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Blizzard Officially Files Against WoW Glider
Marcus Eikenberry writes "Blizzard and Vivendi today filed against MDY
Industries, the makers of the 'WoW Glider' software. Glider allows World of Warcraft players to 'play' while away from the keyboard; the software moves the player's avatar along a set path, following a complex set of instructions dictated in advance. Blizzard is seeking injunctive relief and money damages against MDY. What that means is they want him to stop the production of WoW Glider and they want him to pay them damages. Blizzard believes that Glider infringes on their intellectual property. They believe Glider allows players to cheat, giving them an unfair advantage and that they believe Glider encourages Blizzard customers to breach their contracts for playing the game. Last they claim that Glider is designed to circumvent copyright protections."
That doesn't sound like a bad idea, except that the devil's in the details. How do you handle equipment that gets picked up along the way? Also, don't forget that players learn how to effectively play their characters while they level up. If they suddenly create a new character of a different class, they won't necessarily know how to use that character, which would cause all sorts of grief for any group that player joins. How much gold does that character get? Also, different people level up different skills at different rates and/or take slightly different paths. How do you handle those as well?
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You dont play many MMO's do you? Have you stopped to consider the suck that would come from teaming with someone who has never played a warrior before and all of sudden has all these abilities and powers and no idea how to use them effectively?
Bad. Idea.
Except that grinding is Blizzard's main money earner, and therefore they have absolutely no desire to give people the ability to work less than is possible. In fact, the opposite is true- Blizzard wants to make it harder to get to level 70.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Or you could simply go find another game.
Seriously, such a thing would be pointless. your new character would start with what? beginner equipment? Might work for a mage, but a warrior type is only as good as his weapon in most cases.
Then there's the whole issue that you're not playing the game anymore. I'd be fine with it if you could start a new character at level 10 or so. Before that you cant do anything, but its low enough that even beginner equipment is usable to make a little change, to buy something useable for your level.
This point can seem to be a strong suit.
This is really a legal issue? Can I be put in jail for taking a few 100 extra monopoly dollars when no one is looking? The first thing I can think of is Insider Trading, which is punishable, but is a video game = the stock market?
Can the company be held responsible, even if it's the users choice? If I tell my friend that if he drives really fast when a police offer wants to pull him over, am I responsible when he runs from the cops the next time he might be asked to pull over while driving?
This seems laughable, but IANAL. Copy protection? I guess all users are circumventing such protection. One could draw a stern defense that a person playing WoW becomes little more than an automated computer program. Though, I'm not familiar with Glide or how it interacts with the WoW programming, but I imagine it just a program that interacts with the WoW client or the packets it sends to automate processes.
What's Blizzards strength for their argument besides "they're breaking our EULA or TOS"? Are they saying that "Hey, we've had to ban 100,000's of accounts because people are using your products and we want you to pay us back for those 100,000 accounts. Lets see, that's 100,000 accounts at $15 / month and the average account is active for 1 year. So, pay us $18,000,000."
Hmmm... could local governments sue nitrous and 'after market' car parts manufacturers that encourage people to drive over the speed limits? Or maybe a better analogy would be those who cause accidents and injure other people. Could those injured parties sue the manufacturers of such products?
Cheers,
Fozzy
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
Something doesn't make sense to me.
Why pay to play a game, and then have a computer play it for you?
First, it seems like a waste of your dollars. You might as well just install Progress Quest. It will play for you too, and it's free.
Second, if an RPG has simplistic enough mechanics that it *can* be played automatically, then it seems too simple to be interesting to a human.
Maybe if WoW did not require its players to be automatons, then this kind of automation would not be a problem?
I mean seriously, who wants to play a game where you must repeat the same mind-numbing tasks over and over again to progress in the game? (Let alone pay for the privilege...) I am amazed that these games are successful at all.
This is a game design issue.
That's a big "no," if ever I heard one.
