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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."
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This should be very amusing. Was there any indication that MDY intended to Open up Glider?
If the Glider software doesn't contain any copyright infringement (which MDY may be hard-pressed to prove - really, dunno), can Blizzard legally prevent them from Open Sourcing the software? It would seem to me that that's really not going to fly that well.
Informatus Technologicus
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!
You prefer this to exist with closed source so you can't read the code and see what they do to hook into your game.
Yeeeeeah, smart move!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Blizzard doesn't really doesn't really want th EFF to get involved in this fight. Ok, the EFF may not actively take part in such a fight, but the OpenSource community will. The enemy of my enemy...
its not a gaming company anymore eh ?
lets see, they want to BAN an automation software. on grounds that they may be used to automate their game.
im sure they are aware that normal windows macroing programs can also be used to automatize wow. but for some *obscure* reason, they are not disclosing that information to court, and ask the court to ban macro programs worldwide.
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Unfortunately, a lot of people will be stricken with, "The Enemy of my Enemy is... the maker of the game that I'm addicted to."
I feel a strange disturbance in the force... as if thousands of WoW-addicts/programmers cried out in pain, and were silenced.
Been well over a year since I played WoW, so how has the bot trouble been? They were always more annoying than anything else, and adversely affected some of the economy, but that was about it. Massive bot use would seriously affect gameplay, though...Blizzard may be better off getting some people to corrupt the stuff coming out of pirate bay or something. Distribute bad bots to people who are trying...or they could reduce the grind. Or something. I dunno.
Of course, I could rag on how WoW needs to release its source code and everyone's info because INFORMATION WANTZEZ TO BEEZ FREE, dawg.
it doesnt infringe on anyone's copyrights.
the STUPID, the OVERLY MORONIC argument blizzard is using is that the program 'modifies the wow software running in THE MEMORY'.
of course, that is trying to fool the old, senile court judges. everyone who has used computers a bit knows that when a program runs in memory, MANY aspects of it are modified on constant basis, and a few million times a second or more. windows kernel code modifies the wow software running in the memory, wow software ITSELF modifies itself in the memory, its memory footprint changes, it reads and writes data from disk, and to network and modifies itself accordingly.
a computer's memory is something too complicated for a lawyer to fathom. they shouldnt sweat it.
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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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That's like saying everything at Miliw0rm is illegal. No, the software there can be used for illegal purposes, but in no way is the code it self illegal.
Your right to free speech is the right to speak freely against the government, not release another company's trade secrets.
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
Care to show me how this software is illegal?
It violates the TOS of another software product. That doesn't make the software illegal. I could write in my TOS that you must not run it on Windows, does that make Windows illegal? I kinda doubt it.
It violates the TOS of Blizzard to use the software in combination with WoW, which may void your license. But "illegal"? At least be correct with the terms you use, it's not like there's any lack of term confusion in the vicinity of copyrights, we don't need more people contributing to it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Because they want to stop someone from publishing a way to fuck over most players of their games?
Yup, how evil of them.
If the program itself is ruled as illegal in a court of law, then it is, even if the arguments therefore and the verdict itself seem stupid.
If it's overturned in court, not illegal anymore, but I'd hate to see the release and use of this software taint legit FOSS projects.
So Blizzard is trying to hinder the creation of bots in its MMORPG? Bots in MMORPG's suck anyway! It's not really nice as regular player to see bots playing.
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.
It's not illegal.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Actually, it's your right to speak freely, which the government cannot infringe. You're still responsible for the civil consequences of your speech.
One of the arguments was that:
Glider was interfering with Blizzard's contractual relationship with its customers
So basically, if you wanted to use this software as a reference for something completely unrated to WoW, no, it's not illegal. However, if you use it in full or part to interact with WoW, you're likely going to be sued (contact/civil law, not criminal) or your project shut-down. Being FOSS doesn't make a project immune to such things, look at the unfortunate situation with BNETd
I'm the ideal customer. Rarely play, but every 30 days my account is debited.
Blizzard has crossed an ethical line. Maybe they don't like the guy's software, but asking a court to restrict his freedom of speech is simply wrong.
Yes, publication of source code is a free speech right:
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-225508.html&st.ne.fd.tohhed.ni?hhTest=1
Could you please explain that? When I make it possible for you to break a contract I am liable? For what? Your breach of contract? It's not like I make you use it. By that logic, any gun shop is in deep shit by the moment they sold their first gun.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's bnetd all over again. \o/
No, my rights and yours are universal. The government is involved because we create a government to protect our rights.
This "Conservative" ideology that "our rights apply only to protection from the government" is just wrong. The Constitution specifies, among other protected rights, that we cannot be slaves - prohibiting not just the government from owning slaves. The Constitution of course instructs the government to protect us from robbery, murder and all kinds of other deprivations of our rights.
Our rights are inalienable. Not just inalienable by the government, but by anyone. We create governments to protect us from that alienation, even while the governments we create are themselves not empowered, and often explicitly prohibited to be sure there's no confusion, to deprive us of those rights. But are created with the power to protect our rights.
--
make install -not war
It's not like I make you use it. By that logic, any gun shop is in deep shit by the moment they sold their first gun.
Sadly enough, people tried something similar a little while back. Thankfully, it didn't go anywhere.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I don't see what all the fuss is about ... the source code for Glider is 9 bits:
- # -
- - #
# # #
It's really complicated. Whether by design or not, contract law is astoundingly complex and sometimes borderline irrational.
The basic point when it comes to 3rd party contract interference is intent. If you make a product or provide a service with the explicit intent of causing a breach of contract, the affected party can file a lawsuit claiming damages or requesting other court intervention.
It's a risk you take, of course one can try to develop the game in a way which makes it harder, but if someone is intelligent enough they may find a way anyway.
Though I think cheating is a bigger issue in NDS games for instance where the developers didn't expect anyone to be able to change the code and therefor took no protective measures, and therefor for instance let the client decide which blocks comes next in Tetris DS which makes some people play with all long ones ... Good work!
1) Yeah I thought III and typed II, oops.
2) Can't support one without supporting the other. There are plenty of great games to play, why not play one you can ethically support?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Depends on how the "trade secret" was obtained. With trade secrets, the foruma, source, recipie, etc is kept an internal secret. It can remain that way indefinitely. The downside is that while there are legal protections that prevent an insider from selling it to the competition, if someone discovers the secret independently then they can use it.
To give a company protection they are allowed to patent the "secret". This gives the company exclusive rights to use and/or license it to others. However it does not remain a secret anymore. It's only protected for a limited period of time.
I don't know with Glide if/how a secret was obtained if at all. If the authors were a former employee of Blizzard and they used their knowledge to create Glide, then that might fall in the trade secret category. If they have no connection and just reverse engineered a program, protocol, etc, then Blizzard is SOL on the trade secret route.
with your logic, even leave aside blizzard's, it constitutes a copyright violation if i hit ctrl alt del and end the Wow client by terminating it in task manager.
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I will buy more things, I like that they try to get rid of cheaters and people abusing the game for profit. Those people just destroy the game for all others.
I doubt blizzard do this for themself as much as for their costumers (which if there was lots of cheaters and people grinding for profit would not have been future costumers and therefor would affect Blizzard themself to.)
It's the people who run patched games which suck.
Yes, but the software itself is not illegal. Does Blizzard have a right to ban you from WoW if you cheat? Yes. Can Blizzard ban you in real life... no.
... 100562 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking bnetd (from .../bnetd_0.4.25-6_i386.deb) ...
Setting up bnetd (0.4.25-6) ...
[: 17: ==: unexpected operator
Starting Battle.net(R) gaming server: bnetd.
Hmmm... Lets see about BNETd... http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=bnetd oh wait... I can install it in Debian
Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: bnetd 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded. Need to get 363kB of archives. After unpacking 1102kB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ gutsy/universe bnetd 0.4.25-6 [363kB] Fetched 363kB in 2s (151kB/s) Selecting previously deselected package bnetd. (Reading database
OMG! I just installed it from Ubuntu!!!
Sure, development may have stopped, but you can still get it.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
WoW isn't a first person shooter or something, its not like people are using aimbots. This program basically boils down to a computerized game playing monkey.
I haven't heard of any software that is illegal, there are things that can be done with certain pieces of software that is illegal but that does not make the software illegal. I thought it was the profiting from software that was at issue in this case.
The just avoid proprietary software. It'd be interesting to see cheat devices/software being blocked on the grounds of that blizzards has stated if it's GNU software. It MIGHT work if it were BSD software since their isn't a requirement to release any changes. (Not meant to be flame bait, I'm merely stating the changes were non-obvious.) That or choose a software company that aren't complete *uc*tards about insecure software.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
Every MMORPG I have played once a cheat arises, they go on a banning raid. Doesn't matter if you don't even know what a bot is, they will ban you. However, banning raids are rarer in paid-for MMORPGs because they don't want to kill the revenue stream they have.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
This is a terrible analogy (another /. tradition of complaining about bad analogies).
What they did was slap rockets on their own car, and put it on a communcal network of highways. This is what annoyed everyone.
Then Blizzard put a stop to it with a cop with a radar gun.
So then MDY built a little transparent-ish wall around the cop that was stationed on their part of the communal network , and this is what the lawsuit is about. The radar gun only reads 0, not registering an offense, no matter how fast the rockets are going at any given time.
Still a terrible analogy, but closer than yours.
How do you rule on how someone licenses their own code? Is there some precedent?
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Blizzard is stance on that Glider contains copyrighted and protected property. One can't declare something open source if one doesn't own it to begin with.
Of course all of this maneuvering hinges on whether or not Glider did their work cleanly. I personally don't favor this approach where it seems to be easier just to continually combat the thing better technology.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution officially abolished and continues to prohibit slavery, and with limited exceptions, such as those convicted of a crime, prohibits involuntary servitude.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_ammendment. And those convicted of a crime would logically be slaves to the US government. Now, in the interest of good public opinion the government chooses to not use that part of it most of the time, but saying that the government cannot own slaves is just plain wrong.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
If you want to open-source Glider DO IT NOW. Don't wait for the court to tell you not to or you'll be in serious trouble. Once it's out the door onto the Internet the question is moot.
And for Blzzard to tell you what your future employment can, and can't, be in coding is the Overreach of the Year.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
... being made into a fun game?
I hate to be "that guy", but I hate WoW. There are a few fun parts and endless hours of pointless toil in between them. If I could let a robot play through the endless grind of killing and collecting trash to get to the next entertaining portion of the game, I'd be thrilled.
I don't know, maybe MMOs can't be fun. Maybe it's not possible to put up enough unique and entertaining content to keep people hooked on it for years at a time. Maybe the only way to keep people playing is to endlessly hold a carrot in front of them and hope they chase it for as long as it's there.
Weird slashbug #455
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.
Huh?
For good or ill, that was the court's ruling.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
(from a presentation based upon a textbook)
Intentional Interference with Contractual Relations
A tort that arises when a third party induces a contracting party to breach the contract with another party.
The following elements must be shown:
- A valid, enforceable contract between the contracting parties.
- Third-party knowledge of this contract.
- Third-party inducement to breach the contract.
technically speaking the 13th amendment says: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. " So, you can be a slave if it is punishment for a crime. Thus your argument is incorrect.
Only because the rockets are designed specifically for use with (only function on?) cars that will only ever be used in the No Rocket Cars Allowed Test Track.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Cheaters suck, but I'm not about to throw my weight behind a scorched earth policy that ends up hurting software owners more than it helps them. Cheaters affect your ability to use one piece of software, what blizzard has done has damaged your right to use any piece of software the way you see fit. This is far, far worse.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Farming may have been an issue initially with the game, and people profiting from the game, without Blizzard getting their share of it. However, since Burning Crusades, people who play at 70 can "grind" up gold easily...
