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Blizzard Sues Creator of WoW Bot
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft, are suing Michael Donnelly, the creator of the MMO Glider program, which performs key tasks in the game automatically. Blizzard says the software bot infringes the company's copyright and potentially damages the game. 'Blizzard's designs expectations are frustrated, and resources are allocated unevenly, when bots are introduced into the WoW universe, because bots spend far more time in-game than an ordinary player would and consume resources the entire time,' Blizzard wrote in its legal submission to the court. More than 100,000 copies of the tool have been sold while more than 10 million people around the world play Warcraft. Donnelly says his tool does not infringe Blizzard's copyright because no 'copy' of the Warcraft game client software is ever made. The two parties are now awaiting a summary judgment in the case."
Don't really see how it infringes on the Warcraft copyright; but maybe it infringes on the trademark somehow if it's being marketed as something official to Blizzard and WoW, and giving customers the perception that this is an extension of the WoW service. As for damaging WoW by taking up more resources than the normal player would; what if I were an abnormal player who is on nearly 24/7; is there some provision in the agreement where I am charged more for the subscription or something?
This is only a problem in a game like WoW where you can't lose items on death (specifically to other players) and are built around a constant grind to get that next tier of armor or those next few points in the battlegrounds to get that next tier of weapons. Darkfall, while long in development, is a game that offers complete freedom to the players to run their world as they see fit. If they wish to just be in chaos all the time and killing each other willy nilly, then so be it! If they wish to form a world full with alliances throwing blows at each other here and there to capture more resources (which is the hope/intent of the game) and build more cities, then they can! You can be a roving assassin picking off lone targets who venture too far from a town by themselves, or you can join a massive player army to raid enemy towns and fortresses.
How? Unless he stole source code and used it in his program, I don't see how. Maybe I'm just missing something, but I don't think this program infringes on their copyrights, it may violate other things like their TOS, but this seems to be merely and intimidation act to make him shut down.
A program that plays the boring parts of the game. Can he come up with a program that does the boring parts of my life while I'm out having fun?
I'm really glad to see Blizz taking action against botters.
I've seen many folks using programs like this and they have ruined many MMOs, (esp. FFXI and Lineage 2).
It's about time a company really stands up and tries to prevent this sort of thing.
I don't know about free software, with that they may have trouble, but this guys program is pay to use, so they might be able to take him to task for it.
Less botters = less annoyance
For those that say this doesn't affect us regular players, just wait until you hit a battleground and ten people are botting, it really ruins the experience and wastes a lot of time.
IANAL but i'd expect there to be something in the WoW contract you sign saying that you can't use bots. wouldn't that be a better way to get at him rather than copyright violation?
Bots are grossly overrated for MMOs for the most part. Sure, there are some few players that will use them in WoW and other games, but for the most part, people want to experience the game. And many bot users are very easy to spot, as their users don't put in enough to make it believable.
I am kind of surprised that Blizzard is doing this, but I think it's just a publicity thing, and they don't really care if they make any cash off of it. They are just trying to placate the masses on the forums that worry about every single little thing they can.
The reality is, bots make money for Blizzard. Once an account is banned, the player has to purchase a new box of the game to start playing again. And with the expansion, that's 2 boxes. So, Blizzard makes money off of the players that register new accounts/CDs every time they get banned.
Besides, most gold farmers are played by humans, not bots.
Maybe instead of suing people who run bots to avoid grinding, they should make grinding less boring/time-consuming? Grinding is really the only reason they aren't getting $15/mo from me.
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so i can pay $10/month to have a bot do the boring grinding for me.
Oh wait.. that's why i don't play in the first place. Why the hell would you play an rpg that can be played more effectively by a bot than a human?
</flamebait>
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
This program almost certainly does not infringe on Blizzard's copyright. However, (1) this program exists for the sole purpose of cheating, and (2) cheating is a violation of Blizzard's terms of service. In other words, they're encouraging people to violate their contract with Blizzard, which could be considered tortious interference.
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and I don't know whether Blizzard is actually arguing this angle.)
I like Blizzard, but this argument smells of Comcast logic.
"We sold you X access, but you are using X access. Even though we promised you X access, we really don't want you using X access, and we don't even want you using almost X access that much. So we're taking action."
-Comcast starts forging packets to kill bittorrent transfers, even though they advertise/sell that bandwidth, they don't want you using it all the time.
-Blizzard starts suing to kill automated clients that are in the game, even though they advertise/sell you that access, they don't want you using it all the time.
I understand there's more lying underneath, but this reasoning doesn't win them any sympathy from me.
Maybe Blizzard should take money they're putting into suing this guy and put it into a game people don't want to have a bot play for them.
For the copyright portion, they argue it is an infringement because the program copies the WoW client into RAM. I assume they mean from this it copies all the important executable files from the hard drive to a RAM drive. Of course this is a copy, but is it an infringement? The bot program isn't moving this 'copy' to any other user, and I could easily see this same argument used for a HDD backup infringing, which I'm sure wouldn't stand up. The TOS is a more probable win I think for Blizzard, but this one hinges on did the bot writer infringe, or the individual bot user infringe. Since he had to test this thing during development, I would assume he had to infringe on the TOS, but I don't think that will get them too far either, but as usual IANAL.
In Guild Wars (another MMORPG), those using bots are discouraged from doing so by a method different from suing those that write the macros -- ArenaNet (the devs) simply sniff out (using various AI mechanics) those that use bots and ban them from the game. This action is covered by the EULA that users accept before playing.
Whether EULAs hold up in court, etc. is another issue entirely, but in cases such as banning for using bots I'm fairly certain ArenaNet wouldn't have problems defending themselves.
