The players suggest that Blizzard's cheat-detecting algorithms have overzealously branded Wine as an unauthorized third-party game modification tool, marking them as cheaters and erasing the legitimately earned progress on their account. ORIGINAL STORY: Is playing games on Linux a crime now? That's what a number of Diablo III players are asking after reportedly facing permanent account bans for trying to run the game on an unsupported operating system.Ī number of Linux users running the game through the Wine compatibility utility started complaining about abrupt account bans on the WineHQ forums a few weeks ago, before gaining widespread attention on Blizzard's official forums last night. We’ve extensively tested various scenarios related to this situation, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly, and have not found any situations where players were banned solely for using Linux or Wine. Playing the game on Linux (although not officially supported) and/or using Wine will not result in being banned, but cheating will.

UPDATE: A Blizzard representative said that claims that Wine is leading to Diablo III account bans are 'not true' and provided the following statement to Ars Technica:

Diablo 3 forums complains