploit. There will be no official answer on policy, just the 'suggestion' that you might want to use wine. Someone with the ability to do an end round around the process and contact a dev directory, will use up one of his wishes/contacts, and get a straight answer, but it won't be allowed to be directly quoted. "We're banning anyone who uses wine, but don't tell anyone I said that". Who wants to be on A, who wants to bet on B, or a variant of B? -Ken
Let me start by stating that I am completely anti using cheating software. I however do have a professional interest in how it is being done, so I did spend some hours googling and reading about the issue. So: There are some fights you cannot win. One of them is verifying that eq2 is running in an unmodified environment. It is not only a matter of sniffing the network(which is impossible to detect anyways if done by a network sniffer), but also of sniffing the OS DLL interfaces(DirectX, DirectInput, file operations, +++) and also possibly modifying their operations. Techniques for doing this are being dicussed and implemented for perfectly legal and valid reasons for use with other applications, and EQ2 is just another application to the execution environment. Instructions for changing the execution environment can for instance be found here: http://www.ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu/tr/TR223.pdf. This is a doctoral thesis and not some hackers underground 'how to hack' instructions. I have seen some game specific products sold on the Internet that seems to use these virtualization techniques to for instance intercept DirectX and DirectInput operations to provide game enhancing features. I'll not post links to those Also access to the memory of a process from another process is supported by most/all major OSes as this feature is there to support debuggers(setting breakpoints, looking up variable values etc). This can be used to figure out and modify the internal data structures of a program runtime(albeit with some heavy maintenance overhead as those tends to change as patches roll in) Considering all the options for (undetected) to interfere with the eq2 environment it seems sort of pointless to issue a general VMWare ban. Actually the potential for sniffing and modifying the EQ2 OS interface is way bigger with Wine, since Wine source code is available so programmer access to the Windows DLL interfaces is a lot easier. It seems to me the client(not just EQ2.. ANY program/game) must be considered to be completely unreliable, and the effort against cheating really need to be focused on the server side. Banning VMWare is like throwing spoonfuls of water on a huge fire.
I can understand not making a guarantee about something that they have no control over. They have 100% control over their policies and the enforcement of them. There is no external factor that could conceivably force them to ban all accounts of people who use WINE without warning; temporarily locking them out, maybe, cause the software to not function, definitely.. The way that they handle it is entirely their choice. The failure to commit to not simply banning everyone without warning demonstrates a real lack of respect for their customers.
As long as you don't run EQ2 inside a virtualized environment (using VMware or any other similar product), you should* be fine. Personally I wouldn't have a virtual environment up and running, but that's more for performance reasons than anything else. *caveat: there are a ton of technical ways this could be implemented on your side, and there is an off chance that some of them could be problematic. I can't provide absolute ironclad assurance that nothing bad will happen, but it "shouldn't". If we decided to ban WINE I'm pretty sure we can get word out, although it'll probably be along the lines of "WINE is no longer allowed" rather than "you have 30 days". What I'm more concerned about is that we'll ban some subcomponent of WINE that will defacto ban WINE, and because my department is largely not technical we won't quite understand it in the messaging provided to us that it applies to this specific situation. I haven't used WINE in something like 6 years or so, haven't installed linux in that same amount of time, and can't keep up with current tech trends as well as someone working in that field. Also since we don't officially support running EQ2 on Linux, we're not going to be actively testing against WINE. We can't actively test against everything out there that someone might be using even though we don't support it; there are far too many variables that players can and do use. So the news might not come in quite in the order we want. In that case the burden of addressing player concerns will mostly fall to Customer Service, but they're fairly good at sorting this kind of stuff out and making the right calls when it comes to individual situations. None of these answers are fully satisfactory, but taken together they do represent a pretty cohesive response. Is it perfect? No, of course not. But in a world where some individuals will try to gain any nefarious advantage they can and ruin the game for others, we have to take reasonable steps. It's why we have a fairly limited list of what is supportable, so that we can provide you with a way you know you can connect to EQ2. Going beyond that entails a certain amount of extra work and risk on the part of the individual who feels that specific need. We'll do our best to support you and communicate with you, but we can't always guarantee that every notification can be provided at the ideal time.
This should* pose me no problems then. * couldn't resist. I've never even tried to run EQ2 in a VM. I do all of my web browsing in them though, or at least I did since this news broke I don't get on these forums in my browsing VM because they can be detected via JAVA and if you are still in the stone ages and using IE they can be detected there as well via ActiveX. As for performance issues though I have raided with a SQL server, Exchange server and a windows 7 client without performance issues, just gotta have enough RAM. Thanks
Thank you for your response Piestro. I apologize if I have been a bit abrasive about this. That definitely clears things up though.
While, as a reasonably intelligent human (IMO), I am concerned about the SOE stance on VM products in general, but as an EQ2 player I am more concerned with the propensity for SOE to ban without warning, first. The customer then has to spend their limited time and money to convince SOE that they did no wrong. This inconveniences the user, and perhaps even more importantly, it inconveniences the other people in their group/raid! This leaves a bad taste in the mouth that is not readily forgotten, which the franchise can ill afford.