Blizzard has to address the real underlining issue, keeping the game interesting and challenging. The reason you would use glide is because you are tired of "grinding and questing" the same things over and over, killing the same mobs over and over, either for a new character or for a glimpse of some "better gear" (which is the biggest farce of the game). The user has already done it once why make it the same painful process over and over, it's an absolute turn off...
Curiosity... can you justify your argument in any practical way? If a bot plays 10 hours while I'm at work, and a college kid on break plays 10 hours while I'm at work, we both wind up in the same place at the same time. Neither of us has an advantage.
WoW leveling requires exactly zero skill, same with resource acquisition. Since leveling and resource acquisition in WoW is a matter of time expenditure - by design, mind you - why does it matter whether or not a player puts in that time, or a bot does?
Weird slashbug #455
That's what I was thinking. This isn't a bot that lets you ruin the experience for other players. It's a bot that lets you level up without playing the game for hours on end. If it was a PK bot I would understand. If I was Blizzard, I would take advantage of the fact that nobody wants to start off at level 1, and have people pay extra to start with characters at certain specs. Let the guy start out at whatever specs he can think of (like selecting a computer from Dell), and make them pay extra for it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
And precisely which law do you feel that software violates?
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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."
I'm collecting differing opinions here, so yes, I already asked this farther up in the thread: how is this cheating?
I think we can both agree the leveling and resource acquisition in WoW requires next to no skill. If it required skill, bots wouldn't be able to do it, because bots can't (yet) emulate active human thought processes.
So, in the end, leveling and resource acquisition in WoW is a matter of time expenditure. Why does it matter, then, if I use a bot to put in 10 hours while I'm at work, or a college kid on break puts in 10 hours while I'm at work? We both end up in the same place at the same time, so nobody has an advantage. In fact, since it's a matter of time, people who can't be at the computer the maximum amount of time actually have a DISADVANTAGE by design. They're penalized for not devoting time to the game.
Why is that acceptable, but erasing the penalty via the use of a bot is "cheating"?
Weird slashbug #455
It also says that the term for copyright is not indefinate that's why it's life + 70 years(fucking joke) now. They can impose "slavery" for stealing cookies if they want. Just as the rest of the constitution, the article is intentionally left open to all kinds of interpretation.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
...about making a bot program that would be completely unstoppable. Also, it could be modified to allow for remote play, which is something I'd truly love - particularly for remote AH interaction.
The idea: run the bot on a separate PC.
Requirements:
1) Find/devise a way to send USB inputs from one PC to another. Make it look like plain-Jane USB keyboard and mouse input.
2) Find/devise a way to capture VGA data and parse it. Provide a 'Generic Monitor' PNP ID to prevent detection.
3) Optionally, find/devise a way to capture audio data, as above. Would be great for a fishing bot, along with 'fishping'.
4) Optionally, find/devise a way to interact with bot program via the web, cell phone, or other means. Again, Auction House comes to mind, but also imagine getting a text message when you get whispered by a GM. Log into the web interface and input your replies, clicking the 'send' button.
In general, all of this would be ran on a second PC using only the human methods of interacting with the game - HID, video, audio. With enough of an interface, this could be very difficult to track and/or prevent.
You could even secure the network channel via SSH to prevent Warden from sniffing the traffic.
Another appeal to this approach is that it would be modular and would scale to other games using the same technology: EQ3, Warhammer, whatever.
I could see an enterprising company selling appliances, pre-built and ready to rock.
I wonder how creative the copyright complaint would have to be to bring such an enterprise to court, as well. Again, we're talking about a program that does not interact with the game's data in any way. All that's being done is capture/parse of data being provided to the end-user. Sounds like 'fair use' or even 'time shifting' to me...
Oh crap! I think I may have just 'solved' it myself...
Funny how writing an idea down makes it more tangible.
What if we ran WoW in a Virtual Machine?
Wouldn't that make the hooks a lot more available?
As for 3d acceleration, would you really NEED awesome graphics on your web portal? Just use the crappy-fake method of getting it to run, and viola.
Another idea, what about Wine?
The difference is that your bot can be tapping a node for 24h/24h. I've had problems with bots doing that previously, and I've had to report them to be able to complete part of the quests.
Yes, that was a small server, so almost no one else than the bots in the zone, thus a very slow respawn rate. That was a PITA.
In the midst of all this frothing-at-the-mouth has anyone ever actually bothered reading Blizzard's response as to why the concerns of Public Knowledge really don't apply to games like WoW (Games which you must connect to centralized servers only after agreeing to a plethora of EULA and ToU agreements and cannot access any game content otherwise). This case if you examine it deep enough obviously has no ramifications beyond preventing further hijacking of entertainment service providers such as Blizzard through World of Warcraft.
Can anyone give a single example of how this narrow ruling can possibly have a chilling effect on peoples "right" to do anything other than ruin an online community by violating agreement after agreement to effectively ruin a (game) market through unchecked greed? I bet you can't.
As per the response Blizzard filed to Public Knowledge's concerns:
"We invented personal computing." - Bill Gates
I would argue that Glider is hacking a computer network. Bear with me here.
The tool manipulates a secured line of communication between a client and a server to get a desired set of results and hides the fact that it is doing so. You could call it SQL injection, replay-attack, man in the middle, etc. It is the same thing as hacking a shared network.
A different example. Do you mind if I write software to run on my ATM that when it connects to a bank just manipulates a little data. Maybe transfers some additional money into my account? That is what a Botting-program does to an online game. It takes cpu and resources from the common pool and transfers it to the hacker allowing them to accomplish goals while the user is working or sleeping.
Now you could counter argue that Glider is only interacting with the Wow client in the same way that a user would. But that only works if they were actually interacting with the client and not disabling security and doing things not allowed by the client.
Because the rules of the game say you must be the one playing not some automated system.
The 9million people who subscribed to the game agreed to such rules and the majority of them play the game fairly.
So what makes you so special or gives you the right to be above the rules that you agreed to?
If you don't like the game or its rules dont play, don't be a self centered asshole who thinks hes above everyone else.
The real problem is the fact that World of Warcraft (and every MMO released to date) is designed with such shoddy gameplay mechanics that people would rather have a computer play most of the game for them. The problem isn't that some people automate their characters, the problem is that a large percentage of the game is so mind-numbingly boring and repetitive that people would go to any length to avoid it and just play the good stuff. Is there anything wrong with this? Absolutely not, these developers (again, this applies to ALL MMOs) need to learn to design games that are fun the entire time you're playing them.
Put it another way, consider what would be the case if WoW were a single player game. The immediate conclusion everybody would draw was that the gameplay is substandard, because they are so tempted to automate it. Make it multiplayer and all of a sudden this is different? No. What's really going on here? Blizzard puts as many artificual, tedious roadblocks as they can get away with into the game, and the reason they do so is to extend the duration of their subscriptions as long as possible. When somebody decides to automate the process, Blizzard isn't protecting their player base, they're protecting their profit margins. They're saying, "You'll play this game OUR way so we can milk you for as much money as possible." So I say to Blizzard, cure the disease, not the symptom. Make a game that people don't want to have a computer play most of it for them and you won't have these problems.
Can't figure out how to make a game that's both fun and takes a long time to get tired of? Hire some actually talented game designers. We know you can take a design somebody else came up with and polish the mechanics to to a shiny gleam (see: every Blizzard game to date). Now's the time to innovate.
Y'all think I'm kidding? Y'all think this is flamebait?
I'm not. It's not. I'm serious. You can't stop people breaking in to their own computers. If you want to implement the security at the client, make the game run on a console.
I think it's more like a court telling a thief that he can't publish a book on how to pick locks, even though he might have been using his 'knowledge' to commit illegal acts, it could be usefull learning material for a locksmith doing something completely legal.
Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges
For the love of god yes. Then maybe the macro and UI system will get fixed and we'll get a good Linux client rather than needing to run Wine.
Doing this explicitly pisses off your playerbase, as it means people have characters they didn't "earn".
Interestingly, you can do exactly this by paying money to a third party to play your character for you for a period of time, though this is also banned according to the EULA.
I know, and they shouldn't have done so, that was my entire point. They approached what could have been a fair and legitimate problem from entirely the wrong angle and not only have they pissed off a lot of people, they've set a very nasty copyright precedent while they were at it.
If Blizzard is selling a user interface (the client) then they shouldn't care who's improving the user interface.
If Blizzard is selling a service, then they shouldn't be implementing the security in the client: you can't stop anyone breaking in to their own computer.
What costs more, the service or the client?
Open source the part that you're not making money from, and quit worrying about Glider.
So do you think it is OK to cheat? Do You like to play with other players That are cheating? I do not pay ~15 bucks a month to have to pay a computer game I cheat at? I have played PS2, PS3, Wii and a few others and I have NEVER used a cheat code. I consider them repulsive. also why whould I spend money on a game I cheat at? I could just as well save my money and get a deck of cards and just cheat at solitaire. I do not fault Blizzrd for attempting to do what they are doing I just wish they did not have to. And Yes what they/blizzard is doing is an impossible task imho
Mod this guy up!
This has to be one of the smartest suggestions I can think of in a long time. The reason I refuse to play WoW or games like it is because they are big fsking time sinks, and I actually have a real life, house, cars, wife, and kids. Why the heck should I be essentially required to sacrifice all of my very valuable time just so I can play at a high level with the kids that have all summer to level up?
Being able to BUY my way to whatever the highest level is (for a reasonable and non-stupid price) Should always be an option for the working stiff.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
> If a game had no grind, players would lose interest quickly
That is incorrect.
Guild Wars is an example of an online game that has (almost) no grind, and yet is massively popular (millions), and growing.
And GW has (almost) no bots, since there is almost no boring grinding for bots to replace. As a result, the only reason left to run bots in GW is for farming for drops, but it's very rarely done.
So no, you're wrong. WoW (and EverQuest and others) did not need to be designed as time sinks, but they were, simply because that extends the companies' monthly revenues. And now Blizzard deserves to be overrun with Glider-type bots, because the grinding problem is of their own design and making.
The need for grinding is a sign of a very badly designed game. Repetition has no redeeming aspects at all.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
But what if you design rocket cars for other people with the express purpose of getting past the test track inspectors, so that rocket cars get on the track?
Because an honest player puts actual effort into resource acquisition, while someone who uses a bot is able to beat the honest player without expending the same amount of effort.
This frustrates the honest player and rewards the bot user.
If you don't have the time to play a game by its rules, then go find a different game to play.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Seriously, just let the code out. This world needs to understand that they need a new tool set for dealing with certain issues. It's no longer acceptable to take everything to court where typically, he-who-has-the-most-money wins. A court or faux-legal order will take a while. Just let the code out and be done with it. It's the speed of information that's going to be a force for this change. Also, if he wrote the code and hasn't sold it or the rights to it, I'm pretty sure he can give it away.
Why is that acceptable, but erasing the penalty via the use of a bot is "cheating"?
Because if it takes you longer to get that epic world drop, it translates directly into more money in Blizzard's pocket.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I can't see this as being anything more than a very minor problem for Blizzard. But their actions seem to be begging someone to create a major problem for them; like creating an open source version of their game that runs over a p2p network, that anyone can modify in whatever way they would like to.