People don't want to use bots in GW because they'll get banned. It takes tweaking the AI bot-sniffing to keep up with macros, but the system works well enough that high-profile lawsuits are unnecessary.
I like basketball!!1!
A few months later when I was trying to see if it would be helpful to bot for a Netherdrake, I lost my account in a Blizzard bot sting. WoWGlider was good up until that point. I would have quit WoW earlier without it, so Blizzard got more money from our household (I had two accounts--one for cousins and nieces coming over to play--that account I still have but it is long inactive.) Now I waste that extra time here on /.
*iza
Careful What You Wish For....
I can't wait for the future when cute Haley Joel Osment-looking robots are farming in World of Warcraft XVI and this argument becomes an ethical debate as to whether he has a soul.
The program does not make a copy of any of the game files, it simply reads the memory space that wow.exe loads into and responds to certain procedure calls and what not in the memory. For example, a monster is on the map and the client loads it in memory to prepare it for rendering. Even if the player cant see it, the program can because wow.exe loaded it into memory. The program can see and interact with the wow.exe executable by reading what wow puts in the memory.
I assume Blizzard must have some sort of time limit each player can be in the game? This would surely help prevent addiction and such. Pretty cool of Blizzard to implement it that way.
Makes sense that they would sue if this bot somehow breaks out of the time limits. How does it do that anyway? If a bot can do it then I imagine a regular player could do it and then spend as much time as they wanted in the game which could be unhealthy.
microsoft, apple, canonical LTD, transgaming technologies, etc are all guilty of copyright infringement because they make a copy of the game and store it to ram.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
All Blizzard needs to do is put it in the Terms of Service that USERS cannot use bots. Then they can suspend all users using bots on their system. Blizzard is just down the street from me. Maybe I should drive down there and tell them this.
Why back in my day we used pencil and PAPER to move our characters around. And we rolled DICE to see if our characters could hit a monster. It's all you young whippersnappers and your compewters that screwed up the game with your bots that rolled the dice for you that are to blame for the short attention spans you all have.
(For those that can't see past the humor: Computer Games->DND as Bots/Macros->Computer Games, i.e. Blizzard is inherently being hypocritical)
Blizzard has always been a royal hineypain. You can even get banned for using keyboard macros.
I just play on the free servers.
Play Anarchy Online: Free, better crafting, you can fly at level ~20 out of 220, you don't have to play tetris nearly so often as either HGL or WoW.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Guild Wars does it right. I think Blizzard should keep real world PVP, but implement it differently. I think as soon as someone initiates PVP, an new toolbar should appear, and everyone should be the top level with top gear so it it balanced. There should not be level 70s killing level 20s and other grief tactics. In other words, PVP XP and PVE XP should be completely different.
MDY has only one member, Michael Donnelly. Court documents reveal he made more than $2.8 million in revenue from selling Glider.
http://gameactivist.blogspot.com/2008/03/update-blizzard-vs-mdy.html
Just give people with max level characters the ability to purchase (for the same price as glider) a level 60 character. It's pretty easy isn't it?
Wow, this reminds me of 2006.
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/11/20/blizzard-sued-by-wow-glider-creator/
Except in 2006, he was suing them.
On some MUDs, if a player was suspected of botting, other players would give them an on-the-spot Turing test. Those who failed would be attacked.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
they can kick and ban all the bots they like, and it's not as if theyre hard to spot. bm hunters with pets named "cat" or "owl" hacking away with an axe because they ran out of ammo a day ago?
how about instead of paying their lawyers in attempts to ridiculously broaden copyright law they pay their programmers to put a stop to the account hacking which resulted in 15,000 gold worth of void crystals being stolen from my guild's bank.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Oh boy, another case of a company trying to make their own laws cuz they think they're powerful enough to do so. What is it with corporations and not being able to understand that their security can't detain or shoot people, they can't spy on their employees at home, and they can't sue bot makers. How arrogant can you get? If they would get over themselves and actually pay up to have their programmers create anti bot measures, they wouldn't be having this problem.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Someone charged 3 copies to my credit card. I refuted the charges, but the pile of paperwork my credit card company sent me was not filled out correctly so I had to pay for them anyways. And the window (30 days) my credit card company has to reverse the charges expired before I could redo the paperwork.
I suspect a lot of people get illegal WOW Glider charges on their credit card and don't notice them (it's not like buying TVs on a credit card).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
WoW doesn't mandate it. You can never spend a single day grinding and have plenty of things to do. The problem comes from people who get in to this pissing match of having to have something just because others have it. So they want to automate it.
If people would just play the game to have fun, it wouldn't be a problem. It is a game, you don't "need" anything in it. Just do whatever it is you like to do. If you like to grind (surprisingly some people do) then grind. If you don't, don't. However don't get mad and say that you should get reward X that the grinders get.
More or less, Blizzard has a bunch of different kinds of rewards for different things. You can't get any reward doing any thing. However whatever it is you like doing, there are rewards for it.
The problem is when people aren't playing it to have fun, but playing it because they want to have all the best of everything. Well, that's pretty hard, since you have to do a whole bunch of different things. So they'll get bots to grind and such. That is just stupid. If all you care about is having the best, what's the point? The point should be to do whatever is fun. It is all just a game, none of it matters, other than to have fun.
I came up with this kooky business model to make a lot of money, and for a while it made a lot of money.
I thereby conclude it should be made law, since it is profitable to me, and it should be illegal for anybody to change the world around my business model in a way that might invalidate it.
After all, we know that modern American society consists of only "corporate citizens" and "consumers". It should be obvious to any observer that the constitution only grants rights to citizens.
Thanks,
Blizzard, RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The problem with that approach is the amount of money made before the bot is shut down can exceed the cost of new game licenses.