I still play Diablo II, and I have to say that I've seen a pattern of unreasonable behavior on Blizzard's part. Preventing cheating is one thing, but who defines cheating? They do, and their definition is pretty much "regardless of whether the program is completely harmless and improves a crappy aspect of our game, it's still cheating if it allows a player to play our game in any way that wasn't determined solely by us." The one that really gets to me is the map thing for Diablo II. For the love of God, nobody that still plays Diablo II enjoys exploring the same levels over and over and over again.
I'm also not a big fan of their anti-cheating tactics, and I applaud these people for circumventing them, even if it may have been for a bad cause.
Haiku for you!
But there is a point at which is doesn't benefit Blizzard to make it harder. It's a parabola, not a liner graph. At a certain point it's too hard and players begin to stop playing/paying. Blizzard has to find that sweet spot between hard enough and too hard.
Not to make too fine a point on it, but they appear to have been successful in that venture.
Is this guy serious? "it is not really a cheat program"? No, it doesn't dupe items. It just gives you a massive competitive advantage, equivalent to a bunch of other ways of cheating (that the author delightfully lists) in violation of the ToS. That's not cheating at all.
What a tool.
Regardless of how the game mechanics work, it strikes me as the epitome of wrong for them to sue someone for a 3rd party app. It's not interacting with their servers any differently than the client (because it uses the client) and itself is not hurting their player base. Sure, players get annoyed by glider-farmers, but it was the concious decision of a person to use that tool. If anyone is responsible, it is the person using it on their account ("guns don't kill people, people kill people"). Next, most players assume the person who runs in and kills stuff and doesn't talk is a bot, but it could easily be people like myself or my wife. We don't keep public chat up (emote/say/tell/yell/any general chat), and we play pretty...aggressively. Tag it or we take it. The point of all this being, it's impossible to figure out what the actual damages from bots are, opposed to just assholes like us. Finally, do we want bliz to be able to sue anyone who doesn't play the game a certain way to be able to sue? Is that even reasonable? Hard-core raider? Feel my lawsuit.
Glider sounds like nothing more than WinBatch, or VisualBasic's (or any other language's) SendKeys. If software that automates input is truly illegal, how far down does it go? Would this apply to the BIOS (or whatever) that feeds op instructions to the CPU?
"You know you're narcissistic when you quote yourself in your sigs." -- PRoPAiN!
I think you're missing the big picture. Blizzard will never address your grievances on this issue because in the end it makes them money to not implement your change.
As a wow player, here's how I see it. Most people will fall into two camps:
1. Will make one character and play them all the way to level cap
2. Will muddle around with a whole bunch of characters not really advancing quickly with any particular character
The second group isn't a problem for Blizzard at all, because the creation of content is reused over and over for every one of that player's characters. It is the group 1's that causes Blizzard so much angst.
To keep group 1's happy, Blizzard has:
- Added more content. Most of it was better gear and not so much story driven, though the caverns of time looks promising (haven't been yet)
- Extended the level cap simply extending the period of time before there's nothing left to do
- Introduced end-game PvP as an incentive to keep playing instead of just a small pastime from grinding, item hunting, raiding dungeons
The one thing they never needed to add was the drive for people (once level capped) to roll new characters. Because of the large amount of time to get to the high levels, thats a large amount of time that you're not 'bored' at max level with nothing to do. Bored players are unhappy players, and if they're so unhappy playing the game, they're more likely to quit.
Personally, I really enjoy playing through the entire content over again. It isn't so 'griding' back up to with new chars since after the first or second character, you should know the best, most fun ways to level up. I don't grind levels often because I play new characters to -enjoy- the content, not to be king-o-the-hill.
--rant--
My biggest pet peeve is people in game talking about how bored they are. This is supposed to be entertaining. If it isn't entertaining anymore please quit and find something else to do!
Bye!
As compared to all the warriors who has leveled themselves and still doesn't know how to hold aggro?
Bad warrior! No heal for you!
Yes, you hurt people.
You contributed to the breaking of the in-game economy. You made it harder for other people, who don't happen to share your particular play style, to gain gold playing as the game designers intended. You made it profitable for the gold-selling ****tards to spam players' in-game mail and chat. You have made that game a worse place.
Korvar the Fox!! www.korvar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk