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Banned From WoW For WINE & Programmable Keyboard
An anonymous reader writes "Player gets banned for playing World of Warcraft under WINE and using a Logitech Gaming keyboard. "I am an experienced network engineer for an ISP and I am often running World of Warcraft on Linux through the use of WINE..."" Although the e-mails exchanged are unclear
my guess is that the programmable keyboard was more the problem then WINE. Not that you'd ever know that given that Blizzard communicates with their users seemingly almost exclusively with form letters.
Slashdot profile
:)
The keyboard he is using sounds quite cool though
I shall have to look into getting one.
liqbase
Don't drink and play!
-WoW Overlords
He should consider it a favor. Now he can go back to living his life.
I just got out of a pink page of death ban myself here at Slashdot. Somehow they mistook my frequent reloading of pages and multiple-thread bouncing as some sort of bot or malicious bandwidth-stealing script. It was neither.
So I sit out a couple days trying to get the techs behind banned@slashdot.org to notice my emails. Finally, after a long negotiation with these guys and promising that I will turn off all my Firefox extensions when accessing the site, I get let back on.
And this is what I come back to. A story about someone getting banned.
It stings to get banned... but realy any MMO is a waste of time, WoW being one of the worst in my opinion.
if this is Blizzards new attitiude towards it's customers, maybe I can get all of my friends to stop playing WoW and spend some time in the real world interacting with people in person.
Mod me a troll if you want it won't change the fact that I am siclk of Fantasy MMOs.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
In any situation which one party has vastly superior authority and little chance of penalized. Don't expect them to act in a reasonable manner.
Source:w ow-interface-customization&t=330798&tmp=1#post3307 98
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=
Gotta love the hypocrisy from Taco complaining about unresponsive, noncommunicative companies.
Anybody else unfortunate enough to email the editors about an issue? Whether it is abusive moderation, story dupe/inaccurate/inflammatory, or posting bans, almost all the editors respond with one-line dismissals or direction to read their outdated FAQ which hasn't been updated in years.
Taco really has balls so whine about Blizzard, especially the last time he bitched on the front page about his screen name being changed.
It's really funny when the shoe is on the other foot.
"Man suspended from game for breaking rules of game"
I can't wait for slashdot to report on every ejection and game misconduct in this years NHL and MLB seasons. That'll be thrilling.
But here's the link to the forums;
m Name=wow-general
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.aspx?foru
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I'm a little ignorant about this, but why would a mage need to train weapon skills in the first place? Aren't wands superior?
Banned for violating the rules with his programmable keyboard. They outright told him that; he was interacting with his environment in an unattended manner. That's a violation of the TOS for every MMORPG I've ever read the TOS for, which admittedly isn't many.
However, it is telling that he knows that bot programs won't work on Wine under Linux; I'm not buying the story that he tested them all subsequently.
Summation: Cheated. Got caught. Got banned. Whined and told his buddies an "edited" version of the story, so they all rallied behind him. Tough noogies.
I don't think you have any rights related to software you can't completely control yourself. Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong here. That said, my experience with most RPG's is that they involve a lot of repetition (which is why the guy programmed some macros). Apparently this is part of the official, mandatory WoW experience. That would explain why goldfarming (or whatever it's called in the game) is so popular. Someone at Blizzard must have taken econ101 somewhere along the line?
The fact that Blizzard needs to know if you're sitting at your computer or not is a bit disturbing, however. Like a parent.
Incidents like this remind me that when you play WoW or other mmorpg's, you don't own your character, despite the often thousand of man-hours people put into them. It seems to me that if there was a similar real-world analogue, the account holder would be able to get some sort of redress to his losses in a court of law, or at least reinstatement. In these virtual worlds, the game company is able to rule by diktat and is able to twist the TOS to suit their needs. Indeed, they can change the TOS at will and if you don't agree to the new terms, then you forfeit your right to your account. Eventually, the legalities of virtual worlds will need to be addressed.
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
read TFA and looks like he wasn't playing WOW properly at all, may not have been using a "bot" but was upgrading his skills by using a macro to fight, heal, fight, etc. which did require the repeated pressing of a button but hey, if that's ok then where does it stop?
morale: play properly, or not at all.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
It seems like it was definitely the programmable keyboard and not WINE that set off their bot detectors.
... why didn't they just message him when they saw the odd behavior? Or do something else to verify it's a human on the other end?)
Apparently the macros on the keyboard were making him do repeated actions, and somehow this was interpreted by Blizzard as "unattended" operation. (Why they think it was unattended I don't know, TFA doesn't say exactly
Anyway, a quote from TFA:
"So it seems that if I use a programmable keyboard I am botting. However I suspect their 3rd party detection software saw a very strange enviroinment in which WoW was running; that combined with the repetitive task of healing myself, switching weapons, and casting Hex of Weakness programmed in my keyboard, I am viewed as a bot."
So it seems other people using WoW under WINE are safe, you'd just better not get too trigger-happy with the keyboard macros.
What's really the problem here is that there seems to be a huge disconnect between official Blizzard policy (programmable keyboards are okay, this has been explicitly said by one of their reps in the forums, according to the article) and what the GMs did. And after the guy got banned, they seem to just be just stonewalling him and hoping he'll go away, giving him a lot of "the matter is closed" crap. I have to salute his perserverence, though, in spite of this.
Rather a disappointing showing from Blizzard.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It looks to me that they're saying that people who appear to be performing repetative, scripted actions in non-standard game environments appear to be cheaters. Rather a different statement.
On this point (botting) the EULA has been clear since the release of the game. If one knows something he is doing could be percieved as botting (at the discretion of the owner of the content) then why tempt fate by using it and then admit to using it?
They made a judegement call with their corporate reputation as the foundation upon which they stood to defend this principle. That didn't leave them any backing-down room. When you admitted to the programmable keyboard that gave them what they needed to completely defend their position.
Step 1: ditch programmable keyboard.
Step 2: obtain new credit card.
Step 3: Hellooooo Level 1.
good luck - EULAs can be tough.
Cogito Ergo Sum
The way Blizzard replies to the guy's emails, if I had been him, I would have emailed them a large high rez uncompressed photo of my middle finger with the caption "this is the finger I used to press my final macro key in WoW".
I'm sure your luck is bound to change.
I for one, welcomes our new...programmable-keyboard-overlords?
Haven't played the game myself much, but is programmable keyboards really such an advantage?
1. It's a game. Go on with your life and stop whining. 2. Suspect there is more to this story that we're being fed. The most interesting and enlightening component is the apparent successful use of WINE for a graphically-intensive app. 3. Blizzard isn't clean here, but they've undoubtedly been tricked before by various nefarious actors and so one can see how they might be just a little bit suspicious of this activity. 4. Sounds like he's quibbling about the TOS -- one can see how Blizzard would interpret 'botism' to include use of recurring macros whilst the character is flagged as do-not-disturb, and repetitively hits the same mob(s). In his defense, one could argue that Blizzard should increase the randomization, and perhaps randomly in-game nuke (or whatever happens in WoW) characters engaged as such. 5. Maybe he should claim membership in the GLBT guild, and cry discrimination. 6. It's a game. 7. See #6.
When you a grinding, if a GM suspects botting they will whisper you looking for you to respond. If you don't respond within a reasonable amount of time you get nailed for botting.
Yawn..
Please do not reply to this email as you will receive an automated response.
Regards,
English Game Master Team
Blizzard Europe
-----
and he wonders why he git shitty responses. maybe he should have tried a different email route first I replied them with the following e-mail:
I'm sad that this made the front page here... He shouldn't be made a martyr. He was using a method of automating the game for personal gain, which everyone and their brother knows is against Blizzards rules. If the guy wasn't running under wine, nobody would here would care. He got caught, he got banned. He even admitted that he was watching tv while using his macro keyboard! Comon guy.. Go buy yourself a new account and start over.. And if your gonna cheat, don't get caught, and dont cry Linux.
They -are- addressed, you just don't like the result.
You enter a contract where you're paying ONLY for access to their world (with the related assurance that they'll protect you against TOS violators generally). The fact that your access allows you to alter some of their data - your avatar - does nothing to change the fact that your contract is explicitly not about 'owning' anything.
Want something different? Hit up SecondLife, where you own everything legitimately. The market provides us with what we ask for, if enough of us want it: if enough people wanted to own these properties enough, they'd refuse to play games that didn't allow that ownership. The fact that people keep playing WoW and other MMORPGs with this limitation indicates that most people don't agree with you.
"Stumble before you crawl"
Any dunderhead should realize that automating levelling of skills is and SHOULD BE against the rules of an MMORPG. He got what he deserved. He was also deceptive early in the correspondence, trying to convince them he was only using his macro keyboard to change armor sets. Whether weapon skills are important to a priest or not, he gained levels in those skills with this macroing. This also has very little, if anything, to do with WINE. I think that played no part in the expulsion.
Wow, so not only do Blizzard games involve the most number of hackers in online play, but their staff act like pricks as well? Part of it is Logitech's fault for not ensuring that the programmable "G" keys on the G15 keyboard won't conflict with things such as bot detectors and such. The rest of it is Blizzard for being such a pain in the rear towards this dude. I mean, he isn't hacking, and he paid for the game. Why ban him?
Just look at WOW's EULA and it makes sense. A programmable keyboard will let a user do essentially what several third-party programs would do. I don't see how they could possibly ban one and not the other. Looks like fans of the customizable keyboard are just gonna have to bite the bullet on this one.
change the headline to 'Banned from macroing' like it should be and any MMPORG player would say, 'um...ya...'
:p
WoW is actually very easy to level up weapon skills, and you can get in a group and kill stuff your level it'll go up quick - or solo stuff a few levels down
this guy was setting his keyboard to do a bunch of commands, left the room for a while and would come back with his skills maxed - that's against the rules and if a player was near him and tried talking to him and he never responded, that player probably reported the actions...
this isnt even a story
No the problem is with the programmable keyboard and macros he was using, not that he was running WINE.
In fact, as far as I know, I don't think that they can tell whether you're using WINE or a legitimate Windows version, it ought to look exactly the same to them from the server-side.
Before I got a Mac that could handle the requirements, I used to play WoW using Cedega, and once I tweaked it enough to get it working, never experienced any problems. But then again by WoW standards I'm a very "casual player."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
First off, I've never played WoW (nor any other MMORPG). Now, let me get this straight. The entire WINE aspect seems incidental, so we'll ignore that. Otherwise, he set up some macros on his Logitech keyboard to perform some repetitive tasks. He set those in motion, put up a 'Do Not Disturb' message, and then proceeded to go off and do something else (which admittedly was watching the movie on the other monitor). While this is not a bot program, per se, how is this not running a bot? It's unattended automated actions performed repeatedly. To the best of my knowledge, that's what a bot is. In which case, a banning is what you get.
This guy's the limit!
When you a grinding, if a GM suspects botting they will whisper you looking for you to respond. If you don't respond within a reasonable amount of time you get nailed for botting.
IOW -- "Human fails Turing Test. Film at Eleven."
No wonder the support at my ISP sucks - they're all playing WoW in WINE!
Search google for "wow warden client" and read a few things. In a nutshell: Blizzard most likely checked if their watchdog program was running (which should make sure that you only run "good" programs and makes sure that you're a "good" player) and didn't find it in the process list.
Result: You must've been hacking your way to 60.
Dunno, as much as I hate cheaters, but some companies go a tad bit far for my taste.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
2. But you are right, it was the Keyboard that brought this on. He was wathing movies and just casually pressing his macro key every now and then. Since he wasn't paying attention and doing the same thing over and over again, it looked like he was botting. Blizzard may have been right to ban him. Though I tend to think that since they have no clear programmable keyboard policy, they should have warned him.
3. Nonetheless, after reading his website, I have sympathy for the guy. Blizzard's communication with him really sucked. Getting sent those form letters must have been so frustrating. He asked specific questions to his accuser and they were replied to by generic form letters. He went into great detail explaining what his (somewhat unique) situation was. Even if Blizzard had replied and said "We have no problem with your running Wine, but using those programmable keyboards are against our ToS." Then that would be fine. But Blizzard was vague in their responses, which is unfair, and if they were a government (which they sort of are in this online world) for a developed, democratic, nation, this guy would have the right to at least SEE the evidence against him. It sounds like here somebody reported him as not responding to messages. They should tell him WHEN and WHERE it happened. Explain what showed up in their logs for them to conclude that he was botting.
The true problem here isn't lack of Wine support or Programmable Keyboards. The problem is that Blizzard makes decisions behind a closed curtain and doesn't tell you what evidence they used to support their decision.
Eventually, the legalities of virtual worlds will need to be addressed.
Digital application for residence permit? Permanent residence? Citizenship? Digital fines? Digital jail? Digital deportation? Oh please. It's a game world, run by them. Consider it an online version of a theme park. They can refuse entry or throw you out if you violate the terms. You're not going to see official regulation of this is hell so freezes over.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If the post (and solution) was "Use Linux, problems solved", this would be a +5
..that you didn't read the article properly?
Even though you work for an ISP, you should realize it's a game not real life, get over it. Working for an ISP I'm sure you have more important thing to do beside playing games.
P.S. did I mention you played games and work for an ISP.
...you see this has nothing to do with WINE. The man used his keyboard to skill-up his weapon skills while he watched a movie on another screen. By his own admission, his character was mostly unattended. This is against the rules.