If they can ebay off enough in game stuff before they get banned to cover the costs of their copies of *, then it is not enough of a disincentive. That approach will discourage most causal bot uses, but the Chinese farmers won't be deterred.
Stronger authentification, such as tying it to some ID, or having bonding for game players would be a stronger prventative, but would be much more objectionable.
I think they should have 3 servers:
A> Official. Only runs officially approved scrips/macros and add-ons.
B> Unapproved: Runs registered but unapproved add-ons.
C> Open: Everything else.
Default to playing on Unapproved. Require strong Authentication to upgrade to Official. Continually upgrade the bot/hack detection software and anyone caught on Official gets downgraded to Open (or just banned).
Having Unapproved is important because this allows people to create and test 3'rd party improvements. The game company can then incorporate those changes into the game directly or mark the the 3'rd party package as approved for Official. By registering the add-on, the game producer can get a copy of all of the available add-ons to improve the detection algorithms for Official. The game publisher could even require that the add-on be open source, provide them in-game as an add-on feature, and even sell them (with their own markup of course) on behalf of the original creators (think how CS went from being open source and its transition to Steam).
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
I think they should make characters that get caught using that instantly flagged and lootable.
Then let the fun begin.
Of course we can, but wouldn't it be more efficient to have a computer entertain itself, on our behalf? Your recreation could be taken care of, for you by proxy, freeing you to pursue other more fulfilling endeavors, such as laboring.
This is just a step toward the ideals mankind has dreamt of for ages. Someday, computers will be able to drink beer for us, have sex for us, and enjoy books,music, and movies for us. Perhaps they could even sleep for us. This would make us free to perform menial tasks.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
This is old news, the case is done, you can read the judgment, Blizzard lost, as it should have.
Intelligence is a matter of opinion.
To see that this is what is always likely to happen. Looking at human history, it has historically been the strong dominating the weak, the few privileged exploiting the poor many. You come to realise that the relative stability and equality we enjoy in some nations is an anomaly of history, and took some incredible circumstances and efforts to create. For all that, they still aren't perfect.
So it should be ho surprise at all that is what happens in unrestricted games. Perhaps if some great leaders played the game they could inspire the masses to band together and overthrow the griefers. A George Washington of the gaming world. However, that isn't real likely since the masses can simply take their money to another game. There's no reason to put up with crap and try to make it better, there's other companies who'll be happy to do that.
My response to all the people who claim what a "problem" the design of WoW is and how much better their pet game is is the same one another poster made in this thread: 10 million users. They are doing something right.
As a long time gamer, I have to say WoW is the first MMORPG that has held my attention for more than about 6 months. Everquest was just awful, I quit that one after a month. DAoC was fun for awhile, I played for a few months, quit for a year, came back for a few months, quit again. Eve Online was... Well... Really boring. Tried it in beta, never signed up. Starwars Galaxies had a lot of promise, but it seemed as though Sony had a team dedicated to tracking down and eliminating anything fun. Lasted about 4 months.
WoW, however, I've been playing since a month after it came out, and I still play to this day. Is it perfect? No, of course not. However it seems to be able to keep things fun. I continue to be amused by it, and find that it is enough amusement to justify $15/month.
It seems to me that the people who primarily have a problem with WoW are the asshole griefers, who are mad that they can't become infinitely more powerful than everyone else, that they can't totally dominate. Well, I'm ok with that. If that segment has to be excluded, that's fine, because a whole lot of the rest of us find it fun.
And that is really what matters. Games are not about some magical standard of purity, they are not about perfect realism, they are not about testing you as a person. They are entertainment, pure and simple. So if they are good amusement for the money to you, then your money is well spent on them. If they are not, then your money is better spent elsewhere.
So a good game is quite simply one that people find fun. If people find it fun, they'll buy it and play it, and that is success.
For once, Blizzard has definitely done something wrong...sued for the wrong things all the way around here. Sue for damages? Sure. Copyright? No. Trademark? No.
The guy has disclaimers on his site about using MMOglider that pretty much state "Blizzard doesn't like this", so no, Blizzard can't really do a lot about it.
Unless the guy doesn't have the resources to pay for the lawyer, I would suspect that the odds are in the mmoglider guy's favor.
I say go for it. Sue the hell out of him, or at least try. Get it while you can. Because after a few more years I'd be willing to bet it's going to be very hard to tell if a player is a bot or is real. Hell, maybe this is a good thing that people are trying to create life-like actions through a bot. Could it lead to more people becoming interested in AI? If the answer is yes, then despite the fact that this bot is grinding "my" mobs (yea right, like I own those mobs anyway), I say keep up the botting. Maybe one of these guys will be a brilliant supergenius who actually does create AI.
Highly unlikely, but romantic and crazy enough that I don't really care.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
They should buy the guy out! Pay him a few $1k then incorporate it in to the game as a subscription extra. Blizzard: You want to use this bot? OK that's an extra $5 a month.. It's the easy way to make money! They can then set up raiding parties where everyone can attack the bots for fun!! :D
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
... I present the Penny Arcade comic about that game.
Every MMORPG suffers the same problem. How do you keep a game interesting and maintain incentive for people to keep playing the more they play? Every Single MMORPG, that I'm aware of, going all the way back to the very first network MUD's solved the problem with grindage. Grindage is play where all you do is hack and slash for experience/equipment. That the new generation of graphical MMORPG players is becoming aware of this and using the same techniques the text based predecessors used (scripting or bots) is absolutely not unexpected.
If every level is as easy to reach as the last then no one would play because there is no challenge in it. The grindage is a simple function of the game to make the higher levels and stuff more valuable as the time commitment goes up dramatically the higher you go. There are only a couple other tools you can use to keep things interesting and neither are perfect. Quests require massive continuing development of unique entertaining single player experiences (on MUD's this was handled by the volunteer development community of former players), the second solution is forcing everyone above a certain level to automatically accept Player killer status such that moving about in the world is much more dangerous. The only other option is to bring in elements of non killing group interactivity (true role playing), which graphical MMORPG's seem to be unusable for.