No, it's not ok to cheat. Neither is it ok to pervert copyright law to the detriment of an entire society, just to control what happens in a video game. You are less free than you were last month because of what blizzard did. That's far worse than anything any cheater could do.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Slaves have no rights, are not citizens.
Not all prisoners are slaves. Basic logic. Saying it doesn't make it so, it just makes it plain wrong.
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make install -not war
Be happy, Blizzard just gave you your life back!
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Have you ever noticed that whenever someone starts a post saying that an analogy is bad, they then try to add more convolutions to that same analogy as if that will improve it?
Why, that kind of analogy is just like when someone puts a rocket on their neighbor's car and doesn't tell the neighbor, then fires it up when the neighbor leaves for work in the morning.
Yep, just like it. :D
If you don't want to spend the time leveling a character, then go find a different game to play.
Your argument is disingenuous, since we all know that letting a bot level your character and generate gold give you an unfair advantage over a player that actually spends time on a pvp server.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
You could just mark the characters as "bought", and then let people who bought their character, as well as the stats they bought them at. Maybe the non-bought characters would target the bought ones more. But that might be the price you have to pay just buying your way into society.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
We're enjoying a good rant-fest here, please don't confuse anybody with the facts.
And once you purchase your highest level, what is there left to do?
That's not a conservative ideology. It's a neocon ideology.
I don't play WoW because I generally get bored with it after about a month, so this doesn't really affect me one way or the other. Your response, however, seems mostly based on emotion. I'm looking for pragmatic reasons to not allow botting.
Yes, the rules are a legitimate reason to reject bots, but they're not really a practical reason. I'm looking for a clear explanation of what the difference is between getting to L60/70 in 10 days with a bot, or 10 days hitting the keys yourself. Neither person person gains an advantage, and to play the instances - the meat of the game, really - they're going to have to kick the bot off and take control anyway.
So, really, what's the difference?
Weird slashbug #455
Our rights are inalienable. Not just inalienable by the government, but by anyone.
Name any right that the government does not abridge in certain cases. Going down The Bill Of Rights, the Third Amendment is the only one where I'm not aware of the government revoking it.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
How is open sourcing this software bad for Blizzard? Sure, it might lead to a rise in the amount of people attempting to use it in the short term, but last time I played WoW I wasn't aware that a huge percentage of the players were botting anyway. In the long term, I would think that having the source code for glider would better enable Blizzard to provide a technical solution, as opposed to a legal solution, to their little problem. Beyond that, perhaps they could take some initiative and analyze how glider does what it does in order to improve their NPC movement/AI or something. I'm sure it must have some nice path finding algorithms designed to work specifically with WoW.
You'll have to explain the effort part to me (well, you don't have to unless you want me to understand your point of view). I've played WoW a few times over the last 3 years and, frankly, I don't think it requires any real effort at all outside of instances. Whacking away at enemies seemed mostly a matter of being smart enough to not pick a fight with something stronger than you and hitting the right sequence of number keys again and again.
Where's the effort in that? I mean, you could do quests, but bots don't do quests, and monster grind is a legitimate form of leveling in WoW so....
Weird slashbug #455
"So, in the end, leveling and resource acquisition in WoW is a matter of time expenditure. Why does it matter, then, if I use a bot to put in 10 hours while I'm at work, or a college kid on break puts in 10 hours while I'm at work? We both end up in the same place at the same time, so nobody has an advantage."
A big problem is that one of the most common uses for things like Glider is to collect in-game resources that are limited in number -- a person who feels free to automate that contrary to the rules has a tendency not only to perform better at collecting those resources but to more completely shut out other players.
It's not just a matter of "oh that guy over there didn't have to spend the time that I did," though there's certainly some of that going on, it's that the guy over there let his computer gather up all the scarce resources overnight and now for player 2, who wants to spend the time themselves, there's no point because automated player 1 got there first.
"In fact, since it's a matter of time, people who can't be at the computer the maximum amount of time actually have a DISADVANTAGE by design."
Sure, but in the case of automation, people who take advantage of it have such a huge advantage over any real human being that permitting it would force everyone to automate. At some point in there it wouldn't be a game anymore.
Anyway, as for the legal issues raised in this case, Blizzard's arguments are not completely out there, though they are aggressive. Thing is, copyright is a creature of statute, and that they can make those arguments and sometimes win in court is a matter of what the statute says. Copyright law as it stands right now is chock full of bad policy, but only Congress can change that.
As an example, the idea that a copy of a copyrighted work in memory is fixed in physical form, which makes it subject to copyright under the statute, is actually true, no matter how inconvenient it is or absurd the result. There's case law that protects copying incidental and necessary to legal uses of a copyrighted work, but arguably (and Blizzard has argued this and won the point in this case) someone who copies incidentally to doing something that otherwise violates a contract with the copyright holder isn't protected by that case law.
I'm sure Blizzard's attorneys wouldn't want to be sued (or disbarred) because they came up with some argument the statute supported but elected not to use it despite it favoring their client.
Care to show me how this software is illegal?
The court said that making modifications to WoW as loaded in memory was copyright infringement, and that consequently anyone using Glider was thus in fact infringing Blizzard's copyrights.
I don't agree with it. I think it's an incredibly stupid ruling. Unfortunately though, it means that for now at least, Glider is a piece of software that facilitates copyright infringement as its primary purpose in the court's eyes.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
That's all well and good, but is a EULA or sign-on click-through agreement an enforceable "contract"?
You made the same point as the other guy, and it's a legitimate response to my question, so I'll just interject my opinion with the understanding that I'm not disagreeing with your particular take on the matter:
That's just a design flaw.
In fact, that's really what WoW, to me anyway, appears to be: one giant bundle of design flaws. It just seems like they built a game that, in the end, could initially interest a lot of different people, but would inevitably infuriate and frustrate a substantial portion of them. If I don't automate resource collection, and I have other responsibilities (or just don't want to play for insane amounts of time) I'm penalized and ultimately locked out of substantial portions of the game. However, if I do automate that collection, people who spend substantial time in the game feel slighted.
I guess I can't really feel for Blizzard or its players on this matter, because it just seems to me like Blizzard invited this sort of thing on itself. I don't know that I agree that Glider should be deemed illegal, but I definitely think it's unethical, but I also think it's Blizzard's poor design that made it an issue in the first place.
In other words: fail all around.
Weird slashbug #455
I still hadn't forgotten the bnetd debacle so there's no way I'm ever forgiving Blizzard now.
Put identity in the browser.
How is the bot cheating any more than cruise control? Do cops claim you're cheating by using a system to keep your vehicle at a set speed? You set it to maintain a specific speed, but then you take control again (using the terms suitable to WoW) during "the interesting parts", like when you come upon other traffic, when you enter a town, or when you simply want to take full control for a while.
The big difference I see is using bots like this to gold farm or do other things for profit. If you are just wanting to start a new character and get past a lot of the grind that is so repetitive and lame (especially after you've manually leveled up a character or two), then I say go ahead.
Blizzard needs to decide which action will ultimately preserve their player base--allowing or disallowing the bots--and then live with the consequences. While WoW has a legendary reputation in the MMO field, if they start losing veteran players who are tired of the grind, they will need to reassess their business model and their terms of service.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
You know that most of the MMORPGs in Asia run this way, right? People here play for free but pay to get the cool equipment or to level up faster.
Put identity in the browser.
Links to other cases or you are completely full of shit.
I vote shit.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
If you actually played WoW, you would understand the reasons against botting. However you don't, but it doesn't seems to stop you from trolling for comments...
This is another example of your lack of understanding. WoW has PvP servers. Within these servers, Players can attack other players. Asshats use a bot to get to the highest level possible and then proceed to attack lower level characters for their own amusement. This harassment slows down the legitimate player.
Of course nothing prevents a level 70 from being an asshat, but at least without bots you would have a lower number of dedicated asshats...
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Blizzard banned my real life account when I opened my WOW account. ):
Because they want to stop someone from publishing a way to fuck over most players of their games?
Yup, how evil of them.
as oppose to THEM fucking over most players of their games?
world of chorecraft.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Actually i tend to disagree a bit with the car analogy not being good enough,
let's say that like me you get into an accident, and that now your car is supposedly a total loss
only because the insurance think its cheaper for them to just write the car off, but then you pay for those damages yourself, seeing as it would only be 1000$ out of your pocket, and this would be much less, then redoing a full leasing of a vehicle etc, etc.
Now you go to get your car reinstated as drivable, guess what it... isn't Ford that tells you you can't put rockets on your car, it's the dmv/caa which passes your inspections, that makes you follow a code set up by the gov. for cars (being the small weapons they are in society) to require a certain minimum of responsibility on your part to make sure it is road worthy.
Having rockets on your car, would make it unworthy, as it would not be tested for it to be road legal (hence tomahawk dodge bike not being able to be driven on the road normally, nor a nascar race car, although it is still a automobile, and the other a bike.
I tend to agree with you, that blizzard sucks for taking this stance, as they could have come up with something clever about maybe not allowing your characters to join a cheat free server if certain applications are installed on your computer. You want to cheat, then cheat on a cheat server.
Perfect example of a strawman. The grandparent didn't say anything about fighting monsters, but was referring to resource harvesting, most likely for the botting player to sell on the auction house.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Which is why I'm asking other people for their input. I note that you couldn't be bothered to provide any without an insult first.
Don't waste your time responding. I won't dignify any further outbursts like that with my attention.
Weird slashbug #455
I would consider having to spend time doing monotonous farming as putting some effort in leveling your character. While coming home to see what your bot has accomplished can be considered effortless.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
they can ban people from THEIR SERVERS..
They have overreached in this case. Under this ruling ford can sue third party "pimp your ride" services because they fabricate parts which interact with patented ford parts.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I suppose, but every argument you just said could be applied to a very dedicated insomniac. Whats stopping a normal person from doing everything you just said? to your second point, What if someone grinded for a number of months and saved up tons of money, and then took over an entire sector of the market by buying everything up? These are all very good points, but they are not specific to botting, they are specific to people who are willing and able to take advantage of them.
No, it's not a strawman, not even close. It's apparently a misunderstanding on my part. I thought he was referring to killing monsters, looting them, and selling the loot.
Regardless, the point still stands even if the mechanics described are slightly different. I don't see how walking up to veins/plants/etc. and clicking them really required any effort.
Somebody else already made a good point on it anyway, though, so its a moot point: apparently bots camp at them and grab the resources as soon as they respawn. I wasn't aware of that (hence the reason I'm asking for input).
Weird slashbug #455
Those that like the game will. Those that don't will figure that now it is time to quit. Others will quit in protest of it.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
If a developer writes an application, it it doesn't infringe any copyrights....
But RUNNING the application DOES. Is the application still infringing?
This is why you should be afraid.
What about thinking about writing the application? After all, you have to think about the code before you write it. Isn't that, in effect, Thoughcrime? (I think I owe royalties to Orwell now)
It's a damn shame that they chose to use the insane 'copyright on RAM contents' argument.
If you ask me, it's a shame that they used the argument and won with it.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
That's not a conservative ideology. It's a neocon ideology.
really?
what was "neo" about the mccarthy era?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
IAANAL, but is a breach of TOS the same as a breach of contract? That is, is a usage license the same as a contract?
Really now, what this is about (at least to some of us) is that what right does Blizzard's EULA give them to control what happens to the source code of SOMEONE ELSE'S IP. Yes, the code is used to "cheat" in a video game, but even if Blizzard has the best intentions of their customers at heart, those of us who know this country, and this industry are concerned of where it can lead. Precedent will be set and anyone will use the case to try and gag other peoples software on this premise. Blizzard should not be able to use their copyright claim to trample others copyright. If they do, others will most definitely follow.
you are now rationalizing why it is okay to cheat. BTW, your argument stinks the kid at home DID THE MINING himself , the bot user did not. How difficult the task is does not matter and is known as a "red Herring"
They could sue me and I would still buy SC2 and D3...
