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If I "hook" the whole system with something (say a rootkit) and then launch WoW by it's "legal" means, am I in the clear or is that still a violation?

You and most of the people criticising this judgement fail to understand what is really going on here. World of Warcraft actively encourages people to write and use add-ons. The WoW UI is done in LUA, Blizzard has a forum http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=11114&sid=1 documenting it. The spirit of the rules is that you can customize the game any way you want just so long as it does not take unfair advantage of other players. The concept behind Glider isn't new, see http://code.google.com/p/rogomatic/ but it certainly constitutes unfair advantage and thus is taboo.

I would guess that most players eventually end up using some sort of an add-on. I use the Cosmos UI and there's nothing wrong with that. Indeed, the best ideas it has had end up being incorporated into the game. What is wrong is having a program play the game for you (Glider); that is cheating.

I am uncomfortable with the grounds Blizzard used in this case, but I certainly support what they are doing. It's yet another example of Blizzard taking care of us and helping to keep WoW a fair and fun playground. There's a reason why 10 million of us are playing now - Blizzard takes care of its customers.

I run WoW through Steam so I get the Steam Community overlay in-game. Does that then classify as not using the program as per the license agreement?
On another note, WoW actually has two executables: The main game WoW.exe and a launcher (optional) that checks for trojans/keyloggers and handles game updates. I'm assuming Glider doesn't link to the launcher as it would probably be detected.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/misc/launcher.html

Duh, the Wrath of the Lich King bard class was announced months ago: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/features/bard/bardclass.xml

QQ dominates the IM market in China.

Funny. QQ also dominates many of the Blizzard WoW forums as well.

Blizzard apparently cant export these outside the USA currently, supposedly due to encryption export laws. The Customer service GM's cant get a confirmation from Blizzard's Legal Dept. until sometime this week http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=7475462573&sid=1

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your Login Information, and you will be responsible for all uses of your Login Information, whether or not authorized by you.

So, technically, any time anyone loses control of their account, it's their fault. It seems the restorations that are done are not done out of obligation, but for the sake of good service.

You agree that you have no right or title in or to any such content, including the virtual goods or currency appearing or originating in the Game, or any other attributes associated with the Account or stored on the Service.

Is there any end? No, and you were right with the carrot: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/community/comics/gallery.html#139

Agreed, this info is almost 2 months old anyway. The official post by Drysc from April 22, 2008 is here. I tried pasting it below but I kept getting a retarded error: Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

Done!

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/features/bard/bardclass.xml

Will be Northrend, employed by Thottbot!

Um... they do.

Obviously the game is specifically designed around the idea that the more you play the stronger your character becomes.
I imagine the vast majority of players have fun just playing the game and earning things. Getting it all for free overnight isn't exactly what I'd call fun. Maybe you've heard the expression "getting is better than having", or however it goes.

Of course, some people just want to instantly have 70s with endgame gear. For those people there's the area tournament:
http://worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/tournament/index.xml

plans for a "live action movie" in Blizzard's news - May 2006 Gamespot did an interview with Blizzard

or direct link to the interview

I didn't say go out, buy a camera, come home, search for files, dig through the crap that is search results, install package. I'm talking out-of-box support

point is, if they had to call comcast then they wouldn't be the kind of person who can googleshoot their own network problems. Besides, if the internet isn't working, how do they google it?

I find it hard to believe that the example applications I used would run in Wine without some degree of noticable loss of performance.

Yes. They are called themes.

Who backs up settings? Linux users? Guess what the vast majority of us don't care about doing? That's right, back up our settings.

Start to question why do people spend so much dang money on multi-boxing on WoW:

How much money people will spend: 15 grand
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=5784541038&sid=1&pageNo=4#66

How many people are doing it: lots
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=5781098289&sid=1&pageNo=1

People are surely going beyond the resources of a single computer budget.

Start to question why do people spend so much dang money on multi-boxing on WoW:

How much money people will spend: 15 grand
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=5784541038&sid=1&pageNo=4#66

How many people are doing it: lots
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=5781098289&sid=1&pageNo=1

People are surely going beyond the resources of a single computer budget.

Sort of like Brewfest where you would run through a major city advertising for the goblins? The infrastructure is practically already there.

Got them over it? Have you looked at the WoW forums recently? A more wretched hive of tards and nerdrage you will not find.

You must be careful!

The Terms of Use allow them to cancel your account anytime they feel like it:

"BLIZZARD MAY SUSPEND, TERMINATE, MODIFY, OR DELETE THE ACCOUNT AT ANY TIME WITH ANY REASON OR NO REASON, WITH OR WITHOUT NOTICE."

That's from http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/termsofuse.html

If they wanted to, they could ban you for botting, or for *not* botting, or just because someone is having a bad day and needs to lash out.

And if you define the health of PC gaming by subscriptions as well as sales?

Go take a look at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/

It's not HTML or XHTML, it's all just XML+CSS, much like what the iTunes Store does. Apple has publicly stated that iTunes uses WebKit on a few occasions. I can't be arsed to look up the links though.