Don't blame Blizzard for the game being about grindage, it's a fact of the genre that you would know if you had been around long enough to have played MUD's back in their heyday. As a for profit company Blizzard has a goal of preventing people from cheating at the grindage because it can get people to stop playing because the achievement of working through the grindage means a lot less.
How is Blizzard supposed to control whether or not some twit in your guild gets hit with a trojan? Maybe they can implement a polling function that makes every online guild member run through a special raid dungeon before someone is allowed to log on?
If Blizzard wants to stop people from using bots they should be talking to their designers, not to their legal team. The real culprit behind the issue is the fact that World of Warcraft is a dull chore. Just more whining from the makers of MMO Wonderbread.
A bot that automatically performs essential tasks?! Isn't World of Warcraft already painfully dull in just how automated it is. That click and wait combat is enough to put you to sleep.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
The bot writer might actually be entitled to write his program without regards to how it is used.
It is certainly not illegal for someone to cheat at a video game, even though it violates the EULA. Blizzard would have to prove that this man selling a cheat program causes them damage, and that he is liable for that damage. Currently, cheat programs do not fall under the spam or malware category, they are not malicious code. It will be hard for Blizzard to convince a judge that a paying customer running a bot is costing them money.
On the one hand I root for blizzard to weed out griefers and farmers, they can hurt the gameplay experience. On the other hand though i'm not sure that what this man is selling is actually criminal. It's not very sportsmanlike, but i don't think it's illegal.
A large portion of World of Warcraft and other MMOs is the scope of the game's economy. I've been hearing rumors about the WoW Gold (piece?) being labled as a known and accepted form of currency somewhere, but I'm not sure.
Really, at the software can and does damage that economy, throwing off the balance of this economy. I'm a former player that used to try and make money through auction house deals and I slowly saw servers starting to decline economically as more and more goods flooded markets, with no real gold anywhere to spread about.
This may not neccesarily be the fault of Glider itself, but it certainly is a supportive factor. As for lost revenue, when someone's found to be botting, they get banned, and revenue is lost, it's that simple there.
-----
My opinion is biased as I was a player in a server with a ruined economy and rampant cheating, but I kinda hope Blizzard wins this one, despite the arguments used. I'd rather the sale, distribution, and development of Glider be stopped/halted.
Empathetic-- 94% You tend to walk in someone else's shoes a hundred miles before pointing a finger.
WoW and other MMORPGs create a virtual world that is increasingly similar to the one we live in. Those worlds are evolving in all but one aspect - the law. Did you ever notice that when you do something the company doesn't like, your character is executed without second thoughts? The company is the prosecutor, the defendant and the judge in one entity. You don't even have a chance to be present at the trial. Suddenly all your characters are terminated from the virtual world, without a chance to explain that, for example, you were using a programmable keyboard which the manufacturer recommended specifically the game you're being banned from. I find it deliciously ironic that the tables have turned and now Blizzard, the quite ruthless and totalitarian demi-god of their virtual world can only watch as a lone man taunts them from outside their zone of influence. The same lack of laws that allow Blizzard and other companies to dispose of uncomfortable players at a rate that would make even Saddam blush give them little power in the real world.
My computer already has sex for me
:(
I would like to know how Glider has evaded the Warden.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Why not violation of contract?
EULA forbids modifying the game.
Boo hoo
...of Warcraft. Sorry, I just couldn't resist.
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
That's all well and fine except HE DIDN'T DO IT! The user running Glider on their own computer is the one who made the copy.
Think for a moment. If Napster/KaZaZ/whatever is responsible for making a copy of the copyrighted music files, then the RIAA would be suing those company programmers AND NOT SUING THE INDIVIDUALS who run the program afterwards. The original programmer did not commit copyright infringement by creating a program that users run that may load some data off of that user's hard drive into ram memory.
Blizzard Sucks! Why don't they just create some servers for 'bots, some for non-bots, and let everybody be happy?
They say this costs them money. Heck, there are probably some people who are only playing and paying Blizzard BECAUSE they don't have to grind their way up level by level until things get interesting.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The key in making a profitable MMO is to ensure your players are addicted enough to stay playing and hence keep their subscriptions but also that they're online as little as possible without jeopardizing the addiction.
The less you're online, the less computing resources and bandwidth you consume and the less content you consume, the more profitable you as a customer are. What Blizzard (and other MMO companies) don't like is that people are increasing the amount of time their characters are in game with bots, hence eating their bandwidth and resources whilst the player is elsewhere actually having fun in real life instead of boring themselves in a game (the irony huh?).
Essentially what they do with content is draw out the content they have created as much as possible, for example they may introduce a new sword which will take them maybe an hour or two to design and implement but they ensure that it takes you the player tens of hours to aquire that item. People want the item because it makes them feel special for some obscure reason that phsycologists can likely fathom so they'll spend maybe 30 hours a week to get this item across two weeks. Unfortunately for companies bots change that, players can suddenly get the example item in just a couple of days by letting their bot get it for them.
Rather than invest time and money in better content they just create small amounts of crap content and just make sure it takes you weeks to consume that content. If you only use a couple of gb bandwidth and only consume content that took 10hrs to produce in 2 months then Blizzard love you. If however you consume a couple of gb and the same content in 2 days and do so all the time then you're more expensive to look after as a paying customer in terms of bandwidth costs and it's harder to keep content available for you so you don't get bored and quit. You're spot on in your analysis, only I felt the need to point out the reasoning for such crap design - it's not incompetence, as I've pointed out here it's purely financial.