Since leveling and resource acquisition in WoW is a matter of time expenditure - by design, mind you - why does it matter whether or not a player puts in that time, or a bot does?
You recognise that time sinks exist by design. If the game designer didn't care about the player having to spend hours in front of the game, it wouldn't have time sinks. So why have you not stopped to ask yourself why they exist?
Inherent in being a MMORPG is that your character's skills improve. There are three basic ways of doing this: a) the character improves over time no matter what you do; b) the character improves as you spend more money; or c) the character improves as you spend time playing. Of these c) makes most sense. a) means that I can never overtake someone who started before me. b) is rather a bad way to get lots of people playing the game, because many people will view it as unfair.
Given that time spent playing determines your level, what the game designer is essentially asking you to do is convert one resource (your time) into another resource (your level). Often this goes via an intermediate resource (your gold). To use a bot is to replace the base resource with another one (your computer's time), and will interfere with the in-game economy. You're taking a game designed around option c) and forcing it into the mould of option a). Similarly, gold farming is pushing for option b). If you prefer option a) or b) then play a game designed for it, whose economy takes it into account.
They could sue me and I would still buy SC2 and D3...
Quoth the beaten wife: "But.. I love him!"
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Blizzard is well within their rights to ban cheaters. On the other hand, they have no right to stop something from distributing code that in no way violates any of their copyrights, patents, etc.
The Constitution of course instructs the government to protect us from robbery, murder and all kinds of other deprivations of our rights.
What Constitution? Certainly not the United States Constitution. The United States Constitution gives the federal government very limited powers, and we even added a 10th Amendment to tell them explicitly, "If we don't say you can do it here, you can't do it." Now, I'll grant you that FDR used the Constitution as a butt wipe (and threatened to stack the Court when they rightly pointed out that he was doing so), so that hardly means anything anymore, but it is there. I'm not aware of any language that tells the federal government to protect me from murder and robbery or any deprivation of rights. Those are traditionally reserved to the states.
In fact, even the 14th Amendment, which deals with racism, only works for governments. It doesn't apply to individuals. Federal civil rights legislation that affects individuals is based on the commerce clause (on the strained reasoning that ANYTHING you do affects interstate commerce, so the federal government can tell you what to do; there's even a case that upheld an FDR New Deal farm subsidy because a farmer who grew wheat on his own farm and used it himself on his own farm was engaging in interstate commerce).
Our rights are inalienable. Not just inalienable by the government, but by anyone. We create governments to protect us from that alienation, even while the governments we create are themselves not empowered, and often explicitly prohibited to be sure there's no confusion, to deprive us of those rights. But are created with the power to protect our rights.
I'm not aware that the word "inalienable" appears anywhere in the Constitution (if you know of an instance, please point me to it). That word does appear in the Declaration of Independence, which is often confused with the Constitution (often by people who have read neither). But the Declaration of Independence has nothing to do with our system of government. It was a brilliant document, but its purpose was to declare a break with England. The Constitution is a far more conservative document.
The truth is that most of your rights are alienable, and some of those that are not may at least be contractually abridged to some degree. Slavery is probably inalienable, but I can contractually bind myself to work for an unfair wage as long as it meets the statutory minimum wage. Off the top of my head and without looking up any cases, the ones I would suspect that are the closest to truly inalienable are free exercise of religion, cruel and unusual punishment, and the right to vote if over 18 (if you can think of more, good for you).
But other than that, people contract away rights all the time. For example, the Seventh Amendment gives you a right to a jury trial in federal courts, but binding arbitration is very, very common (and in fact, often encouraged by courts for purposes of efficiency). You can contractually agree to not own a gun. You can permit a government to take your property without just compensation. You can voluntarily permit a search and seizure without probable cause. You can voluntarily testify at your own criminal trial. You can even voluntarily permit troops to be quartered in your home in times of peace. And so on...
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Abridgement, infringement, suspension: all those violations are demonstrations that our rights, which still persist as rights, are not absolute, and require protection. Limits on our rights are not solely matters of "shouting fire in a crowded audience". Rights are not absolute, but just abusing them doesn't remove them from being our rights.
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make install -not war
There is still the hardware work-around: Hook up the video out to a video capture card on a second computer, make a hardware widget that takes goes from the second computers USB port to keyboard in on the first computer.
You jest, yet they are worrying about similar kinds of things wrt video. (See Trusted Computing)
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
I didn't address that issue in my reply to that other post because I happen to agree that it's at best stupid to try to prevent someone from releasing their source code for something they wrote and spent time creating. Slapping a FORBIDDEN sticker on a chunk of knowledge/information is not an effective way to combat it, and Blizzard would be much better off whether they realize it now or not by actually letting these programs have the source code completely exposed. All the easier to patch your client and keep up the arms race. Stupid at best, and a combination of dangerous/difficult to enforce/unethical at worst, but the question is if it's without precedent, and I would think there is a significant chance that there is.
"We invented personal computing." - Bill Gates
I have nothing against the use of guides or even addons like QuestHelper. They still require you to be online and actively participate in the game.
The bots give a player an unfair advantage by allowing the character to be leveled or gold collected without the player having to dedicate time to spend actually playing the game.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
I really doubt that and you are being a bit over the top. The legal arguement would never stand if the hackers were modifing freeware. But this is a paid service where the code is subverting the pleasure of customers who pay to use the online community. The hackware is specifically designed to subvert the rules of play. Do u deny that? As for the free world, I am WAY more worried about Homeland security than of the legal actions of Blizzard to protect its online community from cheaters.
Why oh why doesn't Blizzard simply buy the code (along with some NDA clauses) in the first place?
And that ruling says that it's illegal to use Glider with WoW, but that doesn't mean that Glider in itself (or possessing it, or distributing it if it's open source) is illegal.
(Disclaimer: IANAL)
No, my argument is that the government can and does prohibit private ownership of slaves. The fact that the government could own slaves or involuntary servants as punishment for a crime does not at all contradict that argument. Such possible government ownership does not at all conflict with the Constitutional prohibition on private slave ownership. No one but the government can punish for a crime. And even if they could (in a contrived argument invoking private prison corporations), those people are not slaves. They're prisoners.
You are, in fact, getting your argument backwards. Or, more accurately, inverted.
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make install -not war
That nice, but it's coming from Blizzard, there implication of it being a license doesn't make it so.
Botting can't ruin WoW.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The Federal government has jurisdiction over murders and robberies where the perpetrators cross state lines, or substantially affect interstate commerce in the crime's commission.
The Constitution is indeed a document that describes how the US government is constituted, including prohibitions on private actions. I cite the 13th Amendment prohibiting private ownership of slaves. The people create a government with the Constitution to protect our rights. The government and that protection is a real thing in a material world, so those protections can be more or less complete and effective. But the failure of the government to protect private people from other private people is no shortcoming of the Constitution, just its application by real people.
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make install -not war
The question was about the harm of botting, not about WoWs rules.
Naw, I'll contiue to play, and bot.
Well, I only bot fishing becasue I have to have it(per Blizzards rules), and it's a god damn boring activity.
I'm not above everyone else, everyone else keeps lowering themselves beneath me.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We call such characters Politicians around here.
Can't support one without supporting the other. There are plenty of great games to play, why not play one you can ethically support?
Evidently, principles are less important than ph4t l00tz
Interesting. I, on the other hand, loved Doom (Yes, that's how long it's been since I've done much gaming) but I'm just terrible at it. Really. Got killed immediately, consistently. I tried some settings that removed enemies, all the way down to none, iirc. That didn't help; it was boring to walk around in empty or near-empty spaces. Then I tried just flat-out cheating. I gave myself infinite ammo and invulnerability.
Oh, my, what a change. Previously, I'd start to play and quit in frustration after a few minutes or an hour. As much as I liked the game and always returned to it, I never played it consistently. After I got the ammo and invulnerability, however, I played and played and played, hours upon hours, for months. It became a wonderful obsession.
I don't think what I did was cheating, really. I got far more satisfaction from changing the nature of the game. I set different goals, mostly seeing how fast I could get through. I changed the game-type from "kill the baddies" to "run through this maze faster."
Oddly enough, I don't like racing games. I suck at those, too. :-)
Take Mass Effect. The puzzle game to unlock containers, scan deposits and break into computers. Decent enough little mini-game but by the end weren't you sick to death of it?
And ME only takes 30 or so hours to complete.
A MMORPG has to last for months if not years. Just how are you going to create anything that is fun to do for so long?
Age of Conan tried to update combat to make it less boring, so instead of pressing a button to execute a skill you now press a button to execute a skill followed by a number of other buttons a bit like DDR except that the pattern is always the same. So Skill A is followed by 312 for instance. In PvP combat it was tricky because you need to be in range when the final button is pressed but in PvE (fighting against the computer) it adds NOTHING! In fact players with a macro keyboard just macro the combo's and find themselves playing yet another Everquest clone.
Vanguard has a diplomacy mini-game. Intresting enough until you start doing some math about how many games you need to play to actually achieve anything and loose all hope.
Same with crafting mini-games. Fun enough in their own right the 100th time they loose all appeal.
I think Star Wars Galaxies still did it the best. It had a mini-game for crafting but if you had a good result you could safe it as a recipe and use it over and over again in a factory. So mini-game that put in a bit of challenge but without hammering the player to death with it.
But then SWG was a game that required players to make their own fun and we all know how that ended.
The problem is simple, the more thightly scripted content is the longer it takes to design but the shorter it lasts. If a single player game like ME takes years to develop for 30 hours of gameplay then just how many decades does a game have to spend in production to give 30 months of gameplay?
Perhaps the answer lies in making the game focus on strategy, FPS games like the famous counterstrike were played for years with only limited content. Perhaps if MMORPG's battles were less like puzzles (do the right thing with the right class at the right time and WIN) but more like strategy, (okay, we have no class X but we got skill Z, how can we use that?) people would play the game differently and enjoy the gameplay. Could you imagine a MMORPG where not every LFG message has people begging for a healer?
Lotro does that in the beginning. If you want and try you can survive almost until till the end game with odd groups lacking "essential" classes. How about an all hunter party, dragons don't stand a chance. Guardians protecting each other? Takes a while but near invulnerable.
Sadly, I fear that many people just don't have the mindset to play in a game that would focus on challgenging gameplay over memorisation.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"Maybe transfers some additional money into my account? That is what a Botting-program does to an online game."
No, it's not.
"It takes cpu and resources from the common pool and transfers it to the hacker allowing them to accomplish goals while the user is working or sleeping."
WTF are you talking about? It does no such thing.
"Now you could counter argue that Glider is only interacting with the Wow client in the same way that a user would. "
And that's what it does.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You said "Our rights are inalienable. Not just inalienable by the government, but by anyone."
My post shows this to be incorrect.
That's actually incorrect. There is an amendment prohibiting a "person" from owning another "person" and we also fought a war over this premise. However, it is elgal for the government to own a person. Just ask any of the many military personnel in the US who were courts martialed and/or received nonjudicial punishment for "willful destruction of government property" when their reckless behavior resulted in an injury. These cases are for as little as getting a severe sunburn from falling asleep on the beach that results in missing work. Is it against the spirit of the constitution? Absolutely.. Is it the current state of the law? Absolutely not. It always amazes me how many people don't realize that the government can own people. I'm just glad no corporation has stretched the rational to try to own a person. The governments argument is that the war and the amendment forbid "people" not the government from ownership.