If they're "going the way of the MUD," does that mean they're going to go graphical, become a billion dollar industry, and start releasing TV advertisements from Mr.T and Verne Troyer?

MUDs are dead. Long live graphical MUDs (Everquest, WoW, etc).

(*Disclaimer: I still play text based MUDs.)

Especially if you're a warlock, because all you have to do is roll your face.

I am a World of Warcraft subscriber, and saw this junk spam posted on our forums today. http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=3270769489&sid=1

However, I must concede on the number of servers. I haven't looked at the total number of servers they have.

They clearly state in their TOS that they do this (Section 14)
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/termsofuse.html

Don't like it? Don't play the game. Very simple.

And in fact, when you first sign up for an account, Blizzard gives you 30 days to return the game for a *full refund* if you don't agree to the TOS and don't wish to play. That seems pretty fair IMHO, and far more than most game companies will do.

- Roach

You didn't actually read Blizzard's Fair Use Guide before posting that, did you?

No, they don't expect the 16-year-old kid to go out and get a license before he makes his movie. They only want you to get a "content use license" if your film ends up being used for a commercial purpose, or screened in public at a festival. That's not at all unreasonable, since you're making ample use of their artwork in your movie.

WoW servers and status info

34 "High" population PvP servers
31 "Medium" population PvP servers
36 "Low" population PvP servers
17 "High" population regular servers
69 "Medium" population regular servers
13 "Low" population regular servers
22 assorted population density "special" servers
= 222 servers

The total AVERAGE number of USERS on a server would therefore be in the 40k area.
As for the activity level, I'd be seriously surprised if they manage to have over 10k concurent users online on any of them, more like 5k tops probably.

Apple is currently replacing these cards.
There is a thread on the WoW support forums discussing this.

This problem is not unique to the cards from Apple or to the Mac Pro. I purchased the ATI x1900 G5 edition for my PowerMac G5 directly from ATI and ran into the exact same problem. Unfortunately there is no SMCFanControl for PPC Macs.

Mac Pro owners who have the luxury of going through Apple for their replacement cards should consider themselves lucky, as unlike ATI/AMD Apple actually cares about their customers. My experience with getting a replacement card to a month and a half going through ATI's warranty process; during which I was lucky to still have the 6600 the machine came with or else I would have been without a machine during that time.

Laugh all you want, but EVE online runs mighty fine in either Wine (or still a bit better) Cedega. And what does one really want in life besides freaking big spaceships with overpowered laser cannons? Maybe just play WOW ?

And I can't even switch to XP because then the kids will complain that the NFS server is down ;-)

FYI: Blizzard is currently claiming that Death Knights will be available to both Horde and Alliance.

*throws continuity out the window*

Having said that, I expect that to change.

Zonk could have linked to the official Wrath of the Lich King site off the official World of WarCraft site.

Although I've been here long enough not to expect any sort of competence from Slashdot editors.

Zonk could have linked to the official Wrath of the Lich King site off the official World of WarCraft site.

Although I've been here long enough not to expect any sort of competence from Slashdot editors.

Interestingly enough, if you try http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrathofkhan you get the following error:

Forbidden

Captain Kirk does not have permission to access this server.

if you go to http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath you get a 403, versus an actual webpage for http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade .... Who knows, maybe it is an asshole web admin at blizzard

if you go to http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath you get a 403, versus an actual webpage for http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade .... Who knows, maybe it is an asshole web admin at blizzard

Nobody knows who they are because nobody cares and they haven't accomplished anything. Here is his Armory link: http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet. xml?r=Zul'jin&n=Dragons

The Armory started off as simply a way to get character profiles, but in the latest major revision, they added a functional item database. Now you can click on an item in a profile (or directly search for it), and get info about where it comes from. If it is a drop, it will tell you what NPC drops it. If it is crafted, it will tell you what is required to craft it. If it is a quest reward, it will tell you what quest you need to complete to get it. It displays this in a fashion very similar to Wowhead, etc.

What is lacking from this (right now) is that you still can't search directly for an NPC or quest, or find out the location of an NPC. I wouldn't be surprised if these features are added in a future revision. (You can find the entire loot table for an NPC, but only after clicking on an item that drops from it.) There are also no direct comments for each item, but that may not be necessary with the WoW forums a few clicks away.

It makes sense for Blizzard to do this, even though these services are added by a 3rd. party. By keeping players directly on the WoW website, they won't see ads related to commercial gold farming, power leveling services, and so forth.

This sale is probably a bad thing, in terms of quality of the site as it currently stands. Thottbot was used to launch that .ani vulnerability a while back too. I expect more adverts, changes in the design to accommodate more adverts, a flood of new users filling it with crap and spam just like all the other sites...

Still, not bad money for what is essentially a pretty front-end to content other people have created for you! What a shame that something about the whole deal just seems...suspicious. The press release is cringeworthy - full of "We're sure these guys are HIP and COOL!" and "We'd NEVER do anything EVIL! We're not GOOGLE!" crud.

WoW has realms specifically tagged as either role play or "normal". The normal realms vastly outnumber the RP realms, but people actually do fully role-play on the RP servers. And the role-play focused guilds on the RP servers really get into it. Blizzard strongly encourages it too.

