Wine on the front page of Reddit

[Caleb Hearon]

Hi all,

In a conversation between myself (MaggotBrain on the forums) and Jarrex, 
I expressed some frustration that Blizzard had been banning Diablo III 
users who used Wine.  He posted some of the excerpts I sent him from 
WineHQ, and it quickly got to 17 pages on Blizzard's forums.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978861022

Then it made the front page of Reddit with 25k votes!

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/vyc4z/linux_users_permanently_banned...

It's likely a mistake on Blizzard's part.  But I thought this might be 
interesting to some people here. It's amazing that this conversation I 
had while at work led to more widespread awareness of Wine (one of the 
top comments on Reddit asks what Wine is).

And Wine hackers- great work, I've just finished playing 2 hours of 
Diablo III and it runs great.

-Caleb

[Erich E. Hoover]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 11:18 PM, Caleb Hearon  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> In a conversation between myself (MaggotBrain on the forums) and Jarrex, I expressed some frustration that Blizzard had been banning Diablo III users who used Wine.  He posted some of the excerpts I sent him from WineHQ, and it quickly got to 17 pages on Blizzard's forums.
> ...
> And Wine hackers- great work, I've just finished playing 2 hours of Diablo III and it runs great.

I also have been successfully playing Diablo III for some time, and it
is concerning to me that this has escalated into a media frenzy.  It
is entirely possible that the people that have been banned have either
had unauthorized access to their account or were actually cheating.
It seems to me that outright blaming Blizzard for this situation is a
good way to generate a lot of negative publicity and that this
publicity could result in them intentionally changing their games to
not work under Wine just to avoid these kinds of headaches in the
future.

Erich Hoover
[e-mail]