In the past year, a friends’ account was banned for alleged cheating, and we genuinely have not figured out what might have triggered Battle.net’s detection systems. I know that Blizzard is not willing to discuss any of that on forums, which still has me worried a year later, and sucks, but whatever, I take it.
I would like to move away from Windows, and of course there is no Wow release for other platforms. I have gotten wow to work on Wine before, one could have a VM, but GPU passthrough is a nightmare, one could dual boot. I do not expect official support for things like Wine, which would be my preferred way still, but I also wouldn’t want to risk my account. Thing is, I feel like anything short of a clean windows install with barely anything running is a risk. I know people has been playing Wow on Steam Decks and it working fine, but I feel like you never know when something gets triggered in the battle.net agent black box that gets you in trouble, with no real way to defend your stance.
What is the general consensus on this among users? Any experience one way or the other? I wouldn’t expect there to be an official confirmation
Our games are not intended to work on Linux, and currently, there are no plans to make it or the Battle.net Desktop Application compatible with Linux based Operating Systems.
You’ll likely not get banned for merely using SteamOS or Linux. Any programs that may be used for cheating though, will still be detected nonetheless.
Odds are he was cheating, I’ve been using Linux for ages and not been banned and if i was i simply wouldn’t play and obviously not pay for a sub. these days running games on linux is along the lines of some steam/wine shenanigans to please the expected file paths and .dll reqs etc… (trying to emulate windows file structure for games nothing to do with cheats or modified files) and then proton a translation layer for directx api calls to be translated to vulkan generally. again nothing to do with botting or cheating. from my experience your just generally more prone to errors but for me its not game breaking, the odd graphical hicup and the odd disconnection the later probably at the same rate as windows so cant tell.
Thanks for the feedback! I was getting slightly worse frametime consistency and some UI glitches when I tried Dragonflight on Wine, but that might have been me diehard trying to stick to wayland native.
Said friend was on Windows, but I don’t really want to get in that discussion. Our 2 leading theories is a Samsung printer driver that tries to inejct it’s dll into processes (other anti-cheat openly flagged it), and having autohotkey / cheatengine installed (not for multiplayer titles obviously).
I’m just worried about things like, if Battle.net monitors the memory footprint of the game, dll injections and else, Wine might produce a different result than Windows, getting me flagged. I have tried briefly for example on linux dxvk-nvapi to get nvidia reflex / ray tracing through Wine, but since there was no official confirmation of what is being checked by Blizzard, I am a bit wary of these things. Or I’m just paranoid for personally knowing someone affected by this.
Over a decade ago there was a case where Wine was incorrectly triggering bans in Diablo 3 (not sure about WoW). Problem was eventually discovered which caused the ban to trigger and Blizzard reinstated the affected accounts. Since then I have not seen any credible claim that Wine or Linux itself is triggering bans. Obviously if you start installing stuff designed to circumvent any anti-cheats then all bets are off. dxvk-nvapi is bit more difficult; quick search found some reports that dxvk-nvapi users were banned in 2018 but eventually unbanned.
I’m not sure about cheatengine but I’ll address the AHK part:
If this is active when you launch WoW it can be considered cheating even if you don’t have anything interfering with it as it can be used with your keyboard, mouse etc.
No or they would’ve banned me already when i was forced to play on linux back in the day, because it kept crashing on windows for over 2 years, i eventually just gave up and skipped dragonflight because on linux there no directx12 support and performance is worse.
I believe some developers run wow on linux but its not officially supported, but you may be able to find help to get it running.
I am talking about linux ofcourse not auto hotkey or anything else, i would not run in a virtual machine either not sure how wine works tho it emulates windows environment basically then runs it into this environment.
Wine is apparently Windows libraries and system calls re-implemented under Linux, so it runs natively, just there is a middleman between the application and the actual system calls. Weirdly enough DX12 / Dragonflight worked pretty seamless to me, and I’m even on nvidia. I ran on Wayland back in the day.