As an example, the idea that a copy of a copyrighted work in memory is fixed in physical form, which makes it subject to copyright under the statute, is actually true, no matter how inconvenient it is or absurd the result.
Play WoW on a machine with 512MB of RAM. It will function. Thus, this assertion is false (WoW is larger than 512MB).
The reason to disallow botting is because the player base expects there to be no botting.
Now if there was an MMO that had a policy of "We don't care as long as you pay", then sure, bots would be fine.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
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.
1. Makes having the mining/crafting skill trivial and severely limits players from gathering low or mid level resources. Want to mine that iron? Tough, drop your mining skill and level it back up. In turn, that will increase prices on the Auction house to ridiculous levels.
2. Node drifts underground, no one can harvest it.
3. Vendors pay very little compared to what demand will bring for an item. Plus, putting artificial boundaries on prices can easily destabilize the economy.
4. It's been a couple years since I've played WoW, but even then, there were a lot of items/services that would gross well over 100 gold. Now that the level cap is 70 and flying mounts cost a bagilion gold, I'm sure the value of gold in WoW has only gone down (meaning higher prices all around).
I liked the ideas at first, but as I thought about the game mechanics, realized they would only frustrate Blizzard's customers.
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 MMO Asheron's Call, a contemporary of better-known Everquest, has had a framework like this for years, known as Decal.
Interestingly, the developers of asheron's call (Turbine) chose to embrace the 3rd party development community. As a result, players have used the framework to extend and improve the game client; many community improvements have eventually been rolled into the official client (e.g., showing the health/mana of your party members in a single panel, and allegiance-wide chat). Turbine even went as far as to hire several of the top decal plugin developers.
This has lead to a fairly unique game, with player-run bots running unattended trades, offering trade-skill services, and help new players with magical enhancements.
Of course, with all the positive contributions that enhance gameplay, there have been negative ones as well. Combat macroing became commonplace, allowing characters to advance without human intervention; at first this was more or less endorsed by Turbine, but a few years ago they finally ruled against running combat macros while away from the keyboard. To enforce this, they started giving basic Turing tests to players that were suspected of violating this rule.
It's been an interesting experiment. I definitely respect Turbine for *not* taking the Blizzard route, and banning players by the tens of thousands, and suing third party developers. Their philosophy that it's the developer's responsibility for creating exploitable bugs, and not the players' fault for exploiting them is certainly player friendly.
But at the end of the day, it's hard to say if it was all for the better, as the game slowly fades into obscurity, with subscription numbers a tenth of what they were at the game's peak. Those of us who played during the game's heyday certainly enjoyed the ride, but blizzard's aggressive anti-cheating stance may be necessary to building a billion-dollar a year revenue stream.
Plenty I hope. WoW appears to have lots for max lev characters to do.
;).
Maybe some people find it fun to buy WoW stuff with USD.
Not so easy to buy skill at playing though
Actually yes, you could write your own ATM code that diverts money to your account. Though I doubt the bank would continue to do business with you. You'd also be charged with fraud.
Now, Blizzard certainly terminates their contract with you when you use the bot. Though it's not really a crime per se. It takes cpu power and memory, allright, but from the machine of the user, with the user's consent (unlike malware, which usually runs without the consent of the owner of the machine it runs on).
My counterargument isn't that it is just doing what the user does (it doesn't, but whether or not it disables or circumvents detection mechanisms is also pointless, because it's not illegal to use programs that another program cannot detect). The argument is simply and plainly that it is not illegal. Yes, it violates the TOS, but the core argument is that I can't think of a law being broken by either using or distributing the program.
Now, this may be different in your country, of course...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A different example. Do you mind if I write software to run on my ATM that when it connects to a bank just manipulates a little data. Maybe transfers some additional money into my account?
No, actually, I don't mind at all. I do mind if you connect it to the bank network, though.
So now that I have kids, I play WoW since I can log off at any moment (so long as I'm not grouped) and just not care. I used to play Eq and I'm not sure if anyone would say that took "skill" but perhaps more attention then Wow. I sort of had pipe dreams about returning to Eq once my kids are a bit older. My friend played Eq with some botting software and it was better then me. I was good - but properly tuned the bot software was just perfect. And somehow I just lost interest.
No, it isn't totally rational. I enjoy leveling up in WoW. I guess the real high skill stuff such as raids and PvP are just not in the cards for me (since I don't group much - have to be able to log off at any moment). But if everyone were botting around me, I'm really not sure I would do it. I think I'd just quit.
And it seems likely the bot software would get good enough to be flawless in more complex situations so that you'd actually rather have the bot for some roles simply because they won't screw up. Maybe raiding in WoW is too sophisticated for that. I couldn't tell ya.
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
Well, I'm not aware of any laws like this in my country. Else the "unlocking" of cellphones locked down to providers would be considered an illegal service, due to it interfering with the contract you have with your cell provider.
In short, just relocate the project to Europe, Sweden, Russia, Malaysia, or some other country that has real problems. The net has no borders, laws do.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I read their response and think it is a very large piece of spin and not even good spin at that. They are addressing only the copying in to RAM, in that particular response, of the software even though said copying is required for the software to work as documented by their own manuals. It is not relevant that their servers are ONE way to utilize their game after purchase. There is no requirement that an account be created, nor monthly fee paid, in order to buy and keep the software. IF there was a provision that I delete my copy of the software at the termination of a trial period or termination of my subscription I would tend to agree that is more along the lines of a true license. That is not the case here.
In fact, if I wanted to I could purchase the game and do absolutely nothing with it. Why should they care at that point if I were to purchase this glider program as well? They are trying to claim that just because this software *can* interact with theirs they have a right to kill it or control it. Sorry, that sets precedent too scary to think about.
This software is hardly ruining an online community. Blizzard has every right to ban users caught utilizing this software but they have NO right to state that users and/or this company cannot possess or create this software at all. This software does not allow hacking or exploiting nor does it interfere or alter their code, but does facilitate botting. As long a that remains true, Blizzard can go fsck themselves and come up with better detection methods to ban users using it.
The chilling effect is that this sets precedent that any software company can attack another if their product interacts with theirs in any way whatsoever that they do not approve of. Yes, that is a slightly different scenario than what this is about today but that is why they call it "that slippery slope". Unintended results from a litigation that affects far more segments of an industry than what the initial litigation was about. A possible result would be that no software would be allowed to interact with any other software, even in memory, for fear of lawsuits. I would hate to think what Microsoft could do with a precedent like this.
Why they exist? It's part of the conditioning.
One reason why Blizzard might not like such bots is these bots could break Blizzard's control over players in Blizzard's "operant conditioning chamber"[1] aka "skinner box".
When a primate can get the reward without having to press your levers, you lose some control over that primate.
And if other primates are smart enough and see that primate getting the reward, they may choose to "cheat" the same way given that option or give up cooperating and not press the levers when they're expected to or even totally "not play the game" anymore.
That outcome might affect Blizzard's income ;).
But what do I know.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
It's, for me, very similar to the awfull, seemingly automated garbage trolls here on /.
Sure, I can read at something above -1, but it's just ugly to have something tarnishing what a lot of people put a lot of time/effort into.
It's in game spam, in a service that I pay for.
Blizzard is really pushing it... I've already decided not to buy or play another Blizzard game, but now I'm tempted to start stealing copies I see at walmart and start burning them, but I'm going to be the bigger person and not hurt the environment by doing that.
See? Through similar logical fallacy to that that Blizzard has exercised in their cases, I've proven to be over 1,000,000 times better than them. I also deserve money. Give me money.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
> Secondly, these bots farm money and pump that into the economy. That's not how it's meant to work, and it destabilises the economy.
You're arguing about a game that has _infinite_ money and mats supply as "de-stabilizing" the economy?!?!
Come back when you've worked on a game or two.
Your statement doesn't respond to mine at all.
I was saying that copying all or part of a copyrighted work into RAM is fixing it in physical form (specifically collections of electrons that make up accumulated charges, in the case of DRAM), and therefore subject to copyright law, and that's what the courts ruled in this case.
I agree enthusiastically that this is bad policy, but rather than simply denying that copying something into RAM is a physical process (which is demonstrably false), or creating a legal fiction that denies as a matter of law that it counts as a physical process (which would leave the statute saying one thing and meaning another), the most direct and effective way is to press Congress to change the statute. Of course, this is probably rather difficult because large media companies can donate more money than you or I can.
Regarding your comment, first, running WoW does copy chunks of the code into RAM. You don't have to copy the entire thing wholesale to bring copyright law into play, though the extent of copying does have an impact. Running WoW as a licensed user in this way, though, involves a type of copying that case law protects because it's incidental to the licensed use.
Second, in any case, Glider causes WoW to load in a nonstandard way, copying the entire binary into memory to facilitate what it's doing, so even if the question of loading it in part or in full mattered to a particular legal question, Glider's loading it in full.
So people using Glider are paying a monthly fee to Blizzard to let their computer play WOW?
Is it just me or does that seem really stupid? If you are not going to play the game (and occasional grinding is part of the game) why pay?
Get a keyboard that allows on board programming. Problem solved.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Since you do not play you would not understand....but alas your comments imply you have played. Leveling is part of the game. By your logic what is the point of rolling dice in Monopoly? Mabe we should just get a random number generator and let it play till all property is bought. In WoW Leveling is part of the game and while instances are also part of the game so are BGs. The bot allows for PvP players to develop far faster than rules allow. to the players that do there own levling the is a pratical screw in the ass. Also the bots will change distribution of resources so that it may take non cheaters longer. AND THAT IS NOT FAIR
U.S. District Court District of Arizona (Phoenix Division) Civil Docket For Case #: 2:06-cv-02555-DGC Assigned to: Judge David G. Campbell http://www.pacer.psc.uscourts.gov/ Pull up the legal documents for yourselves. Blizzard's Motion for Permanent Injunction is Docket #84 and the Judge's Order that found in favor of Blizzard's tortious interference with contract claim (as well as 2 copyright claims).
Asshats use a bot to get to the highest level possible and then proceed to attack lower level characters for their own amusement. This harassment slows down the legitimate player.
So, your premise is that botting is directly correlated to ganking?
Please, elaborate on this. Everyone else I've ever read has linked botting to the economy.
Oh, and I might mention that I personally know asshats that would gank with or without bots. I transferred off my PvP server, basically, out of shame over them doing this under my guild tag.
In short, as far as I know, botting is bad and ganking is bad, but there is no correlation between the two.
Please elaborate.
About the question of whether it's bad design, the scarcity of resource nodes is balanced to give them a value that provides an in-game monetary reward for a player to spend an amount of time collecting them that's not so long that it ceases to be a fun thing to do (say 30 minutes or so.)
Arguably, it's simply impossible to balance that with some players automating their actions for hours on end.
Going down the route of simply taking scarcity entirely out of the game is even worse design -- scarcity IS the game, and it's why people find it so addictive.
Your statement doesn't respond to mine at all.
I was saying that copying all or part of a copyrighted work into RAM is fixing it in physical form (specifically collections of electrons that make up accumulated charges, in the case of DRAM), and therefore subject to copyright law, and that's what the courts ruled in this case.
Except it's not a "fixed physical form" any more than a bolt of lightning or AC electricity. It's in a constant state of change. The ruling in this case is based on the typical state of judges being ignorant of how the technology works.
