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Blizzard Tries To Forbid Open Sourcing Glider
ruphus13 notes a new development in Blizzard's case against MDY, which we discussed last week. Blizzard, the maker of World of Warcraft, has now requested another injunction — to prevent the open sourcing of Glider code. Quoting: "Blizzard has asked the court for a relatively unconventional order prohibiting MDY from making the source code for its MMO Glider software available to the public, and prohibiting MDY from helping people develop other World of Warcraft automation software. Blizzard had previously asked the court to shut down MDY's WoW operations in its motion for summary judgment, but the court's summary judgment order did not address Blizzard's request. Blizzard's requests to prohibit open-source release of MDY's software and prohibit MDY's assistance in development of independent WoW bots are new to this motion — and seem likely to raise eyebrows in the open source and digital rights advocacy camps."
OOPS! we were hacked! our source code was stolen!
OMG!! It's all over pirate bay! sorry!
In other words, legally say "Blizzard.... Go To Hell."
Except, it's not legal if MDY claims this happens in court, when in reality the story is a bit fabricated.
Also, doing so before the court has a chance to accept or deny Blizzard's request may not help MDY's case at all, and end up costing them.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
This can not help Blizzard in any way what so ever.
A) Glider isn't exactly hard to create.
B) Makes Blizzard look like bullies..again.
C) Now there are several people who are going to create a clone.
D) It's impact on the game, emotional views aside, isn't really that great.
Stopping Glider is a bandage on a bigger issue they refuse to actually address, farming.
Now, farming isn't nearly as bad as everyone makes it out to be. In MMO's that allowed groups to control areas, it was horrible, but you can't really do that in WoW.
Here are some thing they could do:
1) Don't let anyone mine/pick anything that there skill level makes gray to them.
2) put some random drift into movement.
3) limit the price you can sell something for on the AH to 10 times what a vendor would pay
4) don't allow the transfer of more then 100GP a time. Maybe a one time unlimited amount per month.
All of these would be pretty trivial to implement.
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They can do whatever they can trick a judge to go along with.
Sure, you can ban bots and you can void licenses when you catch someone, but bottom line: People won't stop as long as two criterions are not matched
1. The game is interesting enough to be played instead of botted.
2. The game is complicated enough to make botting pointless.
Why do people bot? Two reasons. First, they're goldfarmers and want to make as much gold as possible without having to do it themselves. And second, some parts of the game are just boring tedium nobody wants to do but has to.
So what all comes down is time sinks. People want to avoid time sinks. They don't want to sit in one spot and farm the same crapmobs for hours to get their $number $item for $quest. That's boring and tedious. They don't want to farm $mob for gold to buy their mount, that's boring and tedious.
Give people what they want to play and you have no problem with bots. Simple as that. When you have a problem with people botting through your game, all it says is that you installed something in the game that should keep the people occupied but they generally hate to do it (aka time sink).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's not what they did, it's how they did it. It's a damn shame that they chose to use the insane 'copyright on RAM contents' argument. They did have a reasonably legitimate complaint, since (as I understand it, at least) glider causes problems on their servers which they have authority over. Trying to tell people what they can and can't do with their own game installations on their own machines is an absolute joke, but trying to set terms for what people are allowed to do on a communal service with its own rules is fair enough.
To fulfil Slashdot tradition and make a somewhat clunky and inappropriate car analogy: I can attach rockets to my car and blast along at 300mph on my own land and it's none of the manufacturer's damn business. If I then paid them to take it on their test track which had a rule saying "No rocket cars" they'd be well within their rights to kick me out.
The problem lies beyond your issue of cheating in an online game, which on the concern-o-meter is a lot less important than a company like blizzard getting to control someone else's source code. This sort of precedent could be very scary. Any company that can find a judge who would believe their IP is somehow infringed by other software that is or is not open source could then get control over how that code is handled? no, that cannot fly at all.
Oh I agree.
But lawsuits and the government shouldn't be the ones to give you a cheater free experience on a WoW Server hosted by Blizzard.
Blizzard should be the one to police it's virtual world. Blizzard runs the servers, Blizzard wrote the code, Blizzard collects money from paying customers like yourself who want to play WoW without worrying about other people botting or hacking.
Blizzard should take an active role in preventing/eliminating things they don't want in their world. If botting is going be against BLIZZARD'S RULES the punishment for botting should be ENFORCED BY BLIZZARD.
I have zero problem with Blizzard banning me/terminating my account/flagging my CD-Key as invalid if I'm caught violating their rules. Should it be *ILLEGAL* to break the rules Blizzard makes up for their virtual world? HELL NO.
That's like me making a web forum and telling everyone it's against the rules to post images...then taking to court anyone who writes an HTML book that includes the IMG tag. My rules that I've arbitrarily decided are NOT the law.
If some guy wants to publish the source to something he wrote, why shouldn't he be able to? Because some company somewhere doesn't like it? That seems a bit unfair to me. I'm sure Microsoft wasn't happy about Linux and the Open Source alternative OSes that exist. I'm sure you could argue that Microsoft's bottom line has been hurt from the OS community *AND* that much of the functionality of the OS communities products are based off of MS Software (Open Office can open .xls files - if not for Excel they wouldn't be able to do that, right?).
"Why don't they implement a challenge-response system in-game like a CAPTCHA? Ask the player some specifically worded question about some game event."
Why don't they remove the obvious time wasting aspects of the game that turn a fun challenge into "grinding".
go kill this monster, but you are only done with X drops... wtfh?
I generally enjoy WoW but what really frustrates me are the obvious attempts to get me to play longer and therefore keep shelling out money.. like run over there and kill x monster then come back.. i come back and am given the quest to return to the same exact spot and kill y monster (that i had to kill anyway because he stands right next to X). BOOOORING!
if they spent more time developing quests (and adding to the lower level quest lines) people wouldn't want to automate their grinding (for an e.g. there is a low level crossroads quest that spawns a centaur attack on a village you have to defend against, makes you feel like you are really fighting "for the horde", lots of fun).
I'm just getting tot he high level stuff and it seems to be more along these lines.. why they don't try and improve the older work is beyond me.. that's prolly the number 1 gripe i hear about grinding. UGH WC or SFK again/ "can someone run me thru? i'll pay you gold".
That's the wrong approach.
You shouldn't focus on stopping automated game play.
You need to make changes so it's not more beneficial then non automated play.
I ahve a programmable keyboard. I don't mean those ones with software running on the machine, I mean a keyboard with memory I can program.
This is completly undetectable to the computer. I could automate all kinds of things, it's what computers do.
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