Blizzard Awarded $6M Damages From MMOGlider

dw604 writes "The makers of MMOGlider have been found in breach of the World of Warcraft terms of service and are forced to pay Blizzard $6M in damages." There's a lot of sticky issues on this one. Mostly I'm amazed that MMOGlider had that kind of cash.

Comments

Finances & Conflict

[eldavojohn]

Mostly I'm amazed that MMOGlider had that kind of cash.

MMOGlider is the application, MDY would be the holder of the finances. After scanning the article, it seems that he is estimated to have sold 100,000 copies at $25 a pop resulting in $2.5 million ... then you have all the costs of hosting and developing and lawyering and all that.

And as the bottom of the article says:

The case is due to go to court again in January 2009 when the remaining issues in the legal conflict look likely to be settled.

At issue will be whether MDY broke the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and whether Mr Donnelly will have to pay the damages from his own pocket.

And there you have it, in all likelihood they are not sitting on $6 million. As the article says, it's a good thing MDY won its arguments about the 'damages' their program caused to Blizzard otherwise they would be looking at $12 or $18 million settlements.

And there's your sticky issue, what exactly are the damages. I hate this because if I know it's happening, it ruins WoW for me. But on the other hand, does it really ruin the game if someone magically goes from 1 to 70 in two weeks without working for it? I might be jaded that I had to put in hours of muscle distrophying arthritis inducing clicking to get there ... but what's different now? So another player has more gold or resources, it's a tiny leg up in that game as the best items are won in PVP or require meticulous PVE to acquire.

The stickiest issue is that a lot of us are conflicted. It pisses us off that WoW is a little less fair but on the surface this was a guy who avoided all technical attempts Blizzard tried to thwart him in a great game of cat & mouse. In the end, he could claim he was just selling software that users happened to use to violate Blizzard's TOS and EULA with. I've heard the same arguments about BitTorrent and would probably side with the software makers in this case ...

I guess for me 'sticky' isn't a good description of it. No, there are two core ideologies which are conflicting here. The gamer in me says that games should be as fair as possible. WoW is already naturally flawed to some degree in this way and it is Blizzard's responsibility to keep the playing field level. MMOGlider upsets this 'fairness' and destroys the inherent fun in the game. On the other side of the issue he was just a guy writing software and selling it. I could throw him in with the likes of spammers and botnet masters but it was just a legitimate client program running on a paying user's machine.

Add to this what we've suffered through from Blizzard including rootkits and unfounded bans and it's an issue that strikes very close to home.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Why are players bothering with online games that can be manipulated by manipulating the local client's RAM? Isn't the whole point of "Online" supposed to make client side vulnerabilities moot?

Re:Finances & Conflict