The fact that the software is called "WoW Glider" and that it is marketed and designed specifically for the sole purpose cheating in WoW carries it safely over the line from "making available" to "inducement to breach the contract."
Don't bring firearms into this, it's a completely different ballpark. They have other legitimate uses.
with that logic, anyone has the right to file a case in any court to ban distribution of particular brands of automobiles, guns, fireworks. for there are sure brands that are being used for malicious ends more than their competitors.
basically preventing glider mean that they will be obliged to do the same to other macro programs as well.
Read radical news here
you keep saying that but u do not explain why? Glider is a completely useless program without the code of WoW. In other words the only thing it does is mine the data generated by the client program WoW. The strech is not to far for me to see that they are infringing on WoW copyrighted code. Please explain to me how they/glider are not?
How does that board retrieve information from the game?
IAANAL, but is a breach of TOS the same as a breach of contract? That is, is a usage license the same as a contract?
EULAs are very sticky. Most of the issues stem from whether software is "licensed or sold," or from the fact that the consumer has little recourse if he or she does not accept the license ("No returns on opened software")
Terms of Service contracts, the type which you agree to prior to the exchange of funds or use of the service, are more cut and dry. Unless a clause is unconscionable, it is just as binding as any other contract.
To make things even more complicated and hard to research, many lawyer types and media outlets do not distinguish between the two of these, or the sometimes confusing terms "clickwrap license," "browserwrap license," "shrinkwrap license," etc.
More interesting reading.
The argument as accepted as valid by the court is as follows: To run the program, a copy must be made to RAM. Since making copies is a right reserved to the copyright holder, you cannot run the program without them granting you permission to make a copy. Since the only thing that allows it is the TOS, if you run the program in a way that violates the TOS then you have committed copyright infringement.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
What if MDY sells its code to an european company?
lernu.net
If you don't have the free time to play the game then don't play the game. I'm thirty years old. I have a job, a girlfriend/fiance and a hobby (martial arts). I have about 10 hours a week to play WoW, maybe 15 hours at the outside. I'm not trying to compete with the 14 year old kids who play all summer long, or the college kids who play in their ample spare time. The game is setup so that you don't have to compete. It caters to players of all stripes, from casual players to those who want to live out a second life in Azeroth.
You're obviously pretty lax with your morals and don't care much about the community that you want to take a part of. I will look down on you for it and so will a lot of other people. In fact when it comes to WoW, the majority of the community says that we don't want people like you in it and we're going to support Blizzard doing what they can do to exclude you from it. You can take your pragmatism and intellectual gymnastics somewhere else.
Here's a pragmatic example for you. You have a wife and kids, family and probably a home. You worked hard for it and probably feel pretty entitled to it. Well, pragmatically speaking here, lets say someone moves in next door and they are a big time drug dealer. They don't really work per se, but they live in your neighborhood. While you're busy at work, your neighbor is showing your wife how to enjoy a more fun life. He starts showing your kids the attention they aren't getting from you because you're busy working. The guy doesn't really have any morals and he hangs out with people like himself. He has so much extra cash laying around that it doesn't phase him to buy up other houses around you for his friends. Maybe your wife doesn't like him, but perhaps she likes one of his friends. Maybe you want your kids to appreciate hard work, but they see that their dad is a sucker for actually working when he could be selling a profitable product and taking it easy. Does it really matter that your neighbor is taking shortcuts and impacting the quality of life in your neighborhood? I mean, pragmatically speaking he's just spending less effort to make just as much as you do. Where's the harm in that? Before you know it, your neighborhood is full of people with shitty attitudes who tell you what a sucker you are for doing things the legit way. But that doesn't matter right? I mean, they have just as much right to fuck with your program as you do to go fuck with everyone who plays WoW, right?
Acme made way too much money off of these analogies.
The language is "fixed in physical form," which means something different from what you're reading. In any case, if the code's stable in memory long enough to execute it, that's most likely "fixed" enough as a matter of law.
You could unplug the power and destroy the copy, but you could also burn a book, doesn't make it any less a book.
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.
In this case, Blizzard is forcing the rocket manufacturer to stop making rockets.
Only because the rockets are designed specifically for use with (only function on?) cars that will only ever be used in the No Rocket Cars Allowed Test Track.
Great. That's much clearer. Thanks.
Yes, and Anakin Skywalker was protecting his unborn babies by cutting of the heads of younglings...
Hey, at least Anakin had a compelling motivation.
Entertainment is NOT a compelling motivation to set bad precedents.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No, the gameplay is already "ruined". These bots are just a reflection
of that. The game has a well known and highly annoying characteristic
and people are just "routing around that".
Not everyone wants to become a shut in just so they can "level up".
Not everyone is out for the "Ever-crack" experience.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Why "thief"? What has been stolen here? I think it's more like preventing Tool (or other clubs of that sort) from publishing it's articles/guides/technical information about locks and lockpicking.
You people are really dense.
Have you even been subjected to high school yet?
The problem with "letting them get away with it" is that then
they will be able to "get away with it again". The law applies
to EVERYONE EVERYWHERE and not just the "bad guys". If you make
a dumb law to specifically attack the "bad guys" or let something
pass because "the victims don't matter" then someone else can
come along and abuse someone or something you care about or YOU.
THAT is what a precedent is.
A judge makes or alters the law from the bench.
The system is designed for that. Been that way for 1000 years.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Ya, not going to happen...
Blizzard support is already pretty low on the customer response time. i would hate to see how bad it gets when you have people with Down Syndrome download the open source client and then calling blizzard saying "I download the source but i can't get wow to run, what? what do you mean i have to compile it. whats that? why doesnt this work right now, blizzard help plz!!"
I follow the SDK and GDN principles.. Spelling Dont Kount, Grammer Dont Neither
You know, I always thought that the RIAA and MPAA would destroy
the software industry. I figured that they would push through
laws that suited them and to hell with everyone else. I figured
that they would create laws that burden everyone else that does
something with a microprocessor. I figured that million dollar
Oracle databases would eventually be burdened down with anti-piracy
nonsense to prevent pirates from using old IBMs or Suns.
I didn't think it would be the likes of Blizzard to trash the
industry with really stupid laws or heinously egregious precedents.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The difference is that a bot can pound on a location where something spawns 24x7, making it absolutely impossible for humans to access that resource. If Blizzard wasn't working hard to prevent botting, I can guarantee you that many resources that players rely on would simply be monopolized by people running bots, making the game unplayable.
The other, more subtle consequence of botting is that you end up with level 70 players who are utterly clueless about how to play. Playing well in WoW and handling the more difficult challenges requires a great deal of skill and practice. Someone can have all the great gear in the world and still end up causing a group or raid to wipe repeatedly because they don't know what to do when.
And then there are other problems, such as bots being used to gold farm, which screws up the economy by raising item prices (e.g. people pay real world dollars for in game gold and can then afford to outbid the players who come by their gold honestly).
Probably a host of other impacts as well, but these should be enough for you.
Essentially they said "Since the court has found that this program only has criminal uses, could you please write a note which says that it will also be illegal if other people start using it or compile the source"
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
This case has established precedent that you are only allowed to make a copy of a program into RAM under the terms of the license provided. That means it is illegal to view, inspect, reverse engineer, etc any copyrighted program unless the license explicitly allows you to do so. This is hopelessly draconian.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Well not exactly. My premise is that botting would make it easier for those who would gank, not that everyone who uses a bot will exclusively gank.
It's my assertion that the number of people who would create a high level character using actual game play for the express purpose of griefing lower level characters is lower than the number of people who would use a bot to create a high level character for the same purpose. It has more to do with attention span than anything else.
I can see people who botted to be more likely to gank, since they have a less vested interest in the nuances within the game as compared to someone who actually participated in the game. However, this is not my original premise.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Interesting POV. Too bad it won't stand for long in our courts, which have ruled before that you're allowed to make a copy of a program and alter it to fit your needs for your own, private purposes, as long as you do not distribute the altered program. It wasn't exactly in the same circumstances (IIRC the dispute was that the vendor of the software wanted to be paid a fortune for a trivial change in the code and the licensee made the change himself, which resulted in a suit that was pretty quickly shot down), but it's pretty clearly spelled out in our copyright, you have the right to alter software to make it fit your needs, and you cannot waive this right (i.e. whatever TOS or EULA say is moot, law breaks license).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I guess McCarthy wasn't conservative either. He was a Republican. People need to stop this Republican == conservative thing. Although you have educated me: I didn't really think the party was corrupted THAT long ago. And I didn't realize that he was so far ahead of his time :(
Hello Aphoxema!
We are besieged by the Blizzard corporation. You must help us by finding and destroying 30 copies of WOW. You can find them in the wilds of Wal-Mart. Go now, and do not return until you have brought them to their knees!
Return to Aklephlub the Guardian of Cfgluggbubby when you have destroyed 30 copies of WOW.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
"the STUPID, the OVERLY MORONIC argument blizzard is using is that the program 'modifies the wow software running in THE MEMORY'. "
No it isn't. Its just some bullshit which retards (like you probably) have made up and which other stupid uneducated morons keep repeating over and over and over instead of actually finding out what the fuck was ruled in the court.
It has nothing to do with what is "in the memory". And the recent ruling didn't say anything about copying it to memory. But then why let the facts get in the way of hysterical ranting.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
"The software was found not to violate any copyrights. "
Wrong, that's exactly what they found. Ordinary peoples understanding of copyright is very limited and in no way covers how the law views it.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
"Care to show me how this software is illegal?"
Read the ruling of the court. The PDF is available from the site which is mentioned in story.
"It violates the TOS of another software product. That doesn't make the software illegal."
The court said the company could not sell the program since it would be breaking the law - most people would call that illegal.
"I could write in my TOS that you must not run it on Windows, does that make Windows illegal? I kinda doubt it."
If that is the level of your sophistication you probably shouldn't read the legal documents, probably too hard for you.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
It does have something to do with our government in concert with the 9th amendment (the constitution's red-headed step child).
If by that you mean "James Madison must be rolling over in his grave to see the United States Supreme Court use the 9th Amendment as rationale to overturn a law duly passed by a State legislature because certain jurists find it personally offensive, when he thought he was limiting the tyranny of the federal government over the states" then I whole-heartedly agree with you.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Of course the court found that people do not have a contract, they pay for a license (ie, Blizard dictates all the term - your only input is to take it or leave it)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Do any phone companies have a contract that includes provisions that you won't unlock or use unlocked phones?
"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."
Except they didn't. So you can sleep safely now.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I have to thank you for such a good afternoon laugh. I don't care if you are serious or playing dumb. I got misty eyed.
The contract in question is not the End User License Agreement as far as I'm aware, it is the Terms of Service agreement. As far as your "Blizzard dictates, take it or leave it" point goes... isn't that how most contracts work? One side states their terms, the other side decides whether or not to accept?
i would hate to see how bad it gets when you have people with Down Syndrome download the open source client and then calling blizzard saying "I download the source but i can't get wow to run, what? what do you mean i have to compile it. whats that? why doesnt this work right now, blizzard help plz!!"
Helpdesk: "Dude, you're only a level 0 hacker, if you try and use the open source client before you're at LEAST level 7 and have the Visual Studio skill it's gonna aggro your compiler. You don't want to do that, it's not pretty."
"Our rights are inalienable."
Our rights are that rulers can get away with.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Call 911 and tell them to come and arrest the person holding a gun at your head, forcing you to play.
Sheesh.