As for my opinion on the practice? Well, I think people who do bot away at the content are forgetting why they play games - for fun, if they consume all the content they're given to the point they run out and end up bored to death then, well that's up to them. On the other hand however, MMO companies are both lazy and greedy. Blizzard especially so, with the profits they make there is simply no excuse to not have better quality content that people actually want to play rather than bot their way through. Until they invest in decent content people actually want to play then they've got no reason to cry and I wish the bot creators all the best in defending against this. Ignoring the moral point of view regarding cheating and taking the comp sci./law point of view I think Blizzard don't or at least shouldn't have a leg to stand on, their argument and tactics are as weak and apalling as the RIAA/MPAAs here. They produce shite content, they create a system that spies on process to make sure you're not cheating which is akin to DRM for the music industry and when that fails they just resort to law suits citing copyright infringement for making a copy of a program in memory even though that's exactly what Windows does when it loads an application in the first fucking place- are they going to sue Microsoft next for allowing you to run their application too? So quite rightly as you say, they're taking these measures rather than actually you know, spending that time and money on actually making a game people want to play rather than bot.
On a final note, here's a hint to MMO developers- chances are if the content is complex enough to be fun, it's too complex to be easily and efficiently botted also. If you produce content that's simply a bunch of repetitive tasks don't blame people for using computers to solve them, that is after all what they excel at - solving dull, repetitive tasks.
have your qa group browse suspicious forum links and act overall stupidly to collect trojans.
send those virus definitions to norton, et. al., and run removal tools for them with each patch.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
...is a WoW Bot something like a Real Doll?
Couldn't Blizzard somehow implement using captchas to catch bots? I don't play WoW but I would think that there must be at least 10 seconds of "free time" every half hour (or hour, whatever) during which a player could be prompted to answer a captcha. The captchas could be heuristically delivered, etc. I think this would be a fail-proof way of weeding out the bots.
as opposed to 2 college students/chinese gold farmers playing a blood-elf paladin around the clock to go from level 1 to 70 in 15 days?
Is there really that much difference in between a bot and some poor bastards in a mmo sweatshop in beijing?
Dear Blizzard,
When people are so desperate not to have to play your game that they'll write a program to do it for them, the gameplay model is broken. Try to do better next time.
Sincerely,
An indie gamer
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
This will not hold up in court. It'd be like windows suing people for making programs for windows, that use up resources.
WoW is just another shell that this guy has programed for, and they are pissy cause it automates certain things. As far as I'm concerned someone should be free to do whatever they want, with the game they buy, and the account they pay for.
People aren't exploiting people, they are automating their characters.
I think blizzard is out of line.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
Or catch them. The best source for catching bots is the community and a few CSRs. Have them look for people that have been on more than X number of hours in the last Y number of days. Watch their actions, bots are easy to spot. Suspend the account for a week, if they do it again, ban.
Sorry blizzard, you are going to have to actually pay employees to find and take care of the bots instead of suing your way out of it...
As an Ex-Programmer and user of Macroquest (Glider for Everquest essentially) the act of using active memory to alter game play has been around for a long time.
The automation of simple tasks does not need this memory hacking to work. In my days pre-macroquest, I used to take a nostromo speedpad, or other USB joystick of sorts, and program mini-macro's into them. Just a recorded set of keystrokes to do thing like autofire and such.
The use of Memory alteration, does a lot more then press the same button over and over. It can intercept, and redirect information being sent to and from the server changing what will happen. It can tell the server a new location for your character (warping) it can tell the server your default speed should be "x" so you can run as fast as you want. the list goes on and on.
In the Macroquest world, there are a few levels of "hacking", you have your non invasive macro's, which automate keystrokes, mouse movements, and clicks. Next are plugins, which are a little more difficult, it requires actually writing a program extension (.DLL file) to perform things, some are passive, utilizing the information recieved from the server, but not normally available to the player. Although not available, it's still being sent, so not really against the rules to use it. Lastly using plugins to access your memory, and "hook" game memory addresses, to alter the information and changed it to what you want.
All in all, cheating like this is not a simple task, it requires reverse engineering the programs exe, figuring out memory offsets for each thing you want to change, writing a programs to find and latch onto the memory offset to change it, and then figuring out the value to change it to to get the desired effect. Doing this is what we call an active hack, these are the ones that places like Sony and Blizzard can find using there tracking programs. These are what hurts them, using more resources then a normal player.
The simple automation of button pressing can (and has) be argued to be allowed based on most games EULA, which prohibits the use of 3rd party applications to alter game play. Automating keystroke/mouse click tasks does not alter game play, or change the way the program they wrote works in any way, if anything it may prevent carpal tunnel.
What I'm trying to say is: The user is chosing to use a program to violate the EULA, they should be punished. It's like sueing a company that makes bolt cutters because a customer of theirs bought some bolt cutters and broke into your house, or shed. The person performing the breaking and entering is at fault, not the manufacturer of the tool used to break and enter.
It seems many folks have misconceptions about the case.
The lawsuit is not disputing whether Blizzard has the right to take action against botters. They do. Blizzard will continue to ban botters regardless of the outcome of this case. Even if Blizzard loses, players already banned will not get their accounts back.
The judge's decision will only answer the question is it illegal for third parties to provide players with the means to violate the End User License Agreement and the Terms of Use?
My bot was made out of Mindstorm Lego and pushed my mouse button at regular intervals. I used it for making lots of arrows - load up with raw materials, position the mouse in the right location, start the bot, have a shower. 15 minutes later, lots of arrows...