Note, I'm not judging the person or the rules, just pointing out that what he did was clearly against the rules.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
Seriously!? Priests and wands etc, jesus christ
From reading the linked explanation, it sounds to me like the playing really WAS essentially unattended. If a GM sent a tell while this guy was watching TV, and he didn't answer, but his character kept performing actions -- well, if it looks like a bot and quacks like a bot...
seven two six five
seven four six one seven
two six four two e
Before you all come down on him with the "OMGFTW He gotz banned for the WINE iN lInux0rz" it had nothing to do with that from TFA. He was using his programmable keyboard to fight a group unattended, which in my book is considered a macro cheat. He should have been banned, and was.
When you a grinding, if a GM suspects botting they will whisper you looking for you to respond. If you don't respond within a reasonable amount of time you get nailed for botting.
Same thing that admins would do back in the BBS days. A friend of mine and I used to write scripts for Telix to grind for us in a couple of MUDs. We ended up having to make the script give some kind of generic reply anytime someone talked to us and then start beeping to notify us that we were being watched. Worked really well. We never got caught.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I work at an ISP?
So F-ing What?
Maybe you should of tried "Hello, My Name Is Roofus.. And I work at the corner McDonalds... Ive spent over 300 (insert currency) here. As you can see, That is double my monthly wage... Please dont cancel my account.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
Uh oh! Time to get a girlfriend!
Oh wait. Mine's addicted to WoW, too.
He lost all that time because he was cheating.
Digital jail.
Digital deportation (or exile.)
Further, I bet most people either don't understand the TOS or ignore the finer grained differences between paying to have exclusive access to a set of data and actually owning the data. From an economic view, your ideas about markets makes sense, however, since both humans and organizations are not fully rational, we can't expect a perfectly responsive market.
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
This is why you got banned:
"At the time of the ban I had configured my keyboard to switch weapons, cast hex of weakness and renew myself, all with the press of a button."
There exists a global cooldown of one second between most gameplay affecting actions in WoW, most certainly for casting these two spells hex of weakness and renew.
Therefore the only way you could have cast both with one button, is if the keyboard is interjecting a wait period, and issueing a keystroke to the game that you are not pressing after this wait period. Now in this case, that keystroke may only be a second after you pushed the button. But the issue is that you have, at this point, just barely crossed the line into botting. It has to be drawn somewhere, and to me this is where it makes the most sense: If you allow the keyboard to issue commands while you are not interacting with the hardware in anyway, you are botting.
Not saying this to be an ass, just to let you know what most likely Blizzard took issue with.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
No, we - um, they - use Windows, too.
Of course, I can't understand all the commotion about a fscking game. In my opinion - and I've never played this or any other MMORPG - if the person wants to cheat, that's all part of the game. Seems silly for the operators to ban someone for creative use of technology.
Didn't Captain Kirk do something like that on a simulation?
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
This has nothing to do with Wine or Linux. If he had been using the keyboard and macros but been able to respond when asked a question it wouldn't have been a problem. The problem is this guy was not at his computer for all intent and purpose and leveling his character's skill through automation. He was close to his computer but not on it while leveling his skills. Bannable.
So you are actually required to 1. Be able to read english, 2. Give a crap about some random guy messaging you?
God damn I'm glad I'm not playing WoW any longer.
Not to mention he admits to not "paying attention" to his WoW computer. A keyboard macro that does all that he specifies is definately prohibited in the EULA. In short, the EULA states that anything giving him an unfair advantage over other players (whether it be a bot, or an external macro) is prohibited. He violated now he must live with it.
This story gets to the heart of the greatest flaw in MMORPGs, the time sink phenomenon. Blizzard designs a game that is in essence just neverending repetition. They then say: "We demand that you pay full attention when you are performing mind-numbingly repetetive tasks!" I know you can't allow bots, but come on, this was not botting. Who hasn't stood in front of a low-level monster and whacked away to level a weapon skill. He just found a particularly efficient way to do it. I used to play the game all the time, but I now only help my guild raid occasionally. I can't waste my brain any more, I think a little of it dies every time I play WoW.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
To me, it seems Mr Taco is still peeved that Blizzard made him change his invalid nickname, and is using this story and abusing slashdot to try and shed some more negative light on WoW.
Unfortunately, none of the major MMORPGS offer any form of reasonable communication to their users, and if you decide to disregard the ToS (by installing macros and playing the game unattended or using bad nicknames), you're likely to get stung sooner or later.
Which is why I don't play MMORPGS anymore, because they can undo all your hundreds of man hours without warning or compensation for reasons that are just or not and there'll be nothing you can do about it, until someone starts an MMORPG player's union.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
From working at an MMORPG myself, I can tell people that I have seen a number of these "I was banned for X when I didn't do that" things, and all of them, when told to the public, have been lies.
I am on Blizzard's side here, and, unfortunately, I believe the man to be lying.
Player banned for fapping off to WoW.
Given the amount of time that people put into these games, I am sure that people will begin to consider legal remedies outside of appeals to the game publisher if they get banned. Perhaps they have no recourse, but as these games grow in popularity, I wonder if we might see legal chances in the future.
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
You want some cheese with that whine? Seriously. I'd ban him just for the torrent of annoying emails.
At the bottom of the article:
Priceless.
A GM will specifically identify himself/herself as a GM -- not just any random player name. This guy was botting, and I for one cheer his being nuked. He cheated.
The game has has a built-in macro system that does not permit you to do multiple battle actions at once (you can swap multiple items, and perform multiples of other non-combat actions) because casting multiple spells/performing multiple combat skills all with the press of a single button is botting. This guy bypassed the in-game restricions with a hardware/software combination. The rules exists for a reason, and he broke them.
Funny thing is that if he had just been paying attention to the window he would have been fine.
And your comment about English is just flamebait (not that the rest is not).
It won't be some 'random guy' messaging you. You don't have to pay attention to people who talk to you. It will have GM in the name of the person who messages you (or something like that) and they'll actually say "This is GameMaster Whatshisname, can I talk to you" or something like that.
It's called a gamesupposed to be a waste of time. If it wasn't a waste of time then it would be called "work" or "chores", because other than work, chores, eating, and sleeping, everything you do in life is a "waste of time", since it's only purpose is to entertain you.
To each his own, I don't care if you don't like MMORPGs, but you don't have to try to belittle those who do.
I think EQ actually allows you to create macros in game for this kinda stuff and bind them to hot buttons. hell they even allow to you to activate a hotbutton via a macro lol :) Whats the big freaking deal?
From an economic view, your ideas about markets makes sense, however, since both humans and organizations are not fully rational, we can't expect a perfectly responsive market.
Not to belabor a point, but ignorance is part of a rationally-responsive market. The value you place on your rights includes a measure of how much investigation you're willing to put into pursuing their protection.
If they were that concerned with property rights regarding their avatars, they would investigate how far those rights actually extended. The fact that they dont do so is an indication of the low value they place on them.
"Stumble before you crawl"
I would agree that Blizzard needs to be tough with cheaters. With that said, however, if I were him I would be demanding to see this "evidence" against him. If I were him and if I could get this "evidence" from Blizzard and everything that I've posted on the web and forums is true I would then publically post the evidence and prove my case. I still think its wrong that someone can invest over 300 euros for a product and then be denied access to that product with no explanation as to why. I do not find Blizzards responses appropriate if they are the true responses, I would be demanding answers, if I did not get the answers I would do everything in my power (legally) to boycott Blizzard. Keep in mind that this is just a game, however it has a lot of value to people because it is an expensive habit and it has a lot of social value. I'm sure if he somehow got banned from a single player game he probably wouldnt be complaining about it, its the social aspect of multiplayer games that makes people obsessive about it.
Actually, he reprogrammed the simulation so that it became beatable.
There seems to be some debate about the extensiveness of his programmable keyboard, and whether that truly constitutes botting. Setting that aside, I think the real message to gain from this experience is one of value. If you play an MMORPG, you are going to invest hoards of your life in the game. It is already questionable just what you are gaining from doing this. Now add to it the fact that you are one pissed off admin away from losing everything you've invested in that game forever.
Blizzards actions on this, fair or not, have been reflexive and dismissive. It would have been a simple technical problem to give him a chance to prove his case - call the guy up and say "OK - we've reviewed your situation - I am going to unlock your account for 1 hour right now - I'll meet you in game and you show me how this keyboard works." It will be very obvious if he is telling the truth about how the keyboard works.
I think the message from Blizzard is clear - your contributions of time and energy in our game world are worthless. I think the response should be equally clear - "gee, you're right. Cancel my subscription."
"Some random guy" probably has a name like "GM_Bob" though, most people will respond when a GM sends them a quick "are you awake?" message.
I read the internet for the articles.
programmable keyboard was more the problem then WINE
then != than
Educate yourself.
He was manually attacking/healing, the only thing he macroed was weapon switching.
I think people are getting carried away here (assuming any form of botting is NOT grounds for immediate ban, if it is then consider the rest of this comment irrelevant). The better argument and complaint here is that the accused is given no chance to redeem himself. He recieves an email concerning suspension and is then banned. No warning, nothing. I'm sorry, but that is rediculous considering the amount of money and time he put into the game. 3000+ hours? Gone without a second thought. Makes me happy I have decided to stop playing WoW for Oblivion. Blizzard's actions here are flat-out un-fair.
I feel that the only thing Infernix may have violated was his lunch-hour at the ISP. Simply put, any game that allows you to craft a macro or series of macros, subjects that very method of issuing "quick sequenced commands" to the vulnerability of being chained by a macro-capable programmable keyboard or keypad (like the Belkin Nostromo).
The flaw with WoW isn't so much botting as it is the inherent vulnerability built into the game that permits you to craft macros and chain them and subsequently play "unattended" or simply run around "killing lvl 25 mobs while watching TV".
I play with the TV on all the time. I have all my attacks placed in the quickbar so all I have to do is press "1,2,3,4" and repeat. No macros, no programmable keyboard, but if I had one, all I would have to do is press "1" and repeat. What's the difference? I really don't see any.
As for not answering a GM, when's the last time one appeard IN GAME in front of your character? They can do that, I hear. They even tell you they have distinct robes too. I have yet to see one. I get plenty of whispers to me too. Most of those are from someone I do not know either asking me for gold or offering to sell me some. Because of that I tend to let the "whisper/tell/pm" channel go unanswered. If you want my attention, ask me to party up with you so I get a pop-up box. Now THAT is an attention getter.
Infernix, in my opinion, did nothing wrong except play on the job, and if you job lets you do that (like mine does) then he did nothing wrong except waste his time trying to explain to Blizzard why he was condemmed.
Innocent men die in prison all the time for crimes they didn't commit. Sometimes someone figures out that they were mistakenly accused and they get released. Why would anyone expect the WoW police be any different from the real thing...?
Not long ago I reinstalled Starcraft to play with a friend. I've owned this game and the legal CD key that came with it since the game was originally released. However, when I tried to connect to Battle.net after installation, I received an error message claiming that my CD key was "meant for another product," and it denied me access to Battle.net. I went to Blizzard's website and checked out their FAQ. After trying the recommended fixes for the problem (which involved the ever-popular "reinstall and put the CD key in right this time, retard" suggestion, which of course wasn't the issue), I still could not connect to Battle.net. Finally I got fed up and wrote an e-mail to their tech support, explaining that I had tried the suggestions on their FAQ page and was out of options. I needed their help to get my CD key working again. I didn't actually expect to get a response at all, but I was surprised when there was one in my inbox the next day. I was less surprised that their response was a boilerplate message containing the exact words of the FAQ page. Oh, I was furious. I went out and bought the Starcraft battle chest again for a new key. I wouldn't have bothered, but my old CDs were getting pretty scratched up anyways (having seen the better part of a decade of use), and I could justify the replacement.
The moral of the story: Blizzard doesn't give a damn about it's customers. I would encourage anyone to ignore Blizzard's games from now on. Of course, WoW has a stranglehold on pretty much the entire gaming community, so, that's an uphill battle.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
There should be a Player TOS that the company agrees to before selling their games. It would read like so:
17. In the event you, the player, are ever in need of technical assistance, customer support, account maintenance, or in the event you are banned from the game and your account closed, you have the right to expect that a human Blizzard employee will examine your situation and respond without the use of bots, form letters, or automated responses to make certain that your situation is fully resolved. Furthermore, while the resolution may not always be to your liking, the details will be explained in full using simple, standard language showing the logic we used to make our decisions. Once we have made every effort to explain our decisions, if you still feel that Blizzard has errored in some way, you will have one appeal effort to escalate your situation. This will mean that a team of three Blizzard employees will examine your case in full, reaching a decision. You will only be notified that either Blizzard's previous decision has been upheld, or that there is sufficient evidence to reverse the previous Blizzard decision.
I have to agree with this post. The guy was using a 3rd party peripheral to automate the game, and blizzard detected these commands being sent and banned him. Using the keyboard to send the multiple keystrokes doesnt seem any different than using software to send the keystrokes which they forbid.
... "while I was training my different weapon skills by pressing the macro keys and healing myself every now and then, I watched some movies on my TV, because fighting a level 25 healing mob doesn't require much attention if you're a level 60 priest. "
... my level 60 char is so powerful anyway!"
That is the key problem in what he did. If he used macros while watching TV, I can only guess at how long these repeated actions went on.
This isn't about Linux, not about WINE, not even about programmable Logitech keyboards! This is about: watching TV while letting your computer play the game. And... "playing" the game unattended is most certainly against most MMO agreements, and usually equalled with botting, much like Blizzard indeed told him.
I can only guess at why the Blizzard Boards once told him that it was OK to use keyboards with basic programmability, but a guess was that Blizzard didn't mean it was OK to fucking abuse them to play WoW while watching TV. Yeah, maybe that's why.
