LinkBlizzard Entertainment in their infinite wisdom has decided to ban players who use a Linux based Operating System (Free Software) to play Diablo 3. Users submitting official requests to have the decision reversed have been denied. Below is the official reason given (as seen in the first post in the link above):
Account Action: Account Closure
Offense: Unapproved Third Party Software
A third party program is any file or program that is used in addition to the game to gain an unfair advantage. These programs may increase movement speed or teleport heroes from one place to another beyond what is allowed by game design. It also includes any programs that obtain information from the game that is not normally available to the regular player or that transmit or modify any of the game files.
You can assume that they will start banning users who use the trainer in the near future. We're not going to stop you from using the trainer but this is a warning to users that Blizzard is probably thinking of stopping you cold in your tracks.
For those of you not well versed in the Linux world here's how it works:
1. Most Linux distributions are considered Free Software meaning that users are allowed to use, redistribute, and modify the code that makes up the OS. With the exception of few enterprise editions that come with official tech support designed for businesses, it is impossible to pirate a Linux OS.
2. These games are ran with the aid of WINE (WINE Is Not an Emulator). Wine is an open source compatibility layer that provides open sourced DLL files that do the same thing as the Windows API implementation (read: not the same as the Windows API, but functionality recreated in an Open Source way). It does not provide any kind of advantage for the player (in fact Linux users are at a disadvantage since Wine is going to give weaker performance than a Windows OS by default).
[Edited by moderator Neo7, 7/2/2012 9:19:24 PM]