(The point was actually to improve the fletching skill, not to acquire arrows.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
The BBC just rehashed old news that's over a year old. The original, much more informative news post is here: http://www.markeedragon.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Board=32&Number=351836&Searchpage=4&Main=105573&Words=blizzard&topic=0&Search=true#Post351836
Like others have pointed out here, the reason people like me use Glider is simple. I work long hours at the office. I also take night classes. So my time is very limited. Grinding in WOW is brutal. The best part of any MMORPG for me is PvP. However, it would take me months, if not years to achieve the maximum level with my time constraints.
So a program like Glider allows me to hit the maximum level and then go enjoy the PvP. I was ALWAYS at my keyboard when Glider was running as to not interfere with others enjoyment.
I paid for 6 months of WOW a few years back. The next day, Blizzard banned my account and did not refund my $60. I personally felt robbed. So I hope the creator of Glider really wins this. I actually went back and bought WOW somewhat recently and leveled by myself to 45, but now I am hitting the grind and I cant bear to log in anymore.
In light of all this, I may just start running Glider again. If I get banned, oh well, Ill just stop playing permanently. But for people like me who want to just be able to PvP an hour or two night, Glider is a God send.
It's times like these that I remember why I don't play online games.
This is a similar case to when Nintendo sued the makers of Game Genie for their tool that modified the NES/Famicon experience. Ultimately the judge found against Nintendo because even though it modified the game, it wasn't enough of a change to be infringement. I highly doubt that the tool creates an entire 'copy' of the game in RAM, and if the use of such a tool is against the EULA they have a case to ban users, but I doubt they have enough to order a cease/desist from the developer/distributor.
So if I write a word processing program and on the package I say "requires Windows Vista" - I have to get Microsoft's Permission first??
What if I say "requires Ubuntu 10.9" - whose permission do I need to get now?
This is a dangerous precedent!
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Sims...and yet it's weirdly addictive, unlike doing the same things in real life.
Just goes to show, that everything is better if you add a dose of fire.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My answer to the argument "10 million people, it must be a good game!" has always been:
Britney Spears.
Is she good because millions of people adore her? Is that really the definition of good music? Is that the key to her success, she's good? Or did her handlers simply hit on the right combination of sex appeal, catchy pop tunes, and image at the right time to propel her into stardom?
Britney Spears and the manufactured pop music model are why we can't have nice things. They are why it is hard for an indie group or someone who wants to break the musical paradigm to make it big. There simply is no room in the popular culture for any other model, though perhaps for the music industry that will change as online distribution slowly destroys the monolithic record labels.
I think there are many parallels in WoW. It's an ok game. It's catchy. I played it for a few years. But in much the same way that the average pop idol is the sugary part of hundreds of years of Western musical tradition distilled down to a few repetitive chords and drum patterns, WoW is simply the result of taking the most addictive parts of a gaming model that started with MUDs and polishing them into online crack. Addictive, but with little substance. Unfortunately WoW has a stronger hold on the MMO industry than even the record labels have on theirs, as there is no real way to take them down. No "WoW Killer" in the foreseeable future. Unlike a song that lasts a few minutes, WoW can consume an individual's entire free time. I think the best we can hope for is the more innovative developers will be able to peel off some of the new player base WoW has created, and make enough money to keep developing that way.
I think the problem with almost all games of these days is how they try to achieve (to be fun and interesting): They become easy, without consequences to your actions.
Most of the mmorpg's your power is very strong correlated with time you spend online. Not a nice feature imho.
And the biggest problem of all games(imo, very unpopular opinion i think) almost no way to fail. I mean wt* with redoing quest as many times as you want till you succeed.
I know people want to win and and not to lose, and games don't have to be realistic and such. But all this "pushing" to success seems to lessen the fun, at least for me.
Ad thats the thing that allows powergaming and griefers. As someone stated you cant punish them.
I'll say i like fallout 2(haven't played fallout 1) because you CAN fail quest, you can so totally fail that games goal becomes almost unreachable. Whats fun in that?
You take your actions more seriously. And then you succeed in doing something it gives you grater emotional reward. And i also like rogue-likes (ADOM mostly) because of permadeath
(you can fail quests there too). Then there is some hard stuff you appreciate what you reach more. Yes it was annoying first times i tried playing. But some time later i learned to live with that
and it's one of the greatest games i know.
Whats this my talk all about? You cant make everyone happy all the time. And for me it seems that games are trying to do just that, and thats impossible(in multi player competitive gaming that is).
And what is this leveling stuff everyone is so obsessed? imho games should concentrate more on skills thant some levels, these depend basically solely on how much time you spend on game, and gives
kids who have lots of time a very good chance to become bullies. Especially that they cannot lose anything. If there is permadeath you will very carefully consider befor bulling/attacking someone
because than it comes back you have a very good chance to not be able to deal with it, and lose what you have.
After all i think one of games purposes is to teach something. And we learn mostly from mistakes don't we? Kinda hard to do that than your not allowed to do them...
Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death. - Major Motoko Kusanagi(Ghost in the Shell)
Assuming that they have 10 Million players, i would have to assume that they have capasity so that everyone of them can play the game at the same time. So in this case, what does it matter if it is a bot or a human playing the game?
Looks like they just sell crap like most webhosting companies. 100 customers sharing 1 server and its resources but if all sites on the machine would have instant peak of users, it all will fail miserably.
Am I the only one who is getting sick of hearing about Blizzard suing people?
Somehow the statement for me depends on wrong and right.
