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Blizzard Officially Files Against WoW Glider

Posted by Zonk on from the it-sorta-kinda-is-cheating dept.

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."

3 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Circumventing Copyright is a bit of a stretch by fotbr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm not a lawyer, but to me it seems like a tacked on item "because they can".

    As for the rest of their claims...I guess I can see the point, but if you look at the glider forums it would appear that Blizzard is being fairly strict on banning accounts. If Blizzard is able to utilize the ban-hammer effectivly enough, the problem will solve itself. And then people will move on to the next bot.

    The ONLY way for blizzard to make the problem go away is to remove the requirement to grind every character up to lvl 60 or 70. My suggestion would be to give people the ability to create alternate characters starting at any level UP TO the level of their highest character. So if you've got a level 52 mage and you've decided mages suck and want to play a warrior, you could create a new warrior character at any level between 1 and 52.

    1. Re:Circumventing Copyright is a bit of a stretch by rob1980 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Mythic did this with Dark Age Of Camelot, giving you the option to start at level 20 and implementing NPCs to give you starter equipment, etc.. However hindsight being 20/20, they stated that starting a character at level 20 did more harm than good due to it killing the 1-20 crowd. The bottom line is, the easiest thing you can do to kill your incoming customer base is to give them nobody to play with.

  2. One valid reason for it to exist by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 3, Interesting

    After you've leveled up a few toons to 60, sorry 70 now, its a PITA to level up the rest of your toons. Same thing happened in D2, where it was a MAJOR PITA to level up to 99 -- Blizzard tried banning a few people, but the bots kept coming, and eventually they gave up.

    If the author really wanted to keep WoWGlider going, he would of open-sourced it before got the big take down. I seriously doubt he has the money to win the legal case.

    Didn't bnetd teach us anything??