BBC Tells World About The Warden

Anonymous Cowpat writes "The BBC is running a story about the Blizzard title World of Warcraft. Specifically an article about, 'The Warden', Blizzard's highly-invasive anti-cheating software, which some, including The EFF have labelled as spyware. Most of the people around here have probably heard of it by now, but it's interesting to see the story in the mainstream press and (at time of writing) on the front page of the BBC's technology news section, no less." From the article: "The watchdog program, called The Warden by Blizzard, has been known about among players for some time. It makes sure that players are not using cheat software which can, for example, automatically play the game and build up a character's qualities. However, knowledge of it crossed to the mainstream thanks to software engineer Greg Hoglund who disassembled the code of The Warden and watched it in action to get a better idea of what it did."

Comments

Much Like GameGuard ....

[GoodOmens]

Seems to be a growing trend to use spyware based programs by large company's to extract information so they can "prevent" hacks.

GameGuard used by NCSoft in Lineage2 is very similiar when it seems to create more problems then it solves.

In fact GameGuard does not block one single hack I know of for Lineage .....

Torn..

[raeler]

I'm torn between my love for sticking it to cheaters, and my hate for spyware. I suffered through the speedhacks and scripters in UO, and every time the developers thought about a process scanner the players went nuts and the idea was dropped. In WoW you sign the terms of conduct each time there's a new patch, so technically you agree to let this warden thing run in the background. Is WoW a better game because of it? Probably.

There are already some big problems with ebay gold farmers.. I'd rather they had to sit at the computer to make their gold, rather than just running a script.

Oh for pitty's sake.

[GearheadX]

The sad thing is, this whole deal was started because one of the WRITERS for the very programs that the Warden was sniffing around for discovered how he kept getting caught and started to whine loudly and constantly.

Consider the source.

Re:Oh for pitty's sake.

[loose_cannon_gamer]

Well, I have to disagree with you a bit, or at least, what I perceive to be underwriting your comment. I don't think people who write these kinds of tools that Blizzard is trying to stop are necessarily bad.

I've played a few MMO games, and many of them are very repetitive. I myself have considered trying to write some macroing programs, because hey, I'm paying for the time, and I believe in automation. :) Besides, trying to write something to automate such a complicated game system as most MMOs provide is a nontrivial, and tempting, challenge (for me).

Point being, these kinds of tools are in demand, and there is nothing morally wrong with using them, other than a license agreement that says no -- you pay for the bandwidth to their servers, a log on, and the right to interact with their servers according to their well defined, well hidden within a beautiful graphical interface, protocol. The fact that Blizzard expects you to initiate all of those interactions manually with a human interface device is somewhat artificial to maintain some notion of 'fairness' within the game world -- which I certainly understand, by the way.

I think these kinds of 'cheating' tools ruin the games, certainly, they take the fun out of it, and that's one reason I don't use 'em / don't write them. But it is hard for me to get mad at someone who produces and sells these tools, because I think they're using their skills to solve interesting problems to make a dollar, in a perfectly legitimate (meaning 'not against the law') way.

Re:The Watcher?

[Stripe7]

It will not be long before M$ "Trusted computing platform" will be used instead of all these spyware. That will be a few years away. For now however the only way I would play WOW is on a seperate boot image. Create a boot image for WOW and keep all your personal stuff in another closed off boot image. It means you have to reboot if you want to do other stuff but given that most guys playing WOW play for hours at a time that will not matter too much. Hmm, anyone try to run WOW in a virtual machine partition?

Create a World for Hacks

[Nom du Keyboard]

They ought to just develop a World/Server where all the hacks can play against each other and see who hacks best. Even the people with the hacks themselves might find that more interesting.