"wrong target" for me means, that morally, the creator should not be blamed for creating a piece of software which can help you in a specifical task, even if this task may be unmoral.
it is like suing weapons producers for making wars. of course on a high-moral ground, we can debate this otherwise, but with high-moral ground i mean idealistic morality, which has more to do with world-view and beliefs.
so of course, strategically it is the right target to catch the dealer of something illegal. if it IS illegal.
otherwise, you HAVE TO catch the customers, which are the USERS of the program.
you can't destroy cigarette companies, to free all smokers, because nicotine is legal.
on the other hand, you have to catch the dealer of pot, because pot is illegal.
for legal stuff (even wow) the customers are responsible for USING them. blizzard claims bots play longer, but maybe somebody has, whatever, disabilities and is very fond of his bot program, because it helps him catching up with his friends - and he does not let the bot run longer, than he plays. so we see, it depends on the usage of the tool, the tool is not used to attack the server and is not performing illegal tasks per se (maybe it does, but from what i see it does not, or blizzard would sue for other reasons)
this makes the programmer morally the wrong target. and also legally the wrong target.
if blizzard succeeds in this, it may be fair on high-moral ground, but absolutely injust in terms of justice for all the other developers on the world creating little tools.
it is of course the right target strategically (and i think you meant that), but this again will make the whole move "evil", since they DO attack the wrong target (legally, morally), even if their motives and anger may be understandable in some way (high-moral).
I think there should be bounty hunter offices in both Horde and Alliance cities that give out bounties, and locations of players that spend over 24 hours in the same zone or online. Those bots can then be easily killed off for gold.
I see how it probably violates the Terms of Use (unless Blizzard was dumb enough to not outlaw bots in there). But copyright???
Seriously, there ought to be a law that any case that abuses some law to attack something unrelated (say, copyright law to attack something that's not making a copy) is thrown out right away. The law must apply to itself. Then again, I don't think lawyers understand recursion.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If a game forces you to spend hours doing tasks a bot CAN do, then it's crap.
This is the worst comment about games I have seen in a while. It's bad because on the surface it looks perfectly agreeable. In actuality it is quite insidious.
No game forces you to spend hours doing anything. You're always free to go do something else. Also a bot can be written to play Tetris or solve Sudoku puzzles or even play chess. I don't think that these games are crap and there are plenty of other people who would likely agree with me.
I have played WoW and found it to be enjoyable, but I liked the progression grind from 1-60 and not the general sameness tedium that ensued once max level was reached. Blizzard now wants everyone to focus on endgame and damn the rest. For me, 60 (and later 70) was a journey and not a destination. Now it seems that the less time your character spends on Azeroth actually learning how to play while enjoying the sights, the better.
Ah well. I don't play anymore and I figure that I'm better off for it. I enjoyed getting together with a few friends and questing or even doing an instance, but now that we've all been fervently pushed forward, I am not going to resign myself to the second job of raiding just so I can have equipment that is marginally better than what I have now.
A lot of people really don't seem to understand the full reach of copyright law in many countries.
Here's an example: A company selling CDs in the UK were buying the CDs wholesale in Asia. They were buying them from official channel sources, not pirate copies. They were then selling them in the UK.
At this point we have:
1. A company, selling something in the UK
2. Buying something legitimate in Asia, legally
3. Selling the thing that they just purchased in the UK
Yet they were stopped by the BPI using copyright law and lost on appeal too!
Non-lawyers need to stop acting like lawyers on Slashdot.
Sue for damages? Sure. Copyright? No. Trademark? No.
Stop. You are not a lawyer. Have a seat on the side of the kiddie pool for a moment, mmkay?
You don't sue "for damages". The fact that someone has done something which means that you're no longer making as much money as you used to does not entitle you to sue them. You have to show that what they did was unlawful (usually through showing the commission of a tort or breach of contract). So Blizzard can't just "sue for damages". They have to explain why they lost money due to the unlawful or tortious act of another person. In this case, the unlawful act alleged is copyright breach. So, unless you have another cause of action that they can use against this programmer, sit down, be quiet, and stay at the children's table.
The guy has disclaimers on his site about using MMOglider that pretty much state "Blizzard doesn't like this", so no, Blizzard can't really do a lot about it.
Here's a note for all you budding entrepeneurs: DISCLAIMERS DON'T ALWAYS EXCLUDE YOU FROM LIABILITY. In fact, a disclaimer accepted by party A will almost never exempt you from liability to party B (except in very special circumstances usually involving authorized agents, which doesn't apply here). Those disclaimers on his website, if they have any affect at all, will only indemnify him as against users of his program.
Until i found out he was SELLING it. A clever kid writing a program to solve a 'problem' or to learn, is one thing, but selling this thing is completely different. Throw him under a tauren stampede. Winners don't bot and botters don't win.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
It ruins gameplay, and is boring. I don't use bots but know of some who have in the past. In all games except maybe Entropia Universe's sweating bots are pointless. I've never played wow but do play d2 a lot. After you get to a certain place in d2, you can just go kill Shenk, who sits next to a waypoint or do thousands of baal runs, killing him over and over every 2 minutes, and do so totally legitly. If you can do that in d2, I suspect you can do similar in wow. Why risk your account doing illegal junk when gameplay can be easy?
Some precedence supports the proposition that an information service can post terms of use that forbid or regulate bots.
Benjamin Wright, Dallas, Texas, benjaminwright.us
Get a sense of humor you assholes. South Park much? Obviously not.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
I wrote a bot that automatically responds to articles posted to Slashdot. It was initially getting modded as troll, until it became disallusioned with society, it listens to a lot of Marilyn Manson now and turned it's UI black - but on a postive note, it's been getting +5 informative all the time!
The article claims copyright infringement because the tool copies the game into RAM? Does that mean that I can sue an Operating System developer for copying my application into RAM when it launches it? Does that mean any game maker can sue Cedega or Wine? This is ridiculous, Blizzard makes good games but this sort of ignorance on their part makes me wish i never bought any of their products.
"You are hungry."
eat bread
"You are thirsty."
drink (ye) flask
"character with girl-name queries, 'Anyone want to help a elf gain some levels?'
answer a/s/l?
