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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.
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!
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...
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.
Read radical news here
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
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.
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.
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.
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make install -not war
If they don't want people to automate their games, maybe they should make their games less repetitive... instead of suing and banning people.
Surely, the development costs would be comparable to lawyer costs.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
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.
(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.
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
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."
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
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.
WoW is not all that repetitive, especially considering that the idea is to spend many months playing it between content updates.
There are LOTS of things Blizzard does to make WoW a lot less of a grind, big one being daily quests, if you don't know why daily quests prevent the grind, then you don't know WoW well enough to be commenting.
Blizzard also does lots of other things to prevent the grind:
- Rested XP, while you are logged out, you earn "rest", when you log back in, you earn double XP per mob kill until your rest runs out.
- When Blizzard introduced Arenas (a competive PvP system), they made it so that consumables such as potions or elixirs cannot be used at all. While this is partly due to balancing issues, it also means that people don't end up farming gold/mats for these potions, because while they can be a huge competitive advantage, they are also a huge money/materials sink when you are using a lot of them.
- In their upcoming expansion, they are limiting the amount of consumables that can be used by players in certain conditions. For example, you will only be able to use 1 single potion for a boss fight, this will mean that people wont end up blowing lots of potions on a single boss fight. Another example being that you won't be affected by more than one set of Drums at a time, this is also good as right now the top raiding guilds had lots of their members abandon a profession and take up Leatherworking instead. And all this just to get the most possible "power" for their raid group. When you aren't levelling at the same time, getting a profession from 0 to max is exceptionally time and/or money intensive.
Personally, what I get most out of WoW is the social connection, I tend to use VoIP a lot with my family and friends who also play. WoW is just a place we hang out, it's like a sports bar or something. WoW for me is something I can do to pass the time between work, going out or sleeping. When I am at home and not playing WoW or sleeping, I do other things like read, watch TV, program.
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!
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.