i would definately prefer linux ports over interpreting the win32 coding simply for the fact of stability... i'm not sure if anyone has noticed, but steam doesn't work (as of last night) due to an update... i haven't tried it this morning, but such things could be avoided if the manufacture distributed these games and programs on a linux box... plus... that would be a huge market for software companies... (minus microsoft) =)~

signed it

*bump*

Stop bumping this stupid thread, Blizzard will never port wow to linux.

Isn't saying that bumping it? Oh this is bumping it too.. oh well.

never heard of the game
i hate mmorpgs
but anything to support the Linux gaming community

have purchased two Linux mmorpgs but stop playing it ages ago

Yeah..................
Agreed!
But, I still signed just now.
Support linux, support linux games!

This is worth bumping for a couple of reasons. WoW is a great game and I'd love to see a Linux client so I could do away with that pesky XP partition.

I signed it.

Blizzard doesn't support Cedega nor the development effort. Blizzard, with World of Warcraft, does some very suspicious things in code, especially related to the in-game mini-map when run in OpenGL mode. The results are serious game crashes at the wrong time, and unrecoverable game play unless you first log into a windows box and move the character to a different location.

As per the developers at Transgaming this is a World of Warcraft issue that they are working on resolving but it is the nature of the way that World of Warcraft is coded that makes it near impossible to do.

As well, Blizzard has messed up the cursor in DX mode. This is also a matter of suspicious programming (programming which violates normal programming conventions). If these gaming companies would just follow the rules we'd be fine but the gaming companies break the rules to gain performance benefits all the time.

Any company that can satisfy 20,000 gamers is 20,000 people ahead of the curve. 20,000 x $15.00 a month comes to $300,000 a month. The initial sale of the game to those people is between $750,000 and $1 million. Over the life of the game--say the average user playes for 9 months (to a year)-- comes to $2.7 million (or more). Add that to the $750,000 and you have over $3.4 million to simply create a linux client interface to an engine that has already been developed, and to servers already running.

To top that off, there are far fewer potential Macintosh customers willing to play World of Warcraft on their machines. The primary reason is that most of the older macintoshes can't handle the graphics requirements and even some of the newer ones would be pushing it or cost the user a bundle to purchase hardware upgrades. This is unlike the Linux world where Linux is mostly run on AMD/Intel boxes.

Let's not forget that the only OS that is suported under the Macintosh is OSX. OSX is a unix operating system (similar to linux), and I'm pretty sure it uses OpenGL as the primary graphics language. World of Warcraft supports OpenGL out of the box. The vast majority of the Blizzard products support OpenGL.

So, we have the money there to develope the client. Linux has more potential users than the Mac community has. Linux is almost always run on AMD/Intel motherboard designs so the hardware is there and cheap. Linux supports OpenGL. The Unix type development work has already been done once on the Macintosh.

Frankly, there's no reason not to develop a client for Linux. I understand they had a linux client in development in the beta test of World of Warcraft. They also have several employees that had worked for other companies where those company's products had been ported to linux.

The only flaw, which is the major weakness of linux, and the major strength of Linux, is that there are so many varieties and so many possible configurations and so many different distro's with so many different kernels. This creates a pitfall that could be the main reason they don't want to support Linux.

Signed. But I didn't leave my phone number in there but typed 'use the email address'.

Tell me that it will install smoothly and/or I won't have to spend a week trying to figure out how to get it to install without any support and I'll buy it. If I have a repeat of my UT2004 experience I think I might shoot someone !

I found this: http://freecraft.org
Blizzard are evil

They will just laugh at the petition really.
But will thank you for submiting your private data.

In short not only company like theirs deny gaming to come to Linux
They will activelly stop anyone doing something about it.

Next time you buy a title from a company.
Just think for a moment.
You are giving money and power to one of the many
companies that are truly hostile to Linux.

Someone said that the above link and story attached is old news.
Let it never be old news, i wasn't aware
Let at least the Linux folks know how there are evil greedy people out there.
Vivendi is another.

