Blizzard: Warden BULLSHIT

[Hotshot[SF]]

well, this forum is sort of dying recently... havent seen doom in months and everyone else (other ten 1 post by sub) stopped posting...

so here goes...

I know few peeps play war3, but anyone else feeling the heat of Blizzard bullshit recently?

In war3 there is something called "listchecker". Basically it allows a host to host games with LAN settings which means less delay. The latency on LAN: 100, BNET: 250 (set to 250 so it would not lag for 56k +5 years ago). Then there is another tool called "w3banlist". It allows you to ping players, ban players permanently, or write notes for a given player.

Both those two tools are extremely helpful and do nothing but drastically increase the gaming experience of war3. Blizzard is now hinting that those programs can get you banned. There are already some people who say they have been banned for using them.

How? Warden. Its basically a spyware that secretly reads shit on your computer (for example title of a window).

[Intangir]

my firefox logged me out and i didnt notice there were new posts

oops
i finally logged in when i realized i couldnt find a post

anyway so ya warden sucks balls..

if you run linux/wine you can get away with a lot more stuff though, warden cant detect it

its definately a disterbing trend these programs that think they OWN your computer when its yours...

a major privacy violating to run certain programs now, like poker clients too

[Hotshot[SF]]

Actually ive heard someone complain about a ban on Linux with wine. A blizzard rep then said you can use wine, and you should not be banned if its "working properly" but that only Win/Mac were official OS'es you can install the game on... I dont know wtf he was implying there, almost like we was hinting at the fact you may (or may not) get banned, but if you do you are SOL.

The part that really pisses me off is how Blizzard is acting in this situation.  Why are we criminals because we want a legit game (because Blizzard is 2 lazy to implement basic functionally like latency option).

Here is a quote from a post in my suggestion forum

In starcraft:  Ability to view someone’s latency (green/yellow/red bars)
In war3: Nothing, nada. Third party App Needed.

In Starcraft: Ability to ban players from your games.
In war3: You only can kick someone (over and over). Third party App Needed.

In Stracraft: Ban, kick, host leaves, etc: Players get told what happened
In war3: No message box, no error, nothing. Just randomly popup in channel.

In Stracraft: Ability to set latency (low/med/high)
In war3: Nada, forced to use third party apps.

.... War3 should have improved those useful features, instead they were completely removed.

and yeah, I installed partypoker again. It was (apparently) trying to install a third party spyware.. But I was running comodo firwall so I denyed it (very powerful program that tells you when a program is trying to access stuff like: internet, registry keys (plural), other programs/files/processes, explorer, etc).

[Intangir]

damn that sucks

i bet you could really get around warden detection using wine
it cant detect anything not running inside of wine
none of their window enumerating, or process enurating things can see what wine doesnt show it

and you can hook out thru dlls it has to call out thru anyway
like networking dlls to catch or alter networking latency, and the graphics dll for printing results on screen or intercepting input

thats probably why they are afraid of it

[Hotshot[SF]]

But w3banlist needs access to war3 memory to get names of the players. It does use some draw API's, winpcap for network stuff and placing data in the clipboard, so not sure how that would work.

But as for pickup.listchecker, that program reads memory (and possible writes at one spot). Its ingenious, this is how it works: You use it to join b.net (sort of like a bot), then you start war3, click on "local area network" and make your game there. From there you type your commands like "/hostbnet Dota", then the game is hosted on b.net, but when people join it, they are really joining to your LAN game (not on b.net, with LAN latency).

You can alter the latency, but you have to write to war3 memory, there is a program that does that (Direct Connect, Aka: DC).

[Intangir]

wow that sounds pretty ingenious and .. difficult to have made
too bad blizz is so strict
but ya both would have to be totally rewritten to use the linux side rather than inside wine to avoid detection
but both totally COULD be rewritten to hide behind wine
but then only linux users could use them


any hacks i personally write from now on will be taking advantage of that. screw windows users