Gold farmers wreck the game because even if the amount of money is Zimbabwe-like infinite, the process of accruing it is via time-consuming gameplay harvesting limited but replenishing resources. Now, a farmer and/or bot "harvesting" these resources repeatedly effectively removes that resource from "ordinary" players, ie. the ones Blizzard made the game for.
When these resources are sold for real-world money, you have a company in a way leeching business from Blizzard's creation by inconveniencing "real" players.
"Curiosity... can you justify your argument in any practical way? If a bot plays 10 hours while I'm at work, and a college kid on break plays 10 hours while I'm at work, we both wind up in the same place at the same time. Neither of us has an advantage."
Yes, you did. Because you didn't have the time to do it, so you are cheating. Otherwise he would have been a head of
you.
Typical cheater rationalizing.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
"Insightful" ? Come on mods.
Glider does not 'manipulate a secure line of communication', it manipulates a client. Huge difference there. Now, I'm not going to pass judgment on the morality of what it does, but it stretches the bounds of credibility and cheapens the image of network security / InfoSec people to call it "hacking a [shared] network".
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
The judge looked at both the TOS and EULA.
And i should think that for most 'real' contracts there are negotiations where both sides give and take a bit.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
...but if a game makes automation attractive, it's not a fun game.
Every single time I've seen people playing this game, it makes me think of work.
You should get paid for work, not pay for work.
I see only two basic game functions : problem solving and competition. MMORPGs are 100% about competition, never problem solving. Indeed problem solving simply doesn't make sense in a normal MMORPG context.
Now competition has about two forms : social (status) and skill (pvp). So you basically want a 100% pvp game. I obviously exaggerate here, second life has non-pvp skill essential for social success.
I feel we're best off improving the compromise between "realism" (ala WoW) and pvp balance (ala Battel.net's ladder). Imagine a pure pvp game with little money & economy and an experience points system that penalized you for excessive repetition. Say for example your gain drops off rapidly if your opponents level is lower and defeating opponents of lower level "typecasts" you, say forcing your later progressing into merely more powerful versions of the same things you could do at their level. So while others players are throwing solid ice walls you are stuck throwing fire walls that do more damage but don't stop anyone down. Or your area of effect healing is significantly less powerful while your single target heals are slightly better. etc.
Another approach is simply add real problem solving components by supporting bots in-game.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Loan documents. Mortgages. Rental agreements. Lease agreements. Pricing at a retail store. Rewards.
I can think of quite a few examples of "take it or leave it" contracts.
How about simply diminishing returns for slaying the same kind of mob over and over? Kill 30 and for a day they won't give you any xp anymore. Adjust number of enemies killed and time according to necessity.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's really complicated. Whether by design or not, contract law is astoundingly complex and sometimes borderline irrational.
So, mathematically speaking, considering C and D are arbitrary constants, pi is the famous number (~3.141592...), and i is the square root of -1, then:
Contract law = C*pi*i + D
Yeah, that makes things a lot clearer.
Unless of course, the owners of those cars (WoW clients) decided to use them on another track, like bnetd. Oops, the car company just sued the other tracks into bankruptcy saying that running a racetrack is unfairly profiting off of other people's cars.
Seriously, enforce rules against the people who sign contracts. The people who promise not to play WoW with a bot.
Because even if WoW Glider doesn't get open sourced, one of these will, and then there won't be anyone to sue except the users but we'll still be stuck with these retarded precedents and many good programmers will have been put out of business in the witch-hunts.
First of all, tag all items with the name of the initial owner/creator.
Create a second server. Fully playable, fine server--except it's only for people who choose to go there and people who cheat.
Watch players and identify bots (as usual--ongoing process) but don't kick them immediately (So that you don't let on that you know or how you figured out).
After a while, just transfer every character owned by the person over to the new server, and eliminate every item tagged with the cheaters name from the original server. No warning whatsoever, just a little notice after the fact--you belong on this server instead.
The person may either stay on the new server with his great character and all the other cheaters, or he can buy a new serial number and go back to the "non-cheating" server.
On the cheating server, there is little attempt to identify cheaters except in the most blatant cases. If people really enjoy cheating more--they should be able to! Just don't interact with people who don't want to be on the same server as cheaters.
It would also have a serious dampening effect on ebay item sales--items purchased may disappear at any time! You'd be more careful with in-game trades/purchases too.
You would not be harming the cheaters by moving them to a different server--they should be happier! If their guild thinks cheating is okay, maybe the whole guild should go over and they can remain together. If not--well you were in the wrong guild and shouldn't miss them too much.
Problem solved.
Thank you for the links. Please correct me if my understanding of the situation is faulty :)
So Blizzard says that, basically, ownership does not apply to the end user because it is license and not sold. But, Blizzard's argument amounts to "It is licensed and not sold because the license implies that is not a sale". Therefore, the glider authors are "contributing to copyright infringement" (illegal?) instead of "contributing to license infringement" (not illegal?) and should be punished under copyright law, and any open sourcing should also be blocked as it causes the same problem. But, a different part of that copyright law does not apply because the end user is not an owner.
The problem seems to me that a license would be able to throw out anything related to 3rd party interoperability in any program that has a a recurring service component or for some reason does not resemble a 'sale'. Why? Even if the 3rd party program does not explicitly make a copy of the original program, many read operations will result in an implicit copy of some parts of the program (disk->mem, mem->registers). Therefore, any EULA that can throw out 17 U.S.C. Â 117 can also prevent interoperability because the actual use of the 3rd party software may violate copyright.
Some possible examples that I can think of off the top of my head are apps running in an OS running in a VM, OS's running in VM, and apps running in wine using MS's DLLs.
Disclaimer: I play WoW heavily and hate cheaters. I just wish they had a better legal leg to stand on than a tortured interpretation of copyright law.
Call 911 and tell them to come and arrest the person holding a gun at your head, forcing you to play.
Sheesh.
Gold farmers wreck the game because even if the amount of money is Zimbabwe-like infinite, the process of accruing it is via time-consuming gameplay harvesting limited but replenishing resources. Now, a farmer and/or bot "harvesting" these resources repeatedly effectively removes that resource from "ordinary" players, ie. the ones Blizzard made the game for.
When these resources are sold for real-world money, you have a company in a way leeching business from Blizzard's creation by inconveniencing "real" players.
first, the gold is infinite, then the farmers are removing this infinite supply from ordinary players?
And somehow the sale of WoW gold, which is of zero value without a WoW account, is costing blizzard money?
Maybe if the epic flight didn't cost 5k gold people wouldn't buy gold.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Well, Blizzard's response is full of lies and they distort precedent far further than Public Knowledge.
Blizzard says that MAI v Peak showed that the courts allowed a license to trump 117a1, but they conveniently neglect the mention that in that case the customer had signed an agreement to be bound by the EULA. MAI is not a test of shrink-wrap licensing, yet they act as if it was.
Blizzard states that WoW users do not obtain rights via a single payment, but only by conflating the service with the software. They lie about the possibility of use of the software for non-WoW uses (bnetd, etc) to support this claim.
This "narrow" ruling will become precedent for shrink-wrap EULAs, they will override the right to use software you bought, and any violation of the EULA will be acted upon as a copyright violation instead of a violation of a post-sale contract.
The existence of a piece of paper in the box doesn't change the fact that the software was sold (ask the clerk as you buy it, if you want confirmation). Blizzard makes the same mistake many people do and assumes that because there's a EULA in the box, it must be binding. Not like a company would ever make spurious legal claims, after all.
I think I get your point, but your analogy is terrible.
To clue you in:
* ATMs are pretty much universally programmed just like you said; to take a little extra money and put it into the owner's account. This is called a "SURCHARGE AMOUNT" and is a part of the pin-based debit protocols specifications.
* No ATM programmer could put in a hack like you said, because the amounts involved are checked and verified in several other places; importantly, on the bank's own servers.
That would rock. Monopoly that did the dice rolling and property shuffling and just let you make the decisions and do the haggling. It'd be just like regular monopoly, except quick, and fun. (You did just describe the very popular field of computerized board games.)
Almost like the WoW Glider does for WoW.
A bot runner still plays the game, except the grind, a FAQ follower just runs from point to screenshot-identified point to do the next thing.
Personally, I wouldn't let either of them ruin my fun. They'd both blow past me in levels (and power) and I'd happily be cleaning dungeons with my friends.
"Wah, his numbers are bigger than my numbers! Tazer him and make him use small numbers until he's earner the right!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
Several exclusive rights typically attach to the holder of a copyright:
* to produce copies or reproductions of the work and to sell those copies (mechanical rights; including, sometimes, electronic copies: distribution rights) * to import or export the work * to create derivative works (works that adapt the original work) * to perform or display the work publicly (performance rights) * to sell or assign these rights to others * to transmit or display by radio or video (broadcasting rights)
The phrase "exclusive right" means that only the copyright holder is free to exercise those rights, and others are prohibited from using the work without the holders permission. Copyright is sometimes called a "negative right", as it serves to prohibit certain people (e.g., readers, viewers, or listeners, and primarily publishers and would be publishers) from doing something they would otherwise be able to do, rather than permitting people (e.g., authors) to do something they would otherwise be unable to do. In this way it is similar to the unregistered design right in English law and European law. The rights of the copyright holder also permit him/her to not use or exploit their copyright, for some or all of the term. There is, however, a critique which rejects this assertion as being based on a philosophical interpretation of copyright law that is not universally shared. There is also debate on whether copyright should be considered a property right or a moral right.[citation needed] Many argue that copyright does not exist merely to restrict third parties from publishing ideas and information, and that defining copyright purely as a negative right is incompatible with the public policy objective of encouraging authors to create new works and enrich the public domain.[weasel words] The right to adapt a work means to transform the way in which the work is expressed. Examples include developing a stage play or film script from a novel, translating a short story, and making a new arrangement of a musical work.
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
Your immature little outburst would be far less foolish if you were insulting someone who actually played the game, never mind someone who botted in it. I have never managed to stay interested long enough to get past L59 on a single character, I'm merely observing that there is no practical difference between someone who sits and pounds WASD and 0-9 for 10 hours to level and a program that calls SendKeys() for 10 hours to level. Both accounts have 10 hours of time on them, both accounts are at the same level.
I note that you've not actually refuted that claim.
Weird slashbug #455
Code can be free speech whenever you want it to be. On a computer? You can restrict its use and export. But they could always do the PGP trick. (Google is your friend, but you should all know what I'm talking about)
I hate grammar Nazi's.
You work hard for a living to have a family and a nice place to live. A drug dealer barely works at all and makes as much money as you do while having more time to spend with his family and a nice place to live. Are you a sucker for working hard and playing within the system? Do you expect that the law will deal with the drug dealer because society has deemed his actions wrong? Because pragmatically speaking you both end up at the same place, making money and having a family.
Well, let's do the analogy thing. What difference does it make if you take some GPL software and tuck it into closed source? Really, what's the harm? You could have used it anyway, the source is still out there, anyone who wants to use it can. The impact on anyone else is ZERO. Yes, you're breaking the license, but obviously you don't care about that.
I'm sure there will be a "open source software is serious stuff, this is just a game" answer, but really, it comes down to the same thing. You are using software against the license agreement. People throughout this topic are talking about "slippery slope" and MS banning software they don't like. Well, if you buy that it's ok to violate this license, then it's ok to violate every license.
Actually, Blizzard has also embraced the 3rd party development community. The UI is written in LUA and XML, and that's completely open. Some operations are restricted to avoid completely automating gameplay, but WoW is far more open than most other games. I just run fairly minor enhancements but some people run UIs that are completely different, such that you wouldn't recognize the game as being the same.