If it in his eyes "doesn't require much attention" or not is completely irrelevant, and an "excuse" stupid enough to just worsen his case. It's the very same excuse used by "true" botters. Blizzard has most likely monitored his account over some period of time and seen, "hey, this guy is doing identical actions all over". The follow up reply from Blizzard shows they were listening to his complaints and clarified the problem once again.
He then went on saying:
"I have also apoligised in advance if using a programmable keyboard violates the TOS - but your TOS does not say anything about using such keyboards."
No, but a TOS doesn't detail every individual piece of hardware or software disallowed either. That would be impossible. Instead, they try to explain what's allowed or not. Not that Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboards are disallowed when used to exploit game mechanics. Whether Logitech says they're OK or not is also irrelevant as they don't have a say in the WOW ToS anyway.
And I'm sure they are right too that using their keyboard is allowed, but do Logitech say "using our keyboards to 'play' WoW with during TV watching is in agreement with Blizzard ToS"?
So that's flaw number two in his argument, after trying to excuse himself with "but *I* thought it was OK to play the game in an unattended way, because
Come on, just because he's using WINE and this stupid keyboard doesn't excuse his actions.
"However I suspect their 3rd party detection software saw a very strange enviroinment in which WoW was running"
Nah, that's just him trying to find ways of blaming his behavior on Linux and WINE.
"that combined with the repetitive task of healing myself, switching weapons, and casting Hex of Weakness programmed in my keyboard"
Yes! That's why though! You know, stuff botters write Windows software to do Does it really matter that much how you do it? This guy need to understand what botting implies (= tools to enable game play automation) and that botting isn't allowed.
"Now to the advantage gained. What exactly did I gain? All I did is train my weapon skills. I did not gain any gold, did not gain any experience at level 60, no honor, not even any loot whatsoever."
This argument is beyond comprehension for me. He gained trained skills! That's what he gained. Gee.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I know this probably sounds like your mom, but now is a good chance to quit being a WoW playing drone and maybe do something worthwhile with your time.
It appears a game master (GM) approached him in-game and he did not respond -- he was watching a movie and pressing the keyboard buttons without watching the screen.
Put yourself in the GM's position. A character repeatedly performs the same action hundreds of times. When sent messages (tells/whispers) the character does not respond. There is no other reasonable explanation than that the character is automated. Sure, weird situations like this particular one can occur, but is there really any way for Blizzard to see that it was not a bot? The guy pressed one button that caused his character to perform repeated tasks while the player was not watching the game. That is botting. The fact that the player pressed one button every few minutes does not mitigate the rule breaking.
If you RTFA you'll see that he was at his keyboard, but his eyes were more focused on the TV next to his monitor than on his monitor, since the chance of a level 60 priest dying against a level 20-30 mob are next to 0. Just not giving it 100% attention should not be a reason for an immediate and permanent ban.
As I understand it, he didn't actually leave it unattended. On the contrary, he couldn't leave it unattended, he still had to be sitting there pressing the programmed keys. He just wasn't paying attention while he was doing that. You can argue not paying attention is equivalent to leaving it unattended, but a simple macro on a programmable keyboard that you can't leave unattended does not make a bot, let along a fucking one.
Anyway, the real culprit here is the game design. If Blizzard want their players to worship at the altar of the great Time Sink, then they can expect them to use things like this to make it less mind-numbingly tedious.
How the hell is some random guy getting banned from WoW for botting with a programmable keyboard "Stuff that matters" or "News"? I guess somehow just because he was using WINE all of a sudden its cool. My friend got a message from Blizzard the other day for yelling "SUCK MY NUTS" in Orgrimmar on an RP server. Man, if only he'd done that on a linux machine then he could get on Slashdot frontpage... shucks.
A macro keyboard is a descent defense but realistically I doubt it would be hard to programmatically inject keystrokes to a program running under WINE and there would be no way for that program to detect that they weren't coming from hardware. Sending the right keystrokes in the right order can do some basically useful stuff and Blizzard would consider this botting. A clever way to get around the warden and bot but not undetectable.
The problem with Blizzard's stance on this issue is that they have created a game with some mindless repetitive tasks that beg to be automated. Realistically, they beg to be eliminated entirely since a computer program assigning you fake, easily automated, mundane repetitive tasks isn't good for anyone. Most of WoW is not this way, however. Most of it's parts are interesting and immersive and those are the parts people find fun. Nobody is going to bot their way through an 5+ person instance run (well, almost nobody.)
Blizzard has drawn a hard line on botting but the problem with any line is there are gray areas and the mundane easily automated tasks (like grinding up a weapon skill at L60) that are so wildly easy to automate as to be trivial. Sitting in one place pushing button 1.. 2.. 3.. 1.. 2.. 3.. 1.. 2.. 3.. gets old after about 1000 repetitions. It would even be easy to create a macro keyboard that would fully automate this activity beginning to end. It wouldn't in any realistic way be "botting" but Blizzard would probably ban you.
Blizzard needs to fix WoW. Pull the mundane easily automated crap out. I'm level 60 and never used a crossbow, don't make shoot 100,000 arrows at rats in the tram to level the damn skill.. it's mundane, repetitive, and I don't want to do it. Ramp that skill up much much faster to the point where it's maybe a little weak but I can use it in regular combat and you eliminate the mundane easily automated task issue. They should also allow you to assign one of your characters to a task and log out and have the game essentially fake the thing for a while (fishing, farming mobs, etc). That short circuits a lot of the desire for botting and allows them to control the negative aspects of it (the characters "botting" could appear differently or not at all in-game.)
As a society we should consider making it illegal to ban the automation of easily automated mundane tasks. Do we really want humans to be forced to sit at a keyboard hitting the same 3 keys in the same order for hours and hours? Blizzards stance on this simply shouldn't be allowed. If Blizzard notices a player standing in the same place doing the same thing for hours the thought on their side shouldn't be "Ban this guy!" it should be "How do we eliminate the desire for automating this task?"
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
I had a problem with something in Puzzle Pirates. Not only did I get a real response from a real human being, but they actually went back through logs, have been asking probing questions, and look like they're going to fix my character (to my description) even though nobody really knows what went wrong.
I nearly left when I found that all of my stuff had been blasted by a bug, but their great service and willingness to work with / believe me has made them a customer for life (or at least a very long time).
They have been much better than Blizzard's legendary "We're destroying a year of your work so suck it up" form letters. Props to the guys at Three Rings: You rock.
I've noticed that Fasterfox's default setting is to be horribly abusive about page loading. I'm far more thorough about reading through settings than most people, and I toned it down from "Turbo Charged" to "Optimized".
:(
I'm hoping this isn't a trend, because Fasterfox really does make a HUGE pageloading difference.
Perhaps if I run a squid proxy on my network it would help too? There's only 3 machines here, my desktop, may laptop, and my wife's desktop.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
t stings to get banned... but realy any MMO is a waste of time, WoW being one of the worst in my opinion.
He should channel all his energy into some more worthwhile waste of time like us sensible Nerds, something like..... ummm.... building a PC case made completely out of fans, or an iPod with a 300gb disk or if he is really masocistic he could try installing Oracle Application Suite on a minimalist Slackware system. One of the aspects of Nerdity is spending so much time indoors doing nerdy things that you begin to suffer from lack of exposure to sunlight and and Warcraft in all its incarnations made the list of nerdy things a long time ago. That being said, techically, you are right WoW is a waste of time.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
They did not deliver a service that he paid for via credit card and will not respond to him. So he should have his credit card return the 300 euros he paid. Hit Blizzard where it hurts, they're pocket book.
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
I can't believe the number of assholes on this thread who are so quick to blame the poor guy who got a permanent ban for no logical cause. One of the primary signs of emotional immaturity is taking joy in the suffering of others and plenty of people here are always smug and gleeful whenever anybody gets in trouble.
Yes, he used a programmable keyboard. But, you know what, WoW contains a built in macro function that lets you build scrips that automate sequences of commands and trigger them with one key.
If, for some reason, the Blizzard Nazis consider a keyboard macro different than a built in game macro they could have warned the guy. A permanent ban out of the blue is really excessive.
At least he won't have to waste money now playing that crappy game anymore. Blizzard has made it clear many times that it doesn't give a shit about it's customers. Look at how they let Diablo2 go down the toilet by doing nothing about all the dupes and hacks and so forth until it was too late and the game was already beyond repair. Then they started acting like they were concerned by banning people left and right, but the damage had already been done. They were always slow at gettting anything done. Look at how long it took them to fix bugs in the game. Now they are doing the opposite and overreacting to something that was, IMO, not a problem. Using a programmable KB is hardly the same thing as botting, and why did they have to be such hardasses about it and outright ban him? At first they said "we have, unfortunately, had to suspend your World of Warcraft account pending investigation", but after he contacted them, he gets a permanent ban. Seems like they didn't like the idea of him daring to disagree with their decision.
:)
Just another example of how these corporate pigs take our money then they treat us as though they own us. We "buy" a product from them and they tell us that we don't even own it. They still own the software and the money we gave them. My question is, why do we, as consumers, put up with this shit? There is no other product, other than software, that we purchase that the seller claims full ownership to even after we bought it. Not just that, but they also feel they have the right to alter it or make any other changes to the software or the service you are paying for at any time w/o our agreeing to it. Their TOS or EULA is basically a one-sided non-negotiable contract that gives them all the rights and protects them from any responsibility or damage.
Besides, WOW is a POS and he should just buy *Guild Wars instead!
*no monthly fee!
I hate it when companies develop games and then expect you to follow some recipe in order to play them. Makes it seem like game developer houses are treating us like deterministic automatons. As long as the play doesn't disrupt the servers I think anything else is fair game. Even Bots, Games would be so much more entertaining if you could freely write bots for them. Then the game becomes building a better bot.
I installed that piece of shit for my kids. I went all the way through the updates/logins/EULAs over and over just to satisfy my morbid fascination that any one company could pack so much incompetence and arrogance into a single product's install program.
Anyway, it's a private firm, and they can ban whoever they want for whatever reason they want. Get over it. They did you a favor. WoW is going to drop off the face of the earth within a year or so. Nobody gets away with treating customers like crap for long. You heard it here first.
Most people don't even think inside the box.
Er, I'd call that cyborg-ing. Maybe it's just as bad, but botting just doesn't seem like the right term to call it.
Yaawn! Contract, TOS, Their server... Yeah. Heard it all before. Totally misses the point.
The point is the perceived unjustness that someone can arbitrarily deny a user access to a character that has value to the person, without any real right of appeal.
I was one of the developers working on an app called WoWSharp... which was a full blown cheat program for WoW that did allow you to bot. I have since quit WoW, but during the time, even when we got detected by WardenClient (WoW's hack detection system) the most we got was some 72hr suspension. After our deep dive into WoW's who anti-cheat world, I can tell you they suck. I am sure many innocent people get banned, while us cheaters who understand the system continue to play. Based on how Warden works, I would guess that running on Wine may have set of some intial alarms... and when the GMs came to check it out, you where doing something they didn't expect. The GMs that investigate you are not high end admins, but just one level above the $10/hr GMs who answer generic tickets. Oh, and feel free to flame me about the bot thing, I have my flamesuit on.
Maybe he should have been paying attention to the game and instead of leveling his weapon skill on some lowly MOB, acting like a bot, he should have have been active at the keyboard doing his thing while out enjoying "adventure".
He should just quit his bitchin' to be honest.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
From "Flaming Moe" episode... Homer is pissed that Moe has stolen the "Flaming Moe" recipe, and tells Moe that he's just lost a customer. Moe cannot hear Homer over the sound of the cash register constantly ringing.
The point is, Blizzard is raking in so much cash that they can afford to be ban-happy. Some guy looks like he's using a bot - ban the sucker! Who cares about one account when you've got 8 million?
I feel a little sorry for the guy truth be told.
Read his page, 300 euro's, 3000 hours and a keyboard that advertised as a WoW keyboard, and he gets banneed with no warnings. All e-mails get exactly the same one line response, and all posts on the forums are removed.
Bliazzard are wankers, lets all play Warcraft 2. They never banned me from that...
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
let along a fucking one.
And, of course that is impossible since there is no fucking in World of Warcraft.
I dont know about you, but with GuildChat, 4Sale Chat, City Chat, the 3 Zone channels I'm in.. i tend to miss a hell of a lot of whispers. (And actively ingore them too).
"Be glad you sailed for a better day, But dont forget there will be hell to pay" - Dave King/Flogging Molly
My take-away from this is that some people are simply addicted. If the game can be so boring, that, at times, a player watches movies while playing, what kind of entertainment is that? Sounds like classic addiction - small rewards at random times("wins" of enjoyment, I presume)keep you coming back despite the overall "loss" tedium, time-wasted, monthly fee.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
And I assume that while playing the game, fighting monsters and trying to survive in general in the game, you read every single message that comes to you, just in case one might be a GM?
I also assume you never disable the chat window completely so that you don't see chat messages? For example, switching to the combat window instead?
If that "random guy" happens to be an admin, and happens to be telling you to respond or face a permenant ban, you damn well better pay attention.
But that's the whole point. Anyone remotely coherent would respond to such. Amazing how well it works.
And...if ya can't read english...get the hell off the english servers, man. Duh?
This is not botting.
As a matter of fact, the behavior he described can be easily replicated on a standard keyboard using WoW's built-in API. It is a simple matter to write a macro that will watch your health, heal you if if drops below a certain threshold, switch weapons based on any of a number of circumstances... etc. Bind that macro to a key, and just press the key over and over. Perfectly legit.