For all we know the moon may be as conscious as a poet or a realtor, and extremely weary of its monotonous round. - HLM
If you make a game that can be played by a bot, which you cannot detect... it is your own fault. I play a MUCH more simple MMO called Runescape (5m players, second most popular gaming MMO). A lot of the game is specifically designed to prevent bots from working. They have "random events" that happen periodically and are very hard to macro (something like showing 3 random in-game objects and asking you which one doesn't belong, sword-sword-fish) These "Random" events also give players rewards for success and the punnishment for failure is a random teleport to one of the newbie cities, causing an interruption in "botted" gameplay. There are other pattern detection strategies that they employ that will cause a GM to come chat you up as well.
If Blizard's game is so predictable, so mind numbing that a bot can play it I think that says a bit more about the game than it does the cheaters.
for everyone else there's Autoit.
Don't go fishing with out it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The problem with your permanent Death scenario is that it sets up the *very real* possibility that a griefer guild could totally dominate the server by making sure that *no one* could ever advance to a level to offer any real threat to them. You've, no doubt, heard the expression "The man is keeping me down"? That would totally happen on a perma-death server. It would become a tyranny, much like a dictatorship or communist system, where members of 'the party' are allowed to control all weath and power, and the death sentence is imposed on just about anyone who is viewed as a threat or a traitor.
And because of this, such a game would quickly lose most of it's subscriber base, except for members of 'the party'. Eventually, with no one to prey upon, 'the party' would either get bored, and leave the game, or turn on each other, and those weaker members that the rest of 'they party' turn on would probably leave to, resulting in a death-spiral for the game as subscribers leave. Which is why game developers don't develop games the way you suggest. No one would pay, long term, to play "Virtual Serf".
People are saying that this code is not malicious. I completely disagree. It is one thing to create a crowbar. It has multiple purposes and can be used for legal and illegal tasks. On the other hand, it is illegal to make keys of someone else's house and then sell them to people who want to break in to the house and steal stuff. Gilder is a tool specifically made to break the EULA, that uses up resources, and degrades the experience for other players. If you look and understand it that way, it is malicious and should be considered malware. There is no legitimate purpose for this application to exist. I don't know how anyone can defend it.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Thank you. I really enjoyed reading about all the different games that you play. Next could you tell us about the different kinds of cereal that you like?
The game isn't making you do any of this. You are perfectly welcome to take things at a slower pace, you are able to spend much more time getting lower level gear, you are able to progress through raid content more slowly. For that matter, you are able to simply not do the raids at all.
It is again this idea that you "have to have" something in the game that leads to this problem. "I have to get my Tier 6," "We have to finish BT," etc. No, the game design isn't forcing any of that on you. Your mentality is.
I've done some raiding, both in the old game and in BC, and I don't go out and grind for consumables. If that means I'm not ready to do a raid at a certain level, oh well, I'm ok with that. Yes, it means I'm likely to never go to BT (though I did do Naxx pre BC). I'm fine with that, doesn't really interest me that much.
Again I say you just need to do what is fun in the game. Stop with this idea of "We've gotta do X," just do whatever is amusing.
Few people remember that Donnelly failed to achieve profitability with his first bot program, pqGlider, for the adventure-RPG, Progress Quest. This was because the game's lead developer, Eric Fredricksen, won a lawsuit barring Donnelly from distributing his helper program. The whole story actually shook the indie development community at its core for years and now we're seeing the natural follow-up to that.
*laughs* Blizzard misses you! Come back. Blizzard is sorry they're successful without you. You stopped buying in the 90's? However did they make it this far?
Actually WoW bot doesn't need to break copyright to get sued by Blizzard.
It's against the TOS to bot, and the TOS is effectively a contract.
By publishing a bot, the bot maker is effectively a third party inducing a breach of contract.
It's called "Intentional interference with contractual relations".
It's actually a tort and you can sue for damages.
The program has no purpose on its own, it's parasitic. Without the existence of WoW, it has no function. And the function it does in WoW is specifically forbidden by WoW's creators...
That being said, I guess you're allowed to write useless, even parasitic things.
It's called a Captcha. If you suspect your users are bots, you can just insert human solvable problems every couple of hours into the system. If the user is human, they can easily pass the test. If the user is a bot, then it will most likely fail to pass the test. If you want to keep it fun, make it relevant to a mini game, or something.
I have never played WoW, nor will I ever. Starcraft, however, is one of my favorite games.
What kind of damages does Blizzard suggest they are incurring? Bandwidth costs? Seems pretty "de minimus" to me...
In a way it's actually letting some people have their lives back but still enjoy the game, although being a form of cheating and having an unfair advantage to others, it would certainly beat sitting around 21 hours a day 6 days a week just trying to get that last level..
The fact that you can get stuck is a very glaring, obvious sign that the game design is a crock.
I would get stuck all the time in adventure games like you describe, because they are so linear. One time I got stuck because my monitor wasn't adjusted right and the passageway I was supposed to take was too dark to be visible.
There really has to be more than one way to do required tasks. Optional tasks may be allowed to only have one solution, but to progress in a game you have to have more than one solution to the problem.
Case in point: Portal.
In this instance there is only 1 exit door that you must go through, however this doesn't mean there is only one way to complete the puzzle. Try playing some of the harder challenges some time. After you get to feeling pretty good about your leet time, go hop on youtube and watch how someone else did it. You will see that there are many ways of accomplishing the objective because the rules are physics based, not an extremely limited set of choices.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Unless there is some big secret I can't see how this software application is going to be ruled as infringing on Blizzard's copyright. That is pretty much a lame attack. One thing that will happen when all of this is over is that there will likely be more Warcraft users due to the increase in media attention and there will also be a LOT more gliders out there. This will likely end up backfiring on Blizzard.