Welcome to /. where false information can sadly get you a +5 informative moderation.

WoW has always been multithreaded on both Mac and PC. It was only with the 2.0.1 patch that Multithreaded OpenGL support was added, and then only to the Intel Mac client. There is no Direct3D equivalent, and from this technote, likely no equivalent from DirectX 9.

It is true that the PC version is faster than the Mac version on similar hardware in certain situations. Most of these involve video driver issues; think Vista driver problems but with the video card companies in less of a rush to get better drivers out.

Go here for some more video information by both blues and greens.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/warloc k/

and this probably isn't a good idea for those 'addictive' personalities right?

WOW Credit Card

too damned funny. But it really cements the notion that WOW is in it's own league among other games, no?

2. Ownership

All rights and title in and to the Program and the Service (including without limitation any user accounts, titles, computer code, themes, objects, characters, character names, stories, dialogue, catch phrases, locations, concepts, artwork, animations, sounds, musical compositions, audio-visual effects, methods of operation, moral rights, any related documentation, "applets" incorporated into the Program, transcripts of the chat rooms, character profile information, recordings of games played on the Program, and the Program client and server software) are owned by Blizzard or its licensors. The Program and the Service are protected by United States and international laws. The Program and the Service may contain certain licensed materials, and Blizzard's licensors may enforce their rights in the event of any violation of this Agreement.

8. Ownership/Selling of the Account or Virtual Items.

Blizzard does not recognize the transfer of Accounts. You may not purchase, sell, gift or trade any Account, or offer to purchase, sell, gift or trade any Account, and any such attempt shall be null and void. Blizzard owns, has licensed, or otherwise has rights to all of the content that appears in the Program. You agree that you have no right or title in or to any such content, including the virtual goods or currency appearing or originating in the Game, or any other attributes associated with the Account or stored on the Service. Blizzard does not recognize any virtual property transfers executed outside of the Game or the purported sale, gift or trade in the "real world" of anything related to the Game. Accordingly, you may not sell items for "real" money or otherwise exchange items for value outside of the Game.

So, Blizzard owns your account. You own nothing, therefore, they'd have no reason to track sales. Now, a company like Linden, on the other hand, wouldn't have that loophole.

If Blizzard finds (your username) to be offensive or improper, it may, in its sole and absolute discretion (take certain remedies) and/or suspend or terminate your use of the Program.

certain acts ... are considered serious violations of these Terms of Use (including) the following: ... Anything that Blizzard considers contrary to the "essence" of the Program.

Blizzard reserves the right, at its sole and absolute discretion, to change, modify, add to, supplement or delete any of the terms and conditions of this Agreement at any time.

BLIZZARD MAY SUSPEND, TERMINATE, MODIFY, OR DELETE THE ACCOUNT AT ANY TIME WITH ANY REASON OR NO REASON, WITH OR WITHOUT NOTICE. For purposes of explanation and not limitation, most account suspensions, terminations and/or deletions are the result of violations of this Terms of Use or the EULA.

Blizzard may terminate this Agreement with or without notice by terminating your Account.

WHEN RUNNING, THE PROGRAM MAY MONITOR YOUR COMPUTER'S RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY (RAM) AND/OR CPU PROCESSES

As you log in, you are given some text to read, and than you click Accept. The text includes this:

5. Consent to Monitor. WHEN RUNNING, THE GAME MAY MONITOR YOUR COMPUTER'S RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY (RAM) FOR UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAMS RUNNING CONCURRENTLY WITH THE GAME... http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/eula.html

That constitutes authorization.

Sorry, stupid formatting. Here it is more readable.

I am currently addicted to arena, and actually doing pretty well, our 5v5 team was in the top10 last week. Not so great this week. I'm really hoping to at least make it to the regionals.

I've noticed a lot of detractors posting in this topic, and mainly I just wanted to give some comments from someone who is actually deeply involved in Arena play.

First, it is ridiculously fun. I haven't had as much fun since I used to play muds back in High School. If you like pvp, and you already have a warcraft account I couldn't recommend Arena more. It takes a lot of skill, quick thinking, coordination, tactics and strategy. More importantly the games last 4 to 6 minutes on average and are very quick paced. It encompasses almost all the things that make pvp fun for me.

Second, it is definitely not solely based on gear. If you had watched closely at the beginning of season, the top arena teams were not decked in epics, a lot of the top teams had fairly marginal gear. Of course now they have arena reward gear, but I still firmly believe that skill is much more important than gear, although, unfortunately, gear does help. As the article stated, gear will balance out as everyone basically gets the same Arena gear, which isn't extremely hard to get. An average team will get a piece every three or four weeks, meaning by next season the majority of teams will be wearing similiar arena gear.

A lot of the critiques of Arena are accurate though. It is still influenced by gear, it does take a lot of time to level to 70, and even longer to build up enough gear to be somewhat viable, right now there is no way to spectate, there are still class imblances.

But overall, I am very impressed with the Arena system.

My profile:
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet. xml?r=Mal'Ganis&n=Thax