He didn't say he was away from the keyboard, he simply said he was watching tv while grinding out weapon skill. If all you have to do is press one button... that seems entirely plausible. He's not gaining any extra information or abilities from the programmable keyboard, so I don't see the sense in this banning.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
it's easier to claim that instead of admitting that they run questionable software on their client's PC?
I mean, after he admitted he's using a programmable keyboard (first rule with those mails: Never admit anything), it was easy to put the blame on that instead.
Or how do you think they should've found out he's using a programmable keyboard?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you don't want to play The Great Time Sink....why would you be giving Blizzard your money in the first place? They have their rules, and this guy broke them. You don't want to play by their rules, don't play their game.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Sorry, but your wild-ass guess is wrong. You don't know how Warden works.
While WoW is running, Blizzards servers dynamically send one of numerous little packages of Warden code to the client. The client executes this code within its own process. What Warden *doesn't* do is run a separate process. Warden collects the strings from the titlebars of each open window and hashes them, sending the hashes to the server (where they are checked against the hashes of certain known cheat programs). Warden also collects the names of all the processes running on your machine, and inspects certain locations within the address space of each process, in order to positively identify known cheat programs. By the way, these things should work fine under WINE (at least for emulated processes).
Its possible WINE would set off other checks in Warden (maybe it checks if system DLLs have been tampered with, for example).
It's much more likely that his suspiciously repetitive behaviour was reported by somebody, he was investigated by a GM and concluded to be botting (and rightly so). He is a dumbass and deserved to be banned.
This had nothing to do with WINE. Nowhere did the GM's at Blizzard say anything about running WoW on WINE. This guy was admiting to them that he was using a keyboard that they've stated time and again goes against their policies and basically turns your machine into a WoW playing bot.
;)" means nothing. To me, 24 is still a kid.
I think he was only throwing WINE in there so people would get up in arms about the whole thing....just as the guys here at Slashdot who posted this did...because it was packaged in the "Blizzard hates WINE" banner. What bullshit.
Oh, and his last remark on his page of "P.S.: I'm no kid. I'm 24. Kids dont work for ISPs, usually
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
WINE is irrelevant to the issue, I believe. WoW EULA explicitly prohibits the operation of any application that interacts with WoW while you are connected. This is more or less how they define bots. Its why, for example, they outlaw mods that let you control iTunes from within the game, but let you log off and report your gathering data to Thottbot. The programmable keyboard with its macro environment creates exactly the sort of executables that the EULA prohibits. Which is something of a pity, because I love playing WoW but I absolutely hate farming. On the other hand, I certainly get pissed when I see some automated toon farming my herbs out from under me like clockwork...
No, just not paying attention.
I have leveled a couple of holy priests myself, so I can relate totally. It's really boring, requires little interaction even on lower levels. Just shield+renew and wand. From level 25 to up I've always engaged a mob, then alt-tabbed to surf some pro.. CNN. Then just alt tab, loot, pick new mob.
Now me being on lower levels this took maybe 30-60 seconds, but the mobs in foremeantioned area are very low levels, so it takes them a good time to actually kill him. With some hotkeys ready to target himself, cast heal, target last enemy and autoattack, you can just alt-tab to game, press one button and continue - for sure not breaking the EULA. So it's just watching a movie/tv/whatever, then alt+tab, press key, alt+tab back again. And leveling those weapons takes loads of time, so you easily get used to pressing those couple of buttons so you don't have to pay *any* attention to anything.
To anyone who has studied Blizzards Warden program they would know that the users story is BS.
First off Warden does not run when the game is being run on a Linux environment.
Second, Warden has no capability to detect things like macro keyboards
Third, if a player is suspected of botting the GM is supposed to first move the player unexpectedly to see if it breaks the bots behavior, or if its really a person behind the keys, they then follow the movement with a message to the player a minute later. (They use to message the person first till bots were developed that auto answered)
This story is BS, the person most likely used some other cheat and is now trying to find an excuse to try and get his account back. It ain't happenin.
Just because you've heard it before doesn't mean it isn't precisely true.
That sort of ridiculous dismissal just makes you and your side look foolish: it's not unjust, because you freely entered a contract. It's a game, it's not like you entered the contract under duress.
"Stumble before you crawl"
Obviously their support team is very lacking when it comes to customer service. If nothing else, this certainly convinces me to not spend my money on WoW, something I have been considering doing. I'll stick to non MMORPG's for now, thank you!
It's unfortunately all too common for a business to not give a crap about a paying customer. I found that out with LiveJournal. Post public info, get your entire account and all postings ever made deleted without notice, and the anonymous moderators say "Do what we say without question or be permanently banned, even if you haven't broken the TOS". Meanwhile, a troll with a free account gets a free pass to ignore the TOS for some reason.
The reason they don't care, of course, is that most users don't care either. I mean, the fact that WoW is intrusive spyware with e-mail monitoring abilities doesn't seem to faze anyone. Homophobic policy decisions probably didn't cause anyone to unsubscribe either. DRM that removes your legal first-sale rights didn't seem to stop anyone paying $50 for the game. Why would abusive moderation applied to other people make a difference?
Same with FARK. Anonymous moderators have the power to make invisible edits and permanently ban people, with no right of appeal--and waddya know, it leads to abusive behavior.
The problem is, 99% of people don't give a crap until it happens to them.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
How appropriate that he was using W(h)ine.
Looks like a bot and smells like a bot and it's a bot.
Why not just buy another account and bot another character to 60 using the wine/keyboard combination? Just don't watch so much tv while doing it!
He was a subscriber to a service from a service provider, and that service was cut off. In this case the service is WOW, in the other case, it is cable tv.
Cutting one show from cable while keeping your access would be like cutting access to one realm of WOW while keeping your account open.
Ok, Blizzard should have let the guy know exactly what was the cause (using the keyboard macros?) and given him a chance to play nice.
It's probably been said before, but this seems to be just more proof of the broken gameplay of most current generation MMORPGs. This is the same thing that ultimately supports the MMORPG real money trade and "Chinese" farmers. There really needs to be a way for these games to be fun without having to give your life over to them or pay money so that someone else's job becomes playing your game. Unfortunately, as long as Blizzard makes good money even as broken as things are, I wouldn't expect much change. I would guess that one of their competitors will be the first to offer a game that is deep, fun, and breaks the grind cycle. When that happens, watch out! Because even your grandma will want to play!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Does anyone really have any sympathy for this person? Excuse me, but you don't have enough time to play your videogame properly while watching movies WHILE AT WORK! Boo-hoo. You are lucky to have a job, buddy. Believe it or not, many of us perform "tasks" when at our "jobs" in order to do things like play videogames and watch movies when not "working". Yeah, Blizz sucks and screws people over in more ways than this, but I doubt you got any sympathy from the people reading your replies. Now I know why the Tech bubble burst... everyone was /afk watching movies.
This is like saying that the girl was a little pregnant. You are or you're not. As far as MMO there can not be any gray lines here. There will always be people who will try to push the line further if you start permitting any action that you deem unacceptable to the game.
It might be over the top by Blizzard but it's the only action that they could have taken after they discovered the botting.
It's not like your civil rights are being violated, it's a game, a peice of entertainment. If you don't like the terms, stop giving them money and go play another. There are LOTS of great games out there. Lately I've been playing very little WoW because I have three new games I want to play, and I've got a list of about 6 more I want to try that I probably won't get to. I't snot like I'd be happy if Blizzard terminated my account, but I wouldn't be all broken up over it, I'd find another game to play (actually, I'd just play more of the other games I already have).
We don't need any fucking regulation over some game. What Blizzar dsays, goes, it's their world. If you find their rules and dynamics are fun, wonderful, pay them to be able to play. If you find them unfun or unfair, tell them to pack sand and give your money to someone else.
OH SNAP
I can't stand the suspense ... what did Wine do next?
No more a case of "that people who appear to be performing repetative, scripted actions in non-standard game environments" with raise a flag with our detection software. If on attempt to contact them in game (using a clearly identifiable official ID) while they performing these actions they fail to respond we will rather safely assume they are unattended macroing (aka botting) and ban them from the game."
If you read though the emails he was first suspeded pending investigation into 3rd party software.
As you cannot "bot" just using the wow client and the built in macro engine it's is reasonably safe assumption to assume that when a game character is doing something in game (that cannot be automated), and the player does not respond to a Game master, that the character has been somehow automated and the player is not there. Hence investigation into the 3rd party software
He then quite nicely helpfully confirmed to them that he had automated his gameplay to a degree beyond what is built into the client (legal or illegal is imaterial) thus confirming for them quite nicely that he was botting to to a degree if not totally.
Result Banned
This has little to do with the tools directly but how one probably flagged him for further investigation (WINE) and how the other was used to "bot" (the keyboard).
If he had been using the keyboard and WINE combo and actually playing the game rather watching movies this thread would not exist.
Actually, thinking about it even with what happened i still don't know why this thread exists, another cheater got banned so what?
*looks at link to other article by CmdrTaco and suddenly understands*
Taco if you had read the nameing rules and looked at all the examples you would have known your name was invalid under not one but two different regulations (the title and having an non pronouncable abriviation of it). That you have been using that nick for years on boards and chat rooms is imaterial, Bliz's game, their rules, they did not create the rule just to ban you, they were put in place before the game went live (back in beta). If they set a rule that you must be naked except for a pink frilly dress while playing you get a choice, follow the rules or don't play. So suck it up and move on and stop posting drivel like this
Oh please. Lets get some perspective. Blizzard told CmdrTaco to change a name he had been using for awhile because it violated the game rules. That's it. Blizzard has yet to start rounding up and gassing Slashdot editors.
"I can't use my nickname! It's like Auschqitz in here!"
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Why the hell does that make any difference at all?
I find it remarkable that no one is focused on the irony of this thread.
/. committed to *eliminating* tedious, repetitive tasks by automating them? Let's advance the state of the art. Forget macros - I'm going to design a bot that not only levels up, but responds to whispers with some old "Eliza" like text response.
Aren't must of us on
Games should be about skill development, not brain numbing. Try designing a bot that can handle the Battlefield 2 stream against human players (and if you do, contact the defense department, because that would be one smart kickass program!).
Any task that can be performed by a computer *should* be performed by a computer.
unattended adj. --Not being attended to, looked after, or watched: an unattended fire. --Having no attendants: unattended gasoline pumps. --Not being paid attention to or listened to: an unattended question. He openly admits that he was watching movies 99% of the time and not paying any attention to the game. Because you hit a key on a keyboard every 5-10 minutes does not mean that you are "attending" to the game.
People should know by now that they don't give a damn about anyone playing their games. You're just a number to them, and if you stand out as someone who isn't toeing the line by consuming their virtual crack exactly how they tell you, you get the axe. If you're going to give them your money, expect to get screwed.
I have read some research on MMORPGs that suggests that there is an endless supply of creatures to slay and mobs to fight (i.e. Blizzard keeps the economy running through infusions of resources). If that is true, then I don't think the game qualifies as a zero sum system.
Not giving attention but pushing the button is effectively using a bot. He deserved what he got. I just don't understand why Blizzard banned him, they still get their money. They could have just removed the mob he was grinding on :)
It is cheaper.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
People are far more rational than you give them credit for. The issue is differing value systems systems and limit information, not the ability to make decisions based on the information they have.
Mod point free since 2001
It's not a matter of WINE, he was fucking botting! He took his programmable keyboard and built macros for fighting mobs and then left it unattendend.
So why is this a fucking problem? Computers are made for automation of repetitive tasks. If a bot can play the game, you've done something terribly wrong in game-design.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
It missed the point before. It still misses the point. People are arguing its unfair so you provide an argument that it's legal. Things can be legal and unfair.
Does the person signiong the contract have legal training? Can he negotiate? Does he have any option other than take it or leave it? No he doesn't. The initial negotiating positions aren't balanced.
Now, this person contests that he didn't breach the TOS. The TOS are not clear on the use of programmable keyboards, and Blizzard seem to have violated their own procedure for permanantly banning a user. Yet Blizard are using their own interpretation of the contract. Clearly, this user interprets it differently.
He got banned for macroing, end of story.
ALL MMORPGs I play forbid the use of hardware / software macroing (no drinking bird, homer) to perform repetitive tasks. Attended or not.
And they're mostly all serious - I was suspended from Dark age of camelot for falling asleep on my keyboard. unfortunately I hit the jump key, so I say there jumping in place till I woke up to a CSR saying "Sir I'm suspending you for 7 days for macroing"
Is it possible that Blizzard banned him not because his activities were violating the Terms of Service per se, but rather because he had the audacity to engage in another form of entertainment whilst he was playing the game? Blizzard was losing critical mindshare to some movie studio or television producer. Their customer might even have seen an advertisement for a rival video-game company - while he was ostensibly using their service. The horror!
Although the e-mails exchanged are unclear my guess is that the programmable keyboard was more the problem then WINE. Not that you'd ever know that given that Blizzard communicates with their users seemingly almost exclusively with form letters.
Oh, STFU, Taco! What is it with you and World of Warcraft? Last time, you got all pissed that you had to change your name to follow the rules of no titles, which caused you to post a seven paragraph essay whining about how you, as CmdrTaco of Slashdot, should have been allowed to bend the rules everyone else has to follow. It's obvious you're STILL pissed over this and making flippant remarks about form letters, which is hypocritical considering Slashdot's piss-poor email feedback that often involves a sarcastic one-line dismissal of the user's problem.
