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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."
As I've delved into Diablo 2 once again (after watching the imho downright fantastic gameplay video of Diablo 3) over the last few days, I've seen with some amazement that some of the most widely used Battle.net cheats are actually licensed under the GNU GPL - there's even some kind of application framework for interacting with the game programmatically floating around on the web... :)
It's really interesting to see such development, because back in the days when I really was into all that gaming stuff, there was hardly ever a way to take a look how some trainer's/cheat's author does thing XY. Cool, in a way.
That said, I really, really despise cheating in multiplayer games.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
I presume you do realize Blizzard's banning abilities only extend to WoW and that they can't actually ban you from real life?
The software was found not to violate any copyrights. It's not illegal. It only violates Blizzard's terms of service. They're free to ban your account for using the bot, but that's all.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
IANAL, but I think the case is that it's not criminally illegal, but it does offer a basis to file a claim under contract law. If I recall correctly, it is something along the lines of a 3rd party willfully affecting a breach of contract.
It's not a *fix*, it's a design flaw.
From my experience as a MMO designer, battling automated play is actually a huge design problem. In many cases you don't want to do it by changing the code because the time and effort spent to do that are much better spent developing real game features. So in many games people take the easiest route and just outlaw automated gameplay instead of changing the design to make sure it is not possible to benefit much from it. Can't really blame anyone for that.
Still it doesn't change this Blizzard's request being utterly ridiculous. With all my genuine respect to the company, someone must have had a brainfart in this case.
I don't think you understand game psychology. There is a crossover between a smooth, slow progression and long-term enjoyability.
If a game had no grind, players would lose interest quickly--the rewards need to be spaced out and not constant. In order for a good experience to stand out from the grind, there has to be a grind.
If you give people "what they want to play", they will not enjoy it at all. I can give you a game that you win at the push of a button--no grind at all. Would that make you happy?
When I used to find myself spending too much time on any game, a truly reliable way to make me sick of it is to cheat--to get everything I want as fast as I want. End of all my interest in the game within a couple days to a week. (this is how I broke my original addictions to Diablo and Diablo years ago)
Sure you think you want to be handed all these things you cheat for, but if that was really all you wanted, why not play single player? There are massive, undetectable cheats for that.
The only reason to cheat on b.net is to compare yourself to people who don't--to somehow give yourself an edge up against those who don't because, hmm, because it makes you feel better about yourself maybe? That's just pathetic.
Think about it for a while. Analyze what you play and why you play it. From your statement you obviously play a lot, but do you ever really think about what you enjoy about gaming? What you really want? Again, from your email, I have to guess no...
Blizzard absolutely have a right to control what happens on their servers. Notice though that this injunction is not about their servers. It's about what code is released on the internet - which Blizzard doesn't own.
It's within their right to say "you can't use that code on our servers" - and they have a right to enforce that rule however they please (delete violating accounts or whatever). However, it's clearly not within their right to say "you can't use that code anywhere, or even have it, or even look at it."
WoW is not all that repetitive, especially considering that the idea is to spend many months playing it between content updates.
There are LOTS of things Blizzard does to make WoW a lot less of a grind, big one being daily quests, if you don't know why daily quests prevent the grind, then you don't know WoW well enough to be commenting.
Blizzard also does lots of other things to prevent the grind:
- Rested XP, while you are logged out, you earn "rest", when you log back in, you earn double XP per mob kill until your rest runs out.
- When Blizzard introduced Arenas (a competive PvP system), they made it so that consumables such as potions or elixirs cannot be used at all. While this is partly due to balancing issues, it also means that people don't end up farming gold/mats for these potions, because while they can be a huge competitive advantage, they are also a huge money/materials sink when you are using a lot of them.
- In their upcoming expansion, they are limiting the amount of consumables that can be used by players in certain conditions. For example, you will only be able to use 1 single potion for a boss fight, this will mean that people wont end up blowing lots of potions on a single boss fight. Another example being that you won't be affected by more than one set of Drums at a time, this is also good as right now the top raiding guilds had lots of their members abandon a profession and take up Leatherworking instead. And all this just to get the most possible "power" for their raid group. When you aren't levelling at the same time, getting a profession from 0 to max is exceptionally time and/or money intensive.
Personally, what I get most out of WoW is the social connection, I tend to use VoIP a lot with my family and friends who also play. WoW is just a place we hang out, it's like a sports bar or something. WoW for me is something I can do to pass the time between work, going out or sleeping. When I am at home and not playing WoW or sleeping, I do other things like read, watch TV, program.
Exactly. Now, Microsoft can say, "You may only install Windows on this computer if you never install OpenOffice on this computer." If you install OpenOffice, your Windows license becomes invalid. Tough luck.
From my experience as a MMO designer, battling automated play is actually a huge design problem.
I am a professional programmer, and I would say that it is more than that. I would say that it is fundamentally impossible to prevent botting on remote clients without a client being completely locked down with DRM. And as Microsoft has already discovered, that is a hard sell.
You have the same fundamental problem that media creators do: You have to give people information, but prevent them from using it in ways you don't approve of. This problem will not go away any time soon.
The simpler problem of stopping WoW botting is easy. People bot in WoW because 'the grind' to level or gain faction rep is long and boring. Change the game so that people aren't rewarded for sinking so much time into the game. Problem solved.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The idea behind grinding (and timesinks in general) is that you have a cheap way of keeping your players occupied. Various materials for crafting, gold, etc etc etc. In fact, why bother with creating actual content when you can keep people busy for an hour or two a day by killing the same type of monsters over and over.
Most RPGs suffer from this:
Single player RPGs suffer from it, and with MMOs it's even more obvious because most people play MMOs for months. MMOs don't exactly lend themselves to epic storytelling either, because any large-scale event would affect all players. In a single player RPG you could have a character open the gates of the nine hells and have the world flooded with demons that you have to dispatch, in an MMO you can't really have that happen. "Oh great, player #239483 opened the gates to the nine hells again" "Ugh, another week of demons"
While WoW had some large scale events, such as the opening of AQ, and there was something with the undead or something, the experience is a lot less fun than when YOU are doing something.
I stopped playing WoW on a regular basis when our guild started waltzing through MC. I'd noticed that casual play with friends had started to devolve to getting 40 people organized to be on time, have the correct gear and potions, spend time grinding for gold and materials and generally not having fun.
If you start spending more time preparing to have fun than actually having fun that sort of defeats the purpose of playing a game in my opinion.
I think they did that. A few months ago an old guildmate of mine sent me a mail talking about new questhubs in low level areas (the area where Onyxia is located, I forgot the name). The thing is that there's very little to gain for Blizzard to add new low level quests. Most of their playerbase is maxed out and creates a new character or two to keep themselves occupied while they're waiting on new high level content. I think most players will start going away if there isn't new high level content regularly than low level content.