That's what I was thinking. This isn't a bot that lets you ruin the experience for other players. It's a bot that lets you level up without playing the game for hours on end.
But... they do ruin my experience, they throw the economy out of whack. They also force me to compete (PVP) against players who have an artificial advantage (as in they didn't have to build their characters). They also hurt the end-game experience, since they have no clue on how to actually play their class, since they never have. The main thing is the economy though, they cause prices to rise heavily, so a player who doesn't have unlimited free time, a bot of his own, or the lack of moral qualms to buy Chinese gold, is hurt in the end. You can never complete against people lacking in scruples.
On a more subjective level, I can't tolerate cheaters. People who cheat in a game are immature wankers whose very presence hurts the enjoyability of a game. If your too stupid to play the game, why are you even bothering?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Not so easy to buy skill at playing though ;).
Thats my problem, playing with people with characters from ebay. Nothing like having an uber-geared 70 in your party, who can't even find where a button is, much less know how to use their class. I've been in parties (when I used to play) where the 70 priest in raid gear had to ASK how to get to common instances, and then didn't even know how to heal, in an instance they they were massively over-geared for.
Also the type of person who gets frustrated at the first wipe, and leaves. I don't get why they even bother to play, its like they pay money to NOT play the game. Its like paying in for a poker tournament, and then just sitting at the table with a drink and watching.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
No, the gameplay is already "ruined". These bots are just a reflection
of that. The game has a well known and highly annoying characteristic
and people are just "routing around that".
Not everyone wants to become a shut in just so they can "level up".
Not everyone is out for the "Ever-crack" experience.
--
In your opinion. I enjoyed leveling up my toons, I even enjoyed the grinding to an extent. I actually really enjoy WoW (ignoring the raiding scene), so I don't think its ruined, or broken. If you don't like grinding, don't PLAY, its a simple as that.
There also is no rush to "level up". One of my friends has been playing for a year and a half, and hasn't hit the level cap yet, he's only level 63 (out of 70), and has no real plan to ever hit 70. He's playing mainly for the enjoyment of the story, and world, and as a way to stay in contact with his friends. Before I quit, I had a character I played for maybe 5 hours a week, and got it up to 45 in a month, with just casual gameplay. I don't understand why one needs to rush, nor become a "shut in".
If your not playing WoW for the "WoW experience", then DON'T PLAY. Simple as that.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
This is why i am certain humanity is doomed.
When i stare at these kind of legal statements, i believe it's always taken to the extremes nowadays : even though these kind of statement look completely logical, my first thought is that lawyers, law and anything regarding IP and stuff lacks common sense.
And without common sense, i don't believe in the survival of the human being. Please get back on earth.
> I've seen with some amazement that some of the most widely used Battle.net cheats are actually licensed under the GNU GPL
Like what? The bots?
Blizzard has done jack about removing spammers and bots from bnet. You'll even be in a private game and get messaged.
Here is the key part I recommend looking at:
The Court accordingly will grant summary judgment in favor of Blizzard with respect to liability on the contributory and vicarious copyright infringement claims in Counts II and III.
(emphasis added)
Not contributory means "helped them do it." So they are liable because they helped people violate copyright law, according to the ruling.
What right does Blizzard have?
The right against Tortious Interference.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
You are gaining an advantage by using a bot: your opportunity cost to play the game is lower.
A bot-less player has to invest a certain amount of a scarce resource into their character that a botted player does not. Thus, the botted player has an advantage.
Similarly, outsourcing certain functions (be they leveling or resource gathering) unfairly lowers the opportunity cost of the outsourcer.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
You can always automate killing different sorts of mobs, but you simply can't automate climbing the ladder in Warcraft or Starcraft.
But sure how about you only ever gain the experience for any particular monster type the first 3 time you kill it (and only if it's nearly your level or higher). So again most xp is gained by pvp.
Alternatively most table top RPGs don't depend on radical advancement like DnD. Why not follow them?
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
If they change the source code of Glider slightly enough for it to be different AND THEN release the source code... can it be said that Glider's code is out? It could be argued yes that NewCode is essentially Glider, however as compared to core GLider code when it was frozen it is different. Thus they can still release technically Glider as open source. Just not as Glider. Though I'll have to agree with the 5 million other posts. I hate bots, however it should be BLizzards problem to control them. They should be the ones that make their server better so it's no bottable. If Blizzard is losing money to bots then ban the bots and make sure they stay banned! I've played various MMOs, mostly the free ones, and it's ALWAYS up to the company to make it hard for the bots to work. I know in Granado Espada they put in a report bot feature (that doesn't work half the time however that's because they haven't fixed it). Now it seems that they can sue people for THIER IP. If they sue the GLider people they have to sue everyone else that made ANY form of content for WoW, all those widgets and gadgets..since it OBVOUSLY violates their own copyright by reading what's you items, you MP and all that stuff. Also they have to go after that one program that allows you to make movies from the models as that is "hacking" or whatever silly word they want to use the model files to set them up to make those movies. Since it is a third party program doing it. Oh..but those aren't malicious now are they..... >_>
Indeed. I'm completely against botting in online games, but not through such blatant abuse of copyright laws.
With two major releases coming up, Blizzard may want to consider what they're doing to their image..
Most TTRPGs I play depend on how my players play and not how many monsters they kill. I don't like allowing a game to dictate what I should hand out. But that's a system that obviously doesn't work in automatized environments, and you can't put a GM behind every player to judge and reward their playing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, your analogy is absurd. There is no comparison between the material acquisition of necessities and comforts and a few INSERT and UPDATE statements in a Blizzard database. You can't just whip out any old comparison and call it relevant, the comparisons have to be at least somewhat similar to each other.
And, even ignoring the absurd stretch, your analogy isn't comparing like things anyway. Drug dealers actually have to participate in drug deals just like your players participate in quests. Your lazy merchant analogy is more like a vendor compared to a vending machine. The vending machine sells by proxy the way Glider plays by proxy, and the vendor deal directly with customers the way players deal directly with the WoW world.
If I put a vending machine up and only stop by often enough to check its stock and empty the money, do I not deserve the income because I wasn't there actively selling things?
Weird slashbug #455
One of the things that amazes me most about this is how many players who bot probably wouldn't be paying their monthly Blizzard payment unless they had the bot to do the boring parts for them. Now, I don't know how many non-cheating players leave the game because of bots, but I have a feeling that it is fewer than those people who only play the game because the bots are available. So, how exactly is Blizzard losing money here? Plus, the other thing I can't figure out, is that Glider is not the only bot available, and arguably, not the best bot either. I'm curious how many subscribers Blizzard would lose if they were able to ban every single botter tomorrow... Ultimately, I don't think that it's right for the botters to play unhindered, but I don't think that the current course of action makes much sense in the long run. I agree with other posters who said that there should be a server (or servers) where botting and other cheating is allowed. If someone is caught cheating on a regular server, than you get transferred. You could even be nice and give people one warning before sending them to Cheatsville. However, I also think Blizzard should make the grind less painful for people who just want to have fun. Personally, I wish that the instances scaled down for smaller groups. What if a friend and I want to get together and play? Well, we can... quest... or we can PvP... or we can farm mats/grind honor... or we can find more people to do an instance. But then you have to deal with the people who you find to do the instance which usually isn't that fun anymore. Why can't we go into a 5-man (or any other) instance with weaker mobs and reduced loot? Heck, why can't we go run Sunwell Plateau just to check it out, since it's doubtful we will ever be well enough geared to get into a 25-man group for it. I think that would make for a more interesting and more varying challenge anyways, probably requring different strategies for varying numbers of players... I can appreciate making each progressive instance basically require more well equipped players, but let's get rid of the whole pre-defined number of players thing, because that's just annoying... And let's fix the whole loot drop thing for instances; just drop tokens for each boss, and after I collect enough tokens, I'll go buy the items I want rather than having to do run after run getting more and more pissed each time that I don't get the loot I'm looking for... I'm sure there are traditionalists out there, so give me a way to toggle between traditional instancing and non-traditional instancing... Another thing that I wish they would change would be to make it progressively easier to level (i.e. faster) the more max level characters you have (or heck, even scaled to total number of characters based on level or based on amount of time spent in-game). Then, if I decide one day out of the blue that I want to try out , I can level it up more quickly based on how much time I've already spent in the game... Anyways, one thing I've noticed the longer I play is that the game gets less and less fun, and more and more like work; hard work that is basically lost as soon as the next expansion comes out...
I guess McCarthy wasn't conservative either. He was a Republican. People need to stop this Republican == conservative thing. Although you have educated me: I didn't really think the party was corrupted THAT long ago. And I didn't realize that he was so far ahead of his time :(
hopefully things such as meta-parties will give rise to "common sense".
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
No, the UI is NOT reducing the fun of the game. The UI already is open... people can mod it to create virtually any interface you can imagine. The game does NOT require "repeating pointless activities". Some people choose to play WoW the way you play other MMOs, by repeating one activity over and over. That is their choice, NOT a requirement of the game.
You could call it SQL injection, replay-attack, man in the middle, etc.
Equally, you could call it money laundering, you could call it drug dealing and you could call it first-degree murder—but that doesn't make it true!
Whether or not you believe that what this program does should be allowed or not, it works by pretending to be the user of the game, sending keypresses etc to the program—a bit like asking a friend to play for you while you visit the bathroom. I can see why Blizzard don't like it, though I'm not sure that justifies the sweeping legal decision they're seeking—but calling the program something it's not doesn't help either side of the debate!
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
Preface: I think this whole thing is absurd, and Blizzard is acting very poorly in all of this.
If the sole purpose of the software is to facilitate the violation of contracts, then it can be considered that you're actively facilitating contract violation, and therefore bear at least some of the liability. Or so goes the reasoning.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
If the Glider source code makes use of either code or content belonging to Blizzard, they can argue that they own the copyrights (in part if not in whole) to Glider as a result.
If that is the case, than it cannot be open sourced by a 3rd party without Blizzards permission.
A key arguement for the GPL concerns the hypothetical situation of someone trying to withhold their own modifications to the original source. Even if the GPL license is for some reason not valid, than the code falls under traditional copyright, and the original rights holders can hold the GPL Violator in violation of existing copyright laws and pursue a legal remedy based on that.
You cannot make another persons copyrighted materials open source without their co-operation.
END COMMUNICATION
The UI already is open... people can mod it to create virtually any interface you can imagine.
So Blizzard already supports writing a bot into the UI? So what's the point of Glider?
So, what is it exactly that most people believe that Blizzard is selling? Hot air? Or is the attribute of "sold" versus "licensed" solely a matter of context?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Asheron's Call: Exploit Early, Exploit Often.
Enough said, really.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Submitting the source to the courts ought to put an end to this.
It sounds like you never played the game, because if you did you would never say that Blizzard was lazy with WoW.
I have played wow. I have multiple L70s, one of which is raiding in Black temple and equiped in tier 6 gear. Prior to the expansion, I was raiding MC, BWL and other end game content. I been a programmer and a hardcore gamer for 28 years, so I would like to think I know a bit about computer game design. Am I allowed to say that Blizzard is lazy now?
WoW is a distinctly mediocre game on the whole. WoW is just like most Blizzard games: they take a genre, borrow everything from other titles in the same genre, dumb it down two notches, and give it a visually stunning presentation. WoW is like a hollywood blockbuster: lots of eyecandy resting on tired cliches.
If you think you can create an MMO that will have people renewing their subscription WITHOUT grind, be my guest. It's not as easy as you think.
Actually, I am, and it is. The only thing that is actually hard to do is acquire the time and money to make it all happen.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!