I think I see now why Slashdot is languishing. We always wonder what the editors do all day, and now we know CmdrTaco just plays World of Warcraft while his site generates ad revenue. Then he takes a break from the game to check the submission queue without even bothering to follow the front page (he probably doesn't even subscribe to the RSS feed), and once he's posted a few, goes back to his game while the site falls even further behind.
Please...shut up about World of Warcraft, 'k, Taco? In the first case you bitched, it was over you breaking the rules of no titles in names. In this case of your bitching, you're criticizing over automated keyboard macros that performed behaviors unattended, which is clearly against the rules. If you don't like Blizzard or their rules, don't play their fucking game.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I really hope this article exposes Blizzard as the greedy bastards they are. Just like the RIAA, they want to have control on everything. Who the **** cares if you use a programmable keyboard or not? Don't you know what carpal tunnel is?
As long as someone is in front of the PC, he shouldn't be banned for botting. A bot is something which plays the game WHEN YOU'RE NOT PRESENT.
Screw them. I really hate evil companies, and this just proved how evil they are. One potential customer less.
[H]e couldn't leave it unattended, he still had to be sitting there pressing the programmed keys. He just wasn't paying attention while he was doing that.
So although he was pressing the buttons he wasn't actually attending to the game, so the game was effectively unattended. Blizzard think it looks like a bot, no matter what he says in defence its his word against their evidence.
The first law of gaming is that you don't make the player do anything that isn't fun, unless you get more money by doing it. Back when computer games were just starting to take over from arcade games and many of them had the same "you get 5 ships, and when they're gone you have to start over" format, my buddy Karl put it this way: if you're not making the guy pump quarters into the game, let him keep playing forever.
Later on games developed "infinite" lives and save points and when killing the same things over and over again palled you got zones and bosses and mini-bosses and super-bosses and puzzles... and games where you had to do the same things over and over got panned.
If there's anything in the game that can be automated by a keystroke sequence, then that's something that's going to be insanely boring for a human, and it shouldn't be in the game.
" At the time of the ban I had configured my keyboard to switch weapons, cast hex of weakness and renew myself, all with the press of a button."
Doing more than one in game action (such as casting a spell, using an ability, or the like) with one button is against the TOS. He was going aginst it. He may not have been botting the the traditional sense, but he was not playing the game as intended or as he agreed to.
He also states that sometime during the night he noticed he was logged out. For all we know he just sat there pushing a button for hours while GM after GM attempted to contact him. Then they were forced to determine he was not there (as he was not) and banned the account. I say Blizzard did what they should have.
Alright, so if unattended repeated action is considered botting, Blizzard now must, in order to be consistant and fair, ban anyone who hits 'create all' on a trade skill, and walks away to do something else while the 100 linen get processed (or whatever)
If you're not competant to understand a contract like this, and yet you're an adult, then you need to be in an institution.
It's fair because they're offering a luxury with an explicit code of conduct at a very clear price, and you the customer opts to buy in. This isn't even an interpretation issue, since the TOS is quite clear.
"Stumble before you crawl"
After all, if you can't use a programmable keyboard in WoW to mine gold with, how are you supposed to get rich?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
From TFA: This is not possible to achieve using macros or LUA addons because it is, as many other people have said, botting. If the macro required 3 key presses (1 per action) then it could have been achieved with an in-game macro. I'm afraid the guy is SOL.
Just don't create a file called -rf.
A lot of the stuff in WoW can be considered interacting with the environment unattended. Is taking a flight path and going to the kitchen for a drink one of them? Is putting your mount on run and going to the bathroom one of them? Or is it only things that increase skills, experience, or inventory? Gaining geographical location doesn't count? What about if I stand in the middle of a group of lvl 6 murlocs while they all beat on me. That will increase my defense over time, but I'm not interacting with them. They are doing something to me, but not vice-versa.
Am I required to answer someone if they claim to be a GM? What if I don't even speak english?
I neither agree with the actions of the person who got banned, nor do I agree with the punishment Blizzard decided upon.
Getting kicked off of Wow for using a bot keyboard $15
... PRICELESS!
Complaining about it uselessly $0
Posting it to Slashdot so everyone can see how high your 14M3 factor is
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Similarly, it's not as simple as "You don't want to play by their rules, don't play their game" either. Do you read every rule of every game you ever consider playing and consider every possible interpretation of them before you do anything? Somehow, I suspect not.
How about trying to present your point of view without the hyperbole?
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
This isn't even an interpretation issue, since the TOS is quite clear.
... provide scripting and/or macroing to obtain information from World of Warcraft to gain a competitive advantage over other players.".
Really? I searched for "keyboard" and got nothing. I searched for "macro" and got 2 terms, one of which was clearly not relevent, and the other was "(vi) You may not use software products which
A keyboard is not a software product.
Then there's the "penalty volcano". "Accounts are closed when a player has excessively and/or grossly violated our policies. When an account is closed, the player is no longer able to access the account. Account Closures are rare and represent a player who is unable to abide by our rules and insists on negatively affecting other players' enjoyment of the game or harming the service itself". The violation was minor and doesn't even justify a 3 hour suspension according to these rules.
Kidding! (maybe) Wow is entertainment, but the people I know who play have no like outside of it or EverCrack. A ban for the people I know would be like bringning the dead back to life. The time these games seem to suck from the people I know is worse than what smoking has done in the past. In the end you are working on characters you don't own. They do.
As you can see from Blizzard's replies to their user, they have more than enough people hooked and can afford to lose a few.
If Wow was a your friend's girlfriend you'd know the best thing he could do would be to leave her. It's really sad to see someone beg to stay in such a one sided relationship.
So the lesson is this: These are Blizzards toys. You can pay to play with them, but in the end these are Blizzards toys. In the distance is a faint ringing. Ask not for whom the clue phone ring, it rings for thee.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
WoW already has great OpenGL support, it shouldn't be that hard for a company like Blizzard to port WoW to Linux.
There's already an online petition to get WoW ported to Linux claiming 23725 signatures (at the time of my posting this).
Sign it here.
(disclaimer: I'm not connected with the creaters/pwners of the site in any way what-so-ever, I just really want this to happen.)
You don't need to own or currently play World of Warcraft to sign; you just have to support the idea of it being ported to Linux. Please support this. This would make an incredibly strong argument for Linux as a viable gaming platform.
I have one of those Logitec G15 keyboards, as well as a Belkin Nostromo N52 (Which I no longer use). I am very concerned that Blizzard considers them a bannable offense. Only, they apparently don't. But they do. But...
Blizzard is infamous for refusing to give details about exactly WHAT you did wrong when they ban you. As you can see in the emails. "We looked, you're guilty." "of what?" "Being banned." "For?" "Being guilty". "Of?" "Being Banned." "Well, can you review it?" "Ok. You're still guilty." "Of what??" "Of Being Banned." "For..."
They're unfortunately just asking for a lawsuit in this matter, but... I guess 6 million customers paying $15 a month makes one feel they can get away with anything.
I suggest you call their headquarters directly. They will tell you to email them instead. Refuse. Be a huge pain in the ass, and don't accept being told to go away. They *are* accountable for disabling your account. Fortunately you are in Europe where their EULA holds MUCH less weight than in the US -- they can't write away your consumer rights, so fight for them!
He was using a Macro to automate tasks. I'm not a fan of MMORPGs, but surely that's not allowed in any of these games?
I have to admit, I've never played it. After hearing everything the things I've heard about the operators, I couldn't imagine wanting to plunk down a monthly fee to play a game, get treated poorly by the operator and then get booted.
Heck, if I want to be treated poorly by a service provider, I just call Verizon or DishNetworks.
-x
Yes, but watching a movie/tv while playing WoW is not entirely leaving the game unattended. I watch movies/tv while doing instance raids, makes things go by easier while waiting for the group to set up. And yes, I do perfectly well doing this, and usually happen to be the top of the healing charts.
I do however feel that Blizzard could have taken his actions as botting, but instead of banning him on first offense, instead giving him a warning and monitored his account.
It just is a matter of degree. In your view you were not botting as you define it to a scope which your event does not qualify.
Look, if your not paying attention to the game go do something else. If it is that boring to do what you were doing then why bother? If it is for improvment within the game should you not focus your attention on it.
Unattended play, botting, macroing. Call it whatever you will.
If you want a game which will allow you to bot, supposedly only attended, then go play Asheron's Call. Turbine themselves approved of combat automation to the horror of the entire industry.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
ahh, but your server logs would indicate any normal chat activity on those channels, as would your 'decline' of an invite to a party :-). It's not just about reponding to a whisper.
In his case, the only events being responded to were those for the mob, and as such it's botting, regardless of the fact that the bot was organic in nature. As a long time MUD admin, this is a bitchy lin to walk. Blizzard is taking the most expedient one in this instance, and while it may raise some issues, by taking it public like this, the author has galvanized that any retraction of the ban opens wiggle room in the policy that Blizzard cannot afford, so this case has now become one that Blizzard *can't* back down from. Unfortunate,...
At minimum, this guy should get all the money back he spent on WoW, because they've essentially stolen the value of the characters he has generated. The time can't be recovered, but the money should be.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You got caught botting and you admited to it. Deal with your punishment. And I quote below:
At the time of the suspension I was playing WoW on Linux. I was training my weapon skills because I recently turned to level 60. I had programmed the switching of weapons (I use Wardrobe for that) to my programmable keyboard and was fighting a low-level healing mob to upgrade all my weapon skills to 300. As you might very well know, this takes hours, and while I was training my different weapon skills by pressing the macro keys and healing myself every now and then, I watched some movies on my TV, because fighting a level 25 healing mob doesn't require much attention if you're a level 60 priest.
Consider someone who has two level 60 characters in WoW and realizes that they want to play a game where they can have their own property. Most likely, they are going to focus on the sunk costs of creating those characters, the non-negligible social network they probably have in WoW and the effort required to find and level up characters in a game that matches their TOS. Provided they can find a game that has a TOS they prefer.
No, if they were rational and decided to stick with WoW we could assume that their preferences for playing WoW were greater than their preferences for a better TOS. But people weigh options differently at different times and have trouble accounting for events that might or might not happen or will happen in the future (e.g. hyperbolic time discounting). In this case, they have to make a subjective assessment of the probability that they will get banned under the TOS and use that in helping guide their decision. Depending on how they frame the argument and their reference point, their decision will differ. Cue further discussion of Prospect theory here, I can't be bothered.
The point is, people can still prefer to own their own toons yet fail to act on that preference. And whether or not that is rational can be argued depending on how closely you expect a person's actions to be in line with their preferences.
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
He's using a programmable keyboard that is advertised to optimal for playing WoW, then actually invests some time in learning to use it properly and eventually does, makes some macros to advance his game position which is no different than using an electric shaver versus a straight razor. In fact, Blizzard seems to have a problem with any perspective(s) that don't entirely fit the profile of what kind of users they want or would like to express their opinions, expressions, perceptions, or perspectives. Essentially, they treat their customers no differently than a player treats an NPC, which to me is scary. And furthermore, they seem pretty anxious to play wack the mole on the forums when an "npc" actually reminds them that they are dealing with real people, in a real world, that pay(guess what)REAL money to use the service that they provide. I think he should sue...;D
I play my 60 priest in a high end instance (Molten Core), and use a very common and legal mod (CT_Mod) to hot-key selecting the player with the lowest health. Then I hit my flash heal button. It's 'ctrl+1' and then '0'. I basically just spam that while I watch TV, and coincidentally end up as one of the top 3 healers most of the time (I fade every once in a while too, so I don't get aggro and die). Basically, I see that as the same thing, so I guess I should expect to get banned.
I've also done similar while dragging friends through lower level dungeons with my 60 shaman. Pull a mob, hit auto-attack (built in to the game), heal myself every once in a while (don't really have to pay attention to this with low-level mobs against a 60)... watch BSG. I end up having to scroll chat a lot in these situations, because I can tell by something I just read, that I missed an earlier statement/question. ESPECIALLY if guild chat is active, I miss tells (they just scroll on by with all the guild spam). I don't really know any 60s that aren't in guild, and definitely not any who raid BWL (as was mentioned in the article).
I pictured myself in these types of situations while I RTFA. I don't see this as "unattended."
The keyboard macros must have pissed them off, but jeebus, give a warning first. Unless there are parts of the story we are missing, this sounds pretty redic(k)ulous.
"It seems to me that if there was a similar real-world analogue, the account holder would be able to get some sort of redress to his losses in a court of law, or at least reinstatement."
I don't know whether to laugh or cry.....Its a GAME people!!
Yes, I know this is slashdot, but c'mon, suing over loss/dammage of an avatar?
Surely the loss of something REAL that costs you more than time wasted in fruitless endeavors is more important. Maybe like having a bank lose your account balance? Going through with legal action on something like this would just make the plaintiff look like a dick im most reasonable people's eyes.
You gotta face reality and move out of your mom's basement at some point!
i miss people's tells all the freaking time, with guild spam and area chat its easy to miss text even while you are paying attention
if your fighting a level 25 mob at 60, raising a weapon skill you could easily start a fight, go get something to eat, come back 2 minutes later (miss tells),.. and do it again, thats attended enough..
haha...24 years old and playing 3000 hours of warcraft. geez, get a life. go get a girl. getting banned could be the best thing that ever happened to him. now he can actually go out on a saturday night instead of sitting in front of a computer all night. What 24 year old would rather play warcraft than go to a bar or out with some friends? shrug your shoulders and move onto something else. it's not the end of the world
surely he can only have been cheating if he knew what he was doing was cheating? as far as he was concerned, he was complying with the rules of the game, using a keyboard advertised by blizzard themselves - something i'm sure there's many people out there doing at the moment.
i'm all for banning people who knowingly break the law, but how can he have done this if he didn't know. and there's also the matter of blizzard cheating their own customers out of 300+ euros and violating their own TOS to ban them after a single mistake.