You could easily make the same argument about gaming on Mac OS, especially back on OS's 7-9, when almost no one made games for them. Blizzard, despite a massively smaller fanbase on Mac, has produced game for the OS for a long, long time, and it seems only the logical continuance of their past behaviour to produce a linux port of their newest game.

Blizzard is an open source opponent. And I take it they are not a Linux/FreeBSD supporter either.

They intentionally created WoW so that you cannot run it on non-Windows platforms. Ask anybody that's worked on running it somewhere else. You can't make me believe they have ever been involved with Transgaming to make WoW work. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard tried to shutdown Transgaming in court. Blizzard loves to go to court to restrict their games to be run only the way they want. They've been there several times for different reasons.

They used to develop their games to run on MAC, until MAC started running on OS X. They are extremely proprietary and it sounds as if their strategy is to only develop on proprietary operating systems.

Uhh... according to winehq.org, one of Blizzard's employees helped the team fix the one or two compatability issues keeping the game from being playable. Also, Warcraft 3 and WoW are playable on OS X with about as much work as is necessary to get them running on Win XP. Blizzard may be keeping their software closed-source, but they aren't actively attempting to defeat non-windows OS's. Who you may be thinking of is Valve and the rest of the developers of Half-life 2.

Apparently Valve finished a port of Half Life for Linux anyway.
They just never released it.
I seriously don't know if its rumour or not but it has been documented:
http://lhl.linuxgames.com/

these days I am growing skeptical, its difficult to speculate anything unless you are really inside there.

do game companies really get a phone call from the big master hinting they should stop releasing a Linux port, or is it just a question of them not having anyone experienced enough

maybe it bureaucracy and ignorance,

A CEO smoking his pipe, doesn't want to know details,
reclined in a chair he won't even take the slightest suggestion one of his developer is dedicating time to port a game to run on Linux or Mac.
He will be pissed off for sure.

He is fed F.U.D about Linux daily from big papers and magazines.
Even on Linux websites you have F.U.D Flash adds downgrading Linux - you know that. These people don't think for themselves.

It's an all-pervasive propaganda that pollutes the mind of a businessmen.

Linux is bad.
Trivial patents, lock-in upgrades, running a Power Station from a Windows NT at home - these are good.

It will be an extremely tough battle to fight, I felt it today
I've spent 2 weeks installing Fedora on someones PC and got so much flak for it.
Because Pilot wouldn't synchronize, and the ADSL modem was incompatible.
I got flak for suggesting the person to buy a router.

The world out there doesn't think like us.
Obviously we are Linux fans.
I almost saw the person wiping out my Linux installation, but hesitated when she saw I've added so much stuff: MythTV, a dozen of the best addictive games, Different Office Suites, OO can write PDFs, Weather, DVD-ready, Screensavers, XMMS plugins, RealPlayer/Java/PDA/Flash on optimized Firefox, everything optimized hdparm, prelinking, trimmed down services and defaults, loads of fonts, ATI, lots of applets, different chat programs (yahoo,gnomeicu,aMSN,gaim) - skype, limewire .. that is only half. And all that could have been wiped out because it doesn't sync with Palm and routers are a waste of money.

We are not only fighting nasty greedy corps but people's self-accomodating ignorance.
I can see their point of view, where they are coming from, but they can't.

Maybe the best one is just to stick together and carry on with the batlle.
Give up distro-bashing, desktop-wars, just join forces because the battle will be extremely hard. Never understimate that.

MS has completely anhilated an entire OS; a better alternative at the time.

Of course it won't happen to Linux, but every attempt is only time lost for public wide acceptance.

Gaming is the key.
How IBM, Novell, Sun can be that ignorant not to see that.
Invest on gaming and Linux will take care of the rest.

They should invest on the Linux game market.
That is the number 1 thing holding the vast majority of people back.

Isn't there a billionaire philantropist sympathetic towards Linux or are they all Windows users to?

Investing in Linux Games and see the market rapidly change.

If only George Soros was a Linux man .. never mind.