Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/04/roblox-intentionally-blocking-linux-with-wine-in-their-new-update/

by rolph • 3 years ago

205 46 3 years ago

gamingonlinux.com

jxf• 3 years ago

Sounds like it's time to get familiar with the wine-staging options to hide wine-specific exports:

https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/blob/b46dd63e024a16...

thrtythreeforty• 3 years ago

Where can I learn about Wine internals like these? I would love to debug why applications don't run well in wine, but all I ever find is an out of date wiki page and no clear explanation for how to start debugging these situations.

Maybe I'm not so good at finding the right resources?

ogurechny2• 3 years ago

I doubt that any non-toy anti-cheat system can run on WINE and not notice that something isn't quite right.

serf2• 3 years ago

i'm here to tell you, anecdotally at least, that it is quite often that easy.

These mechanisms are looking for certain environmental conditions, not the entire system state.

userbinator2• 3 years ago

...and thus, the next round of the cat-and-mouse game begins.

Things like this will only make WINE's own compatibility and indistinguishability from Windows increase, so it's not all bad.

jhanschoo• 3 years ago

this is a game that Wine cannot win simply by virtue of the fact that one can do checksums to validate that Microsoft's non-free code isn't present in the Wine environment.

kgwxd• 3 years ago

When my oldest kid was young, I was on Linux. I tried a few times to get it to work so I could play with him but never could get it to run quite right. Because I couldn't play with him, Roblox itself became a constant source of arguments. Hours-long shouting and crying kind of arguments. All discussion was around Robux and the ridiculous money-grabs everywhere in the ecosystem. For years, I absolutely hated Roblox because of it.

When my youngest started playing, my older kid immediately got through to him to forget about Robux and just play the games. By then, I was back on Windows and was able to play with him. We have tons of fun as a nightly routine and he's even using Roblox Studio to build cool stuff and even does a little bit of programming. I absolutely love it.

remote_phone• 3 years ago

Everything on Roblox is gamified to suck as much money out of kids as possible.

When my kid was using Roblox several years ago, all the games were made by kids. Nowadays all of the game developers moved from phone apps to Roblox. There’s no way I’m letting my kid get addicted to their tactics which are very effective, especially on kids.

shagie• 3 years ago

All discussion was around Robux and the ridiculous money-grabs everywhere in the ecosystem. For years, I absolutely hated Roblox because of it.

I would suggest a (re)watch of this pair of videos from People Make Games:

Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers - https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ

Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. - https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY

Sakos• 3 years ago

Any parent that lets their kids play this is a bad parent.

DonHopkins2• 3 years ago

Wow. Thank you for posting those links. I just watched those two videos in their entirety, which Roblox wishes were taken down.

They raise MUCH BIGGER issues than "intentionally blocking Linux with Wine", which is actually a GOOD thing insofar as it helps protect Linux users from being exploited.

It would be even better for society if Roblox blocked all Windows and Mac users.

yarg• 3 years ago

Unfortunately this block was intentional. With the Windows 64-bit client launch we made the conscious decision to block the use of Wine.
First and most importantly, we are not trying to punish the use of Wine.

Not punishing, but certainly showing a callous disregard for them.

You did this deliberately, and they had to come to the forums to find out?

jrm4• 3 years ago

Punishing

I don't get why people often feel the need to sugar-coat this.

sugardough• 3 years ago

Punishing could refer to bans (anticheat) when used in gaming context.

shadowgovt• 3 years ago

Apparently, this has been done because they're trying to collect telemetry on the use of the 64-bit client, and they want "pure" telemetry from the target OS, not the target OS and instances on other operating systems emulating the target OS (https://devforum.roblox.com/t/the-new-roblox-64-bit-byfron-c...).

I can see what they're trying to do here, but (a) I've never, personally, been of the opinion that this kind of shaping has the desired effect (if anything, I've seen users try harder to break the system when such an arbitrary block is put in place, which makes the resulting telemetry noisier) and (b) cutting your customer base to get "cleaner" numbers smells very shortsighted.

fshbbdssbbgdd• 3 years ago

If that’s the real reason, can they not hook up whatever method is being used to identify and block Wine as a signal in their telemetry system so they can filter that data in their query? This explanation sounds like either incompetence or an excuse.

CommitSyn• 3 years ago

They can. So yes, you're spot on.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

Wine Roblox players may be such a microscopic piece of user base that they consciously don’t care.

syrrim• 3 years ago

They cared enough to implement detection and blocking.

bravetraveler• 3 years ago

I'm surprised they've done much of anything, given the likely relatively small overlap.

Since they have, where they essentially have sys.exit in Python terms, it could be updating a telemetry-controlling global instead

The 'protect our data' thing is suspicious in my mind

fortyseven• 3 years ago

they want "pure" telemetry from the target OS

If they can detect the usage of Wine, they can add that to the telemetry and filter on it.

Hydraulix9893• 3 years ago

This is a really gross reason to just unilaterally cut off all of its Linux user customers. I'm sure WINE has bread crumbs of its own that they can check for when sending telemetry...

Hydraulix9893• 3 years ago

Indeed, there's a wine_get_version proc in ntdll.dll they can check for.

meese712• 3 years ago

If they have the ability to detect wine usage wouldn't they have the ability to conditionally disable telemetry for wine though?

malkia• 3 years ago

I wonder what's the core issue. Probably not it, but I've found that no Event Tracing support is there in wine (maybe I'm wrong) - so no .etw data from neither of the 3 or was it 4 apis to emit these. Just pointing out that sometimes missing one feature, not critical for games specifically, might be critical for another new system, and without it it might not function correctly. Again pure hypothesis. I'm curious though what it is...

phendrenad22• 3 years ago

Missing from the headline: This appears to be a temporary measure in their new beta client during testing of said client. It appears that they'll unblock wine when the client is out of beta.

rendall• 3 years ago

This comment should be at the top.

somenameforme• 3 years ago

Actions speak infinitely louder than promises. And this is even more true when those actions are unpopular. Their claim doesn't even make any sense. If you don't want the telemetry of WINE users then you don't block them, you simply don't collect their telemetry, or you discard it.

yellowapple• 3 years ago

Or better yet: you include it, and actually evaluate it as part of the mix of expected clients. Deliberately excluding certain classes of datapoints doesn't strike me as something that'll produce a maximally-useful dataset.

rob74• 3 years ago

At least going by the two quoted posts, that seems pretty unlikely - I mean, if that would be the intention, they would have probably mentioned it to calm things down? Instead, they write "I cannot provide a specific timeline for this support".

phendrenad22• 3 years ago

They did mention it, but the wording is weird.

Animats• 3 years ago

Time to move up from Roblox. If you're over 13, you're already on the way out of its demographic, anyway.

hedora2• 3 years ago

My kindergartener has only ever used wine though. Not sure he’s ready to switch to windows with all the adversarial malware in the base os, etc.

Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update

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