The reason it was "mind-numbingly tedious" is because it was unnecessary. He was spamming attack commands to level up weapon skills of weapons he doesn't use. He could easily level up weapon skills against mobs that drop gold and items instead, but he chose to go the automated bot route. I have leveled up weapon skills numerous times without being identified as a bot, because I was actually playing the game and not just pressing buttons with my right hand while I watched a movie.
I think permaban is a little extreme with no warning, but he was definetly using automated processes to fight mobs. You can blame this on the fact that "the game is boring", but I would argue that it is simply his chosen way to play that made it boring.
The game itself allows you to create macros in game through the /m command and then in game you can assign a key to the macro button you just created. Maybe I'm being overly simple here, but to me that would mean that Blizzard does in fact not only allow macros but also assists the player in setting them up?
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
If I ever thought of playing WoW to see what all the fuzz was about, fuck em. This is clearly abusive behaviour from blizzard and I hope they get sued in court.
Botting- using automated processes to play on your behalf
Unattended - not being present while playing
Unresponsive - not responding to people trying to talk to you in-game
I am often unresponsive to annoying people. I've even gotten so bored I watched TV while grinding. MMORPG's and the time sinks set you up for mind-numbing reptition.
From his own description he was at the console pressing keys. He was not unattended or botting. He was unresponsive. The combination would certainly imply botting, but given the circumstances a suspension would be more valid than a ban. They gave lots of teleporting loot hackers suspensions rather than bans, but they'll ban over weapon skill grinding. That's messed up, but that's Blizzard under current management.
If a bot can play the game, you've done something terribly wrong in game-design.
So, games like chess, checkers, and Quake are poorly designed? When can we expect your awesomely-designed MMORPG to go gold?
EULA is now an enforcerable contract with a fanatical following on Slashdot. Who'd a thunk it?
I wonder if that will carry over to the next thread about the next change in Microsoft's license terms.
Has anyone ever established that an EULA is a valid contract in any state?
Edith Keeler Must Die
I'm not sure if mono and WINE are compatible, but mono does provide some .NET functionality on Linux. I have no experience with using it myself, however.
Where the heck is their support from, anyhow? It looks like 2 Indians and a Russian responded to your e-mails, at least giving a casual glance at the names. It's entirely possible that you're getting outsourced support and they may not be able to do anything directly for you.
Luckily I've never really spent enough time in MMORPGs since the original Asheron's Call Beta to go beyond lvl 10, but I almost never look at the chat stuff on my screen unless I'm actively working in a group. I mean Why would I care who's spamming the town? or whatever?
I think that the only reason I never got kicked from FFXI was because I was too low level for anyone to care. I often left my character running off in some direction un attended while I raided the fridge. ony to come back to him bouncing repeatedly off a cliff wall.
I think some sort of teleport ability would have been nice to have as there were some long stretches of wilderness to wander through when I got to about lvl 5 before I could find something worth fighting.
Sometimes I wonder if eBay pulls these stunts just for fun or to get a rise out of people. I know it takes valuable time, but the way to beat these asshats is to keep pounding them with the same (or similar) emails over and over and over until they cave. Took me over 14 months until I either found someone reasonable or they got sick of reading MY form letters.
A good paper to read is "Pengi: an implementation of a theory of activity", an AI program from the 1980s that played Pengo by actually looking at the screen. It can be done.
Ironically, having the bank lose your account balance IS losing something not-real that only costs you the time wasted in fruitless endeavors. The 'money' is just bits and bytes, just like the fine epic staff you got in WoW. In both cases the primary thing that you spent to get that item was your time and effort. If you are employed doing something like programming, you aren't even dealing with anything substantially more real than the WoW world anyway...
Granted, one other difference is that your landlord has agreed to take the non-real 'money' in your account in exchange for rent, rather than the epic staff. When is the last time you paid your rent in cash?
This is the exact reason why I quit WoW.
What is the difference of using a macro inside the game and simply clicking on the icon in your item bar? Nothing. This is pointless. Whenever I make a post to a GM in-game, I always get the "We are investigating this issue" message. $20 says GMs are nothing but bots too. I will soon be going to a lowbie zone and upping my crossbow skills since I just got a much better crossbow in my Rogue than the bow I had (stats anyways). I say we spam the hell outta blizz's inbox and see if they notice that this kind of stuff won't be tolerated.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Funny thing is that if he had just been paying attention to the window he would have been fine.
/tell. I bet dollars to donuts that you won't be able to see the tell. Turn your favorite music on and game sounds off, and you won't hear the tell. Good luck responding to something that you won't see. (Note that GM tells arrive in the normal chat box, the exact same way that tells from players do)
Please, Go turn off all your chat windows, and have someone send you a
I turn my chat boxes off simplt because I use Ventrillo for anything worth talking about, esecially in end game content. What this little encounter tells me is that if someone thinks I'm a bot, and I have my chat windows off, and I'm listening to di.fm, I can be banned without warning, and not have any say in the matter. Sounds pretty shitty to me.
I left WOW last year over a relatively minor misunderstanding because it took me 2 weeks of mailpong to get a response that was not a form letter with a EULA extract. I just didn't want to support a company that treats its customers like robots with dollar bills stapled to their foreheads.
*beep* *beep* *click* *whir*
Considering that WoW runs natively under Linux, why was he using wine? I smell a cheat.
This sounds completely unfair and is truly angering me. I can understand sending him a warning and a temporary suspension, but a complete ban for a first time offense (which in itself is debatable) for someone who has this high level a character is disturbing. Why would I want to invest more time into a system that could ban me without any recourse?
Strangely enough, the SWG team too seems to give even less of a rat's rear about people botting.
/macro command, calling itself again in a tail recursion way.) We're not talking pressing buttons while watching TV. We're talking people leaving their characters online for 8 hours fully unattended, to farm the NPCs in some area for xp.
E.g., not only they've tollerated Entertainers grinding xp while AFK all along, the info on how to set up a looping macro that gets you XP over time is part of a FAQ stickied right at the top of the official NGE Entertainer boards, on Sony's Station forums.
Let me stress that again: we're _not_ talking just automation, in which you absentmindedly press 2 buttons while watching a movie. (You can do that without macros in SWG anyway.) We're talking full-time, fully automated botting, in which you go to sleep or to work and leave the character online to get XP for a whole day. _That_ stupid.
In _public_ places. We're not talking about someone hiding in some remote place or in their player-house and hoping that Sony won't notice them. Go to the Mos Eisley cantina (i.e., _the_ main cantina in the game, as far as players are concerned) and you'll find a dozen AFK Entertainers dancing around on full-auto, grinding XP while their player is not even at home or awake.
E.g., the _only_ measure they've finally taken against fully automated grinding in combat classes, was to screw up the interface so you can't target an enemy. The character just shoots at whatever is under your crosshair, just like in a FPS (but really with all the bad sides of both a MMO and a FPS, and none of the disadvantages), just because that's something their scripts can't automate. Before you could have a script that basically says "target nearest enemy, attack, cast special attack, cast another special attack, heal, repeat" but their scripts can't say "turn the view so the nearest enemy is under the crosshair."
Again, the key there is that "repeat" at the end. (Well, technically it's a
Now roll that around in your head a bit. They royally screwed the interface and pissed off a lot of customers, rather than tackle the rampant cheating head-on.
It's freakin' sad.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So someone reports him as botting, gm checks it out, gm get's automated reply saying he's not at the computer while the character continues to attack a mob, he get's banned, end of story.
Regardless of what he was actually doing, he told a blizzard gm through his dnd message, that he was away from is machine, aka that he was botting.
Never mind the fact that whether or not he is violating a specific rule of the tos or not, he is clearly violating the spirit in which that rule was made.
I suggest that people send their concerns to Wowaccountrevieweu@blizzard.com
play on a emulated server makes the addiction far less since you progress through the game faster with experience multipliers.
this would loose customer length for blizzard, but should be an option. Since last time i checked, addictive substances are controlled in many countries. You should never have to run a game, that is meant to be interactivly fun, unattended. you need serious mental help.
i do agree he was botting. regardless if he was just watching movies with one hand on the keyboard. what is the point of the game, ESPECIALLY if the character is not owned by you and has no real value.
Why is there a moral distinction between automating a redundant procedure with obvious technology and automating a redundant procedure with muscle memory?
It's like Harrison Bergeron: you can be good at the game if you have quick hands, but if you're merely clever, we're going to shackle you.
Besides, if games don't want macroing, there's a simple solution. They should excise the boring and repetitive parts from their games. WoW did this for the most part, it trimmed a lot of the meaningless fat from the typical MMORPGs, its playability lead primarily to its success.
If the automated parts of the game were fulfilling in themselves, no one would automate them. If people are automating them, then they're making the game better. These people should be Blizz's best friends, Blizz should take notes from them.
Interacting with real people, in person? Are you kidding? You think Blizzard or NCSoft or whoever are good at nerfing, check out some of the Bush administration's patch notes!
Here's an interesting related article I read recently, which argues (in part) that the whole time > skill paradigm is a bad one, which would mean this whole "is using a programmable keyboard botting" question is completely beside the point.
-puk
You've never done a "/lick" emote? (yes, they exist)
I disagree. If you allow the use of such keyboards (and they do), then the amount of attention depends on how much attention the game needs. That means that when you fight a monster close to your own level it needs a lot of attention, and if you fight a monster much lower than yourself it requires little attention. I see few problems with what he did.
I apologize in advance if this offends you. That was in advance.
"at the time of the ban I had configured my keyboard to switch weapons, cast hex of weakness and renew myself, all with the press of a button." To have a single button do 2 spells that share the same global 1.5 second cooldown is 'against the rules'. That is exactly why you were banned. You can have a macro switch weapons and cast a spell while saying something. But to do something that spans across the 1.5 second cooldown (or is it 1 second?) will piss blizzard off.
How about camping a monster for 4+ hours and not even bothering to check if a gm is taking you to task because someone complained they couldn't train off the same monster. Now I haven't played WOW but if it is like any of the other mmorpgs training type monsters are in a limited supply and hogging one for hours is simply unacceptable behaviour. Presumably the gm's have the ability to interact with players regardless of any do not disturb functionality and ignoring them is not going to help your cause. It isn't likely about linux nor even macros. It is about not paying attention to the game. Let me guees this guy used the macros without checking the game. Healed himself regularly whether he needed it or not, never checked his chat buffer scrollback, etc. Pehaps he should have been given a warning ... maybe he was in game. Failure to respond to a gm is a pretty serious indication of bot-like activity and not all the gm's in the world are as mature as they could be.
And the answer is...
Ultimately, people put lots of time into these accounts, spend money keeping them activated, and some even spend money to buy in-game money and other bits for their characters, so ultimately ... they're worth money, and when money is involved, lawyers aren't far behind.
In this specific case, it sounds like the guy was technically violating their terms of service, or was violating the spirit and not the actual words, but wasn't really running a full fledged bot. (Dunno -- I don't know the specifics, and haven't read the WoW ToS documents.) While I don't doubt that the EULA allows Blizzard to do what they did, it does seem like a warning or some other sort of sanction would have been more appropriate, and all the form letter responses the guy got were certainly inappropriate. The guy was a paying customer ... you'd think they'd not be so quick to run him off. And now they've gotten yet another black eye from the case -- first the gay-friendly guild, and now this. You'd think they'd be a little more careful ... fair or not, right or wrong, this sort of bad press is probably costing Blizzard real money, and making money is exactly why Blizzard is doing all of this in the first place.
All the folks advocating legal remedies and class-action suits should keep one thing in mind. If the courts decide that the character is worth X amount of dollars for the purposes of damages, or worse yet that the equipment of said character is worth X dollars, that would be the "foot in the door" for the IRS to levy taxes on accounts and in-game trading.
/.) - if they get any case law on their side, that would be the beginning of the end of MMOG.
Don't think that's realistic? They've already stated unofficially that loot is taxable (the story was here on
You obviosly haven't ever read the second life EULA. It says exactly the opposite. THEY own everything you produce. They also deny any responsibility if you run afoul with the law in any way.
If players feel compelled to bot their way through tedium, then it says a lot more about the gameplay (or lack thereof) within WoW than it does about the players. Although, admittedly, they should be a lot more picky about what they choose to waste their time with. (I'm become bored quickly, so MMOs are about as fun as watching paint dry on the wall.) Anyway I don't see anything wrong with hitting macro keys every now and then. At least he's doing *something*, and not just having it run full auto without having to watch.
Carefully examine your case. Consider the TOS and AUP.
;)
:) It helps if you do high volume on it. I do about $20k/yr on my credit card {paying off as I go}, and they do not play around with me.)
Then, if you really honestly think you have a case, use your credit card's chargeback ability as a bludgeon. If you really think you have a case that you can make, then they'll start talking back if you can convince the credit card company to take your side.
(Keep in mind that by selling you the software, they *offered* to provide you with continuing service at a certain price. Because RPGs are a character building exercise for some people, that "future service" promise may be considered critical to the original purchase -- a sort of contract if you will. Furthermore, they did not give you a reasonable opportunity for dialog to resolve this issue independant of the credit card company {something the CC company wants} because they communicated with you almost exclusively through the form letters, failing to provide you with any meaningful communication.)
I don't know how well it will hold up, but getting the credit card company on your side is critical for you. You know how Blizzard can tell you to stuff it, do what it wants, and start ignoring you? Yeah, the credit card company can and will do the same thing to Blizzard -- if you can get them on your side. You're going to have to come up with justification (maybe like mine above) that holds water for charging back to day one. Mine may not hold up, so consider it carefully. But, you can expect someone at Blizzard will start talking if you can convince the credit card company that $200 worth of chargeback is justified.
Assuming you do get the CC company on your side, even if Blizzard doesn't give you what you want... well, you've got your $200 back
(You may have to threaten to cancel the card to get what you want, btw.
Second, what counts as "unattended activity"? Heck, sometimes my character (who's still stuck in EQ1) meditates while his puppeteer is off taking care of biological needs. Sometimes his meditation skills even improve while he does this. Is that "botting"? Sometimes I'm not paying much attention when I'm playing because my wife is yelling in one ear, or I'm half asleep--or I go comatose and my head hits the keyboard. Is that "unattended"? How do you measure the degree to which a player is attending to the game? The answer should be: you don't, you just make sure that if he isn't paying attention, he dies.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Legally, it is not a question of whether you should have to read every rule or not. The rules are there, you agreed...if you break them you suffer the consequences. Thus, if you want to avoid breaking them, you should read them. Now...considering every possible interpretation is another matter, which is why lawyers exist. However what this guy did was a very clearcut case of botting and he deserves what he got.
If people want to gripe about the form responses....thats one thing. I mean, Blizzard could obviously have made a better effort to handle this...however the ultimate decision they made sounds quite reasonable. If this idiot didn't realize that you couldn't bot in WoW...he deserves this.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I was also running a similar macro.. which is semi-against their ToS. My account was cancelled instantly. No warning or anything.
I emailed them a few times and got canned responses similar to what the story talks about here. Eventually I said that I had not completely understood the ToS and now that I did, I would not continue to use the macros that I was using.. and after a couple of pleas they turned my account back on.
It basically comes down to this.. due to the wording of their ToS they can consider basically anything to be a violation of the ToS if it involves third party software.. which could be keyboard software, mouse software, or any various keypusher program.. Usually they are able to detect the processes on your system and verify that it's coming from mouse or keyboard software, but I would guess in the WINE environ they weren't easily able to find the process and decided it must be some sort of bot process.
It's an extremely subjective thing.. because many highly touted mods/interface addons do things to 'take skill out of equation' which is basically the exact same thing to me.. I was just using the tools in the game along with a very simple bit of programming. Was it unfair? I guess according to them, any ability that one person has, that any other person doesn't(e.g. programming) makes it unfair.
Unattended macroing is against the rules.
It doesn't matter if you're using a programmable keyboard, EZ macros, or a pewter paperweight to hold down the F1 key, unattending macroing is unattended macroing and is against the rules in every mainstream MMOG there is.
Maybe you didn't know. I didn't know either when I first got my toon tossed in jail for macroing in Ultima Online 8 years ago. I continued to do it and eventually got banned. I don't macro anymore in any game.
Make a new character and don't macro anymore. It's cheating.
Anyway, the real culprit here is the game design. If Blizzard want their players to worship at the altar of the great Time Sink, then they can expect them to use things like this to make it less mind-numbingly tedious.
That's a fantastic point. I think games like Puzzle Pirates make a lot more sense. There, your skill in the game is determined by your real-world skill in playing various puzzle games. It seems like much more fun to me.
Anybody happy with others that follow that model?
1. casting multiple spells/performing multiple combat skills all with the press of a single button is botting.
No, that's macroing. Botting is automatically triggering macros based on feedback from the game (current health, etc).
2. The rules exists for a reason, and he broke them.
The reason being, lack of good design. You have to start at skill level 0 with each weapon you use, and grind for ages before it becomes even vaguely useful. Why? (For example) If I wrote using crayons for years, and I made the switch to pens, I wouldn't suddenly lose the ability to write coherent words on paper. A level 60 should be able to do sufficient (though less than optimal) damage even with no experience with a weapon. Then there's less temptation to spend hours not paying attention to the game.
3. If you have enough time to grind like this, power to you. I'm cancelling my account due to this, and Blizzard's constant increasing the amount of grinding needed to accomplish anything (in order to placate the high level characters who aldready did the grinding when it was easier for them)
If a chair is thrown in a forest, and there are no witnesses, did Ballmer still do it?
The bottom line is, he was skilling up weapons unattended. He attempts to justify this numerous times as if this is not a big deal but the fact remains that this is a clear violation of the TOS.
He agreed to the TOS, broke it, and tried to debate how it applies to him. He should just take responsibility and buy another account. He is not a victim.
After reading his lists, it seems it's most likley a combination of things, the repeated equal-spaced timed events from the keyboard, in combination with the lack of responsiveness while he was watching movies and yet continuing to preform actions, and the suspicious program list, probably all contributed to them writing him off as a bot.
Personally I think it's also a fault with the way WoW works, if you can can gain skills by doing trivial tasks repeatidly, the system is broken.. You learn a damn sight more about anything by pushing at the limits of what you can do, the game should reflect that.
Gold farming's harder to overcome, but coding the game to encourage skill farming?!?!
Botting is a "very serious" issue. If you bot, you're pretty much banned without the suspensions first.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
It's called autoattack. If you're a paladin you're very used to it.
P.S.: I'm no kid. I'm 24. Kids dont work for ISPs, usually ;)
;-) Now take your talents and go write a better WoW. Beat them via competition, not anger. ;-)
By my definition 24 is still a kid, albeit an older one.
Putting up with a company like Blizzard is like putting up with a company like Microsoft. And to think that people pay money for that. Its like they've been conditioned to accept abuse.
Oh, wait.... they are.
Hahahaha, 24 years old, working at an ISP, and he is 'no kid'...
Ever since the beta, I've been hearing nothing but bad experiences with Blizzard's customer service team / GMs on the internet. IMHO staff's willingness to work with the players is one of the main factors that determine the overall quality of an MMORPG. And frankly, any online game that values time spent doing something over all else to the extent that botting would gain players a huge advantage over anyone else isn't a game I want to be playing anyway.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
You're corrupting the term. Botting began in text based games and what it meant was that you'd program your client to issue commands based on key words the game presented (such as to monitor your health and issue a healing command when it went below a certain point), and then LEAVE YOUR COMPUTER. The test for botting was to engage the bot in coversation. If it couldn't reply intelligently (mindlessly saying "Hi *name of person who spoke to it*", you knew there was no one there. Kick, siteban. To be botting, your computer must be able to do everything it does without input from you.
Assuming that this guy's TV was visible from where he sat in front of his computer, what he did was macroing. Hit a key, observe that things are going how you expect, wait till it is til to hit the key again.
While it may not be allowed, it is in no way botting. Automation of a sort, sure. But not botting.
> Now think of the sheer size of the subscribers.
Yes, I believe many of the subscribers *are* Americans.
I did botted in some MMORPGs and this is not botting. That's a huge difference between botting and macroing.
A bot is aware of the surroundings and himself and can take several actions based on these data. Efectivelly replacing the human player. The macro is only a script repeating a boring action over and over...
So Blizzard allows you to script your own Macros through the console, but if you Macro through a keyboard that is botting? Okay then.
I've been playing WoW since Feb. 2005, and have pretty much seen it all in the game. I really hate to defend Blizzard, because really, they are pretty terrible when it comes to resolution of issues, but, this guy definitely was violating the TOS. It doesn't matter what you call it, but there are ways that Blizzard tracks what your character does throughout the game. A flag goes up if your character is sticking around in the same place in a zone for xx amount of time, and doing the same actions every xx seconds/minutes. On my server, Aggramar, there's a number of Rogue's who are bots that you can watch in Winterspring and Western Plaguelands daily where they'll attack self-healing mobs automatically, kill 'em, loot 'em, move a bit, come back, and do the whole thing over and over again. While the intention of these folks is to farm gold, it's essentially the same thing that this guy was doing. Call it what you will, but sorry man, you were exploiting the game. It's all good and fine to have macros, and I can sympathize about wanting to up your weapon skills at 60 (especially since Priests rarely use their melee weapons), but there's better ways to do it, and putting your toon on autopilot is exactly the same as a farming bot. You could've just run MC or BWL with your guild a few times and gone shadowform & meleed the lava packs and such, or help other guildies out in mid-level instances like Uldaman and Maraudon and leveled your melee weapon skills while healing your group.
But there was someone there: the gamer. Now, the fact the WoW is full of dull boring sequences because the designers are, well to put it correctly, not very imaginative, is the problem.
Were they far more imaginative, the restrictions of the game WOULD BE THE GAME, not TOS. But because they can't conceive of a complex world, they have to come up with a complex TOS.
Unattended means someone is not there - not that someone is there and is boringly pushing a button (and so what if they are?). Seems to me that Blizzard is confusing people with bots.
Feloneous
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
And again, it's not as simple as "don't like their rules, don't play". In order to know whether you like the rules, you have to read them and understand them as intended by those who will be enforcing them. That's not simple, particularly when the rules are often dependent on terms not defined, withheld conditions, or not even listed anywhere. And even if someone doesn't like the rules, why exactly shouldn't they play? They may still feel the merits of the game outweighs the rules they don't like.
But perhaps an actual example would help - since you think it's so simple, could you find the exact rule broken in this case and post it here?
best suggestion so far IMO
I hypothesized that Blizzard is just trying to keep players occupied; as proof, I wrote up a web page detailing my problems with their game and made a graph suggesting their design trends (based on their own patch notes).
http://www.redrival.com/hateown/
If you read through that page and temporarily consider it as some level of evidence, it will explain why Blizzard is not responding to customer complaints the way they should. Bottom line: they are just trying to keep players occupied.
"I for one, hopes he gets a good lawyer. Given that this is far from the first time I've heard these complaints, a class action suit against Blizzard may just be what's needed to shake things up." Why is it that everyone seems to want to sue Blizzard? For that matter, why is the first response to anything is to sue? Let's vote with our wallets and our feet. Articles like this provide the kind of bad PR for [fill in bad company of the month] that leads customers away. And THAT should be the first step: stop giving them money. It's free to us and it hurts them. Tell me again, why do we have to sue them?
While I don't think botting in WoW is a horrible thing, it is impossible, for all practical reasons, to create a game where people can't automate.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Maybe you haven't thought this through.
Its a game. Its not a fucking spreadsheet.
Now, educate me on how exactly you design the game 'properly' so that some external hardware device cannot mimic human keyboard commands?
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Just the otehr day I was fightingh a mob and talking to my wife. When a mob died, I just reached over and hit 'T'(targets next creature).
So I wasn't really paying attention, and only reached over to hit a key.Should I be banned?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But this would all be settled if he got refunded his latest subscription payment.
It's usually considered silly to drag disputes over $14.99 to court. If you ever get into the kind of problems that courts are designed to handle, you will certainly notice they completely dwarf this issue, annoying and unfair as it may be.
Also, for paying that small a fee, you can't reasonably expect Blizzard to maintain a full fledged legal system to deal with every argumentative misfit that has a complaint. You're pretty much guaranteed a system of summary banning at that price level.
I was going to comment that TFA is pretty absurd.
OP posts that he got banned for botting. Then he shows us all how he used a macro-enabling keyboard to flat-out bot his character. Then asks for sympathy. It's totally absurd.
Then I realized, "Hey, this is Slashdot!" The place were folks who have downloaded several hundreds or thousands of songs from illegal sources and got busted would come. I can read it now.
"Dudes, I got busted. I downloaded 1347 songs from this file sharing service called . I didn't play a freakin' cent for them. I modified my iPod to get rid of their damn DRM, so I could play anything. It's a sweet setup. Then, the RIAA tracked me down, and asked me if I was stealing music. I showed them my setup, and they sued my ass. Can you believe that shit? And, my iPod stopped working, and I asked Apple to fix it, but they refused, due to the fact that I cracked the case open and made changes to it. Man, this sucks. Do you think I can sue for stress?"
Naturally, 50% of slashdotters would symapthize with the guy.
according to the logitech g15 official website, "The 18 programmable "G Keys" allow you to execute macros--like casting spells in World Warcraft--with a single button press, and the backlit keys are great for lights-out play."
...It's not like they really ban anybody for botting there, it's practically par for the course. Bots roam freely there, and nobody cares what keyboard you have. They only care about revenue.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
There really should be an FAQ on how to deal with companies like this. This may be your first time being screwed. Sadly, it won't be your last.
;-)
...Posting Anon -- I still have my account, but for how long?
The correct way to address this issue is to realize that low-level flunkies have no power. They cannot correct matters. Your entire point when dealing with them is to document the company's [Blizzard's] bad actions. Document it in spades. Give them enough rope to hang themselves. Let them dig themselves deeper.
And always be polite!
You've done that already. Good.
Now call them up. Phone calls, not email. Start at the top. Phone the CEO. It can be done... In the unlikely event that fails, try others at the top of the power hierarchy. For example: The CFO, who controls the purse strings.
What you are looking to do here is to NEGOTIATE! You want your ban lifted. They can do that in 5 seconds. But you need to convince them that doing so is in their best interests. You need to convince them that there is a minor problem with their company policies that they are currently unaware of. That minor actions at this point in time can avert significant financial problems for them later on.
DON'T threaten legal action! Be nice. Be polite. You are doing them a favor!
You never want to threaten. You never want to be nasty. Always be nice!
If nothing else works, then contact a lawyer. Don't tell the folks at Blizzard you are doing this, or going to do this. That's what the lawyer is for.
Oh, and make sure your Lawyer seeks class-action status!
I know I, and I'm sure many other WOW players, have gotten bored by the "push these buttons 10,000 times" philosophy. It's pretty easy to learn LUA, and write a one-button-wonder AddOn. Then to invoke it from a MACRO. So every time you push a keystroke, or a mousebutton, it figures out what action to take and performs it. Be it casting spells, using weapons, or whatever.
WinXP, along with many other (read: Better) Operating Systems permit multiple input devices to be attached. So adding a second wireless mouse... Removing the mouseball... Going off to another room to watch TV while pushing the button... This is viable...
It doesn't even involve cheating. Unlike, say, hooking up a 555 timer chip to a relay to a $1 used mouse to automate mousebutton pressing. An electronic drinking-bird solution. (Hint: Use the 555 output as a current sink rather than a current source. As in connect 555 output - relay - resister - +power.) Not that I'd ever do anything like this... Oh no, I just loved sitting there for a hour at a time, summoning water over and over again, on the off chance that my guild might be raiding later that night. I'm a good little citizen consumer.
Oh, and even if you are watching the screen... By default, you have one chat window with two sections. If you are watching combat-chat, you will never see the GM's message... Even if it did show up, it would scroll by instantly. (You might mention that to the CEO.)
x
PS: I wonder if you can now log the message output? Share it via SMB to a linux box. Run perl on it, and trigger an alert (perhaps play a sound) when someone messages you. (Use perl -e '$|=1;while(){...}')
Supposedly you could do an alert-feature like this in-game with LUA. But I've had problems getting sounds to play in that environment. I'd hate to rely on it for something so critical...
There was once a great company named Blizzard They made many a great game Blizzard started unfairly banning orcs and wizards It started acting very lame The begining of the end is when great fans quit They should've known better, we won't put up with that s**t
If what he did was botting, then the 'create all' button under any trade skill is also botting. There have been many times i sent a toon enough mats to power level through a skill, i hit create all and go away, 45 minutes later, i have a bag of crap to sell off, but i also dont get banned.
Blizzard says that the dont ban on first offense, we know they do. The guy claims he fought one mob for no xp, loot, or rep. Since Blizz refuses to talk about anything (as per the norm) we can only assume he is telling the truth. That being the case, he shouldn't have been banned.
The sad part is the bulk of people that think his' banning was fine are either anti-MMO, or just anti-wow.
It's nice to see such deep thought out there.
I call BS on this assertion.
He claims he was only 30 points away from the ceiling for the various skills. Why would anyone bother to be away from the game for that much time and come back and suddenly decide their first course of action would be to give these little used skills a bit of a boost by setting up keyboard macros to fight lower level mobs? He could more easily have just gone around manually fighting stuff for an hour or two, or not even really care about those few points, which would just come automatically over time while doing more fun stuff. It's just not the kind of thing people grind for.
I find it amusing that with each email to Blizzard, he gives away more things he did wrong without them ever actually coming out and identifying any of them. This is classic behavior of someone who was caught but isn't sure which of the things he did he was caught for, so he attempts to come up with one excuse after another for all the possible different things.
In the end, even if all he was doing is exactly as he explains it, it's still counts as using 3rd party technology to automate macro-tasks without being engaged in the game himself. Maybe not worthy of full termination, but even then, still debateable. However, given all the clues, it sounds like there is more to this than he is letting on. Based on just this information and this one story, I am not going to jump to the conclusion that Blizzard did anything wrong in this regard or has bad policies for this stuff.
Asking people to think is like asking them to buy you a new car
*Yes, botting. "Playing" the game while not listening to or looking at the computer is botting. Just beause his program/macro was simpler in abilty and scope does not make it any less a bot.
-
But why would I want to do a thing like that?
Except some courts have found that the gold you earn in the game is a form of work, and subject to certain protections.
To paraphrase cookie monster, EULAs are a "sometimes contract".
The EU has even stronger protections for customers.
Fine, I'll take yours!
This sort of thing is the reason I stopped playing WoW, and in fact any game that (A) requires a monthly fee to play, and (B) has a customer service department that is obviously understaffed, overworked and applying vague rules unevenly and (therefore) unfairly.
In short: if you want me to spend money every month on you, you're going to have to step up to the plate and provide decent customer service for me, and that includes treating customers fairly when you *don't* want their money any more -- after all, after reading this story, why should I work to build a character up to level 60 if I might lose everything without notice for no reasonable reason and with no opportunity for justice?
(Insert rant about Blizzard and how this relates to bnetd and the DMCA here.)
http://outcampaign.org/
i think wizards of the coast said it best? "If you are in your basement pretending to be an elf, you should at least have some friends over to help." -A D&D ad.
I agree with the gist of what you have said, but EULA's arent really necessary. yet- they haven't been really tested in court, so the exact legal ground they occupy is similar to a contract, but not quite. Although that could all change once they are tested in court.
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
after the bnetd thing, this really isn't any suprise. they're like the game publisher version of sony.
US$0.02++
So why don't they say so in the T&Cs? If they're going to ruin several months worth of gameplay then they should make it clear beforehand that they're going to do so!
Blizzard probably didn't give 2 shites about your OS or method of running WoW....now having hardware do the "human" or "user" work for you, because it's a boring task, and you're level 60, yadda yadda...lazy and it's your own fault. Might as well run a fishing bot while you're at it....right right, they keyboard is hardware...you just got lazy and figured ya fooled the system, well...
DJB
DJBeSSeR
Now, educate me on how exactly you design the game 'properly' so that some external hardware device cannot mimic human keyboard commands?
Maybe make a game that actually requires brain activity to succeed? We're not talking about a chess playing super computer here, or some cutting edge artificial intelligence. This game is exploitable by simple keyboard macros, which shows that it is far too simplistic. It rewards repetitive behaviour, and as a result, suffers from this sort of exploitation.
>>A keyboard is not a software product.
Does said keyboard has a separate LCD panel and set of keys that allows the user to create Macros?
Or did the user have to insert a CD into his machine to install SOFTWARE that would enable said macro functions?
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
Found this on the US forums:
w ow-tech-support&t=747600&tmp=1#post747600
:)"
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=
Blizzard poster NickJS saying, "No you cannot be banned for using this keyboard." and "Some of us even use them.
He got popped for botting... and is not telling the whole truth.
In the course of an investigation the player will be attempted to be contacted several times over a 15 minute period. The character will then be trasnfered to another area if the character still exhibits the same actions in a new context, an attempt at communication will be attempted again, if at that time the player is still not responding then they will be removed from the game and will get a warning or temp ban. If this action is seen again after all steps are takin they will get temp banned. All of this also has to be be reviewed by a manger. Only on the third offense (sometimes second) will the player be permenatly banned. Unless the player had already recieved numerous infractions and was close to account closure already then they might lose the account on the second offense.
This is the same policy used to check for afk botting in AV. Remeber you can use a macro or bot in AV to prevent AFK, you just need to be able to prove you are sitting at your desk and see the messages. The teleportation is used to make sure that even if the player had no chat window open or spoke the native language of the server. Once the same action is seen after being teleported it is hard to argue that the player was infact at the keyboard, and not using a program while afk for an extended amount of time.
Of course I never worked for Blizz and all of this is conjucture
So, some guy gets banned because he looks like he is botting, by Blizzard admins who look like they are botting ;).
Perhaps the admins are using a special keyboard to ban users without too risking RSI.
"Just make the game fun to play, and people won't want to bot. When's the last time you saw someone bot an adventure game like Monkey Island? It would defeat the purpose."
that's the most sensible post i've seen in this whole article.
Check out my women's designer clothing store.
Does said keyboard has a separate LCD panel and set of keys that allows the user to create Macros?
I don't know. And since they didn't ask, presumably neither did they
If they're going to write the agreement and be the ones interpreting it, then they should be a lot more clear about it than this, as well as what the penalty is for violating hese terms.
Blizzard have completely destroyed something that has value to this user based on something that is a violation of an unclear term in their user agreement, and in doing so have reacted considerably more extremely than their stated policy indicates. Thheir legal right to do so doesn't make it reasonable.
Problem here is: they don't really care, and you can't make them care. There's no independent organisation (NO, SLASHDOT ISN'T) that can make them rethink their decisions. They say you're banned, goodbye, you're the weakest link.
Online Gaming just has become a normal business, where customer sometimes get screwed, or just are subject to someone with a monday-morning-temper.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
They say that if you break the rules you'll be punished. Right?
Well, they also say they can punish you any way they see fit. Right?
Botters get banned without any warning. The only thing worse than the botting is the kiddies using teleporters.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
They say that if you break the rules you'll be punished. Right?
But not that programmable keyboards are against the rules.
Well, they also say they can punish you any way they see fit. Right?
They say "Accounts are closed when a player has excessively and/or grossly violated our policies. When an account is closed, the player is no longer able to access the account. Account Closures are rare and represent a player who is unable to abide by our rules and insists on negatively affecting other players' enjoyment of the game or harming the service itself.". The user has neither excessively or grossly violated their policies. He has indicated he is willing to abide by the rules since they have been clarified. He has not negatively affected other playrs enjoyment except in a very abstract manner, and has not harmed the service. So no.
Blizzard has a long and rich history of creating games that rely on making players perform drudge work rapidly.
Starcraft, for example, introduced the limited build queues and limited selection group size specifically to increase the amount of drudge work in the game. The tasks added were simple and mindless, but because they forced the player to click the mouse and hit keys more quickly, Blizzard felt that the player was more excited. (Contrast this with, say, Total Annihilation -- which is currently being enhanced and cloned for Linux -- which allowed a player to automate essentially all of the drudge work and simply focus on high level strategy.)
Regrettably, the main goal of computers (eliminating drudge work) runs counter to this approach to game design. A number of people who want to use the computer for, well, its primary reason for existence, are going to chafe. These players may want to focus on the higher-level strategy and not simply engage in a clickfest. Blizzard feels that this conflicts with their game design, and will attempt to stop people from taking this approach.
Contrast this to, Stuart Cheshire's Bolo implementation. Numerous quite sophisticated bot programs were produced, ranging all the way from adding small automated features or recording a map of seen area all the way up to fully automated AIs that could be played against. Frankly, I thought that this was both cool and fun.
It all depends on the mentality of the game designer. Some people feel that drudge work is fun, some don't. Some players want a high level strategy game with action to watch, others want to be required to perform every click themselves.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Here's another good example of Blizzard imposing drudge work on players -- consider Diablo. Diablo is basically an extremely simplified version (and made real time) of the gratis and libre Angband.
Diablo relies mostly on forcing the player to click rapidly, and minimally on some strategy.
Angband has long had the Borg built in, a fully-automated AI that can play based on simple criteria for the player. The most advanced variant of Angband that I am aware of is ToME. ToME provides a system for recording and using macros that operate on designated objects (including by player-designated name). ToME provides a scheme for automatic pickup of items designated by a variety of criteria. ToME allows automated movement that is interrupted based on a number of player-specified criteria. ToME provides a scheme for automatically performing actions on objects -- such as "destroy all cursed long swords, but retain cursed Demonswords".
As a result, Diablo is basically a drawn-out sequence of forced drudge work, whereas in ToME, the player need only perform the work necessary for the strategy that he wants to conduct.
Granted, for the ToME approach to work, the game has to be sophisticated enough that automating the drudge work leaves plenty of entertaining game to play.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
"*Whaaa Whaaa* Poor mean old blizzard banned me for not paying attention to my script! It wasn't a bot, it was a script I left running for HOURS doing the same task to level while I was out doing something else, how is it my fault some GM messaged me and I didn't respond? Things are so different the me running a bot, and I bet it was the WINE part........"
Seriously, he set up a script to run and handle a repetitive task for him while he was away from the keyboard.
While it could be argued that it technically wasn't a bot, this sure has the properties of one. Running a script/micro with the sole purpose of repetitively doing some task(leveling up, getting money, etc) through automated means with no/little user supervision seems very bot like to me.
As for the wine part, well I wouldn't blame them for acting suspicious since you were behaving like a bot, and people love trying to use what ever means they can to hide their cheating/bot-stuff from Blizzard's programs/eyes.
First of all, forget about WINE. That's not what they mean by "external software". They probably didn't even know you were running WINE until you told them. "External software" means that you had handed off control of your character to a software entity.
As indeed you had: the pre-programed key sequences in your keyboard. Of course, that's nowhere near as sophisticated as a true bot, but it still gives you a big advantage.
Then again, they probably don't care about programmable keyboards per se. It's just that the only way they can tell if somebody's using a bot is to look for bot-like behavior. Standing in one place, doing the same thing over and over, and doing it faster than a human hand could manage — that's clearly bot-like behavior. So don't act like a bot, and you'll be OK.
but he chose to go the automated bot route
He didn't use a bot, dumbass.
Oh please, the guy was botting with the gaming keyboard.
He writes that he did it from Saturday to Sunday to increase a skill.
That's botting.
He wasn't using the keyboard to make gameplay easier, he was doing it so he didn't have to sit at the computer and 'grind' away.
I think that's a clearcut case of botting, where you set something unattended. You're not even monitoring the darn thing. It's one thing to set up attack strings or whatever witha programmable keyboard, but its quite another to just set a series of motions to repeat indefinitely and then stop interacting with the game.
He did grossly violate policy by automating his playing. That's against the rules. There's no arguement here.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
For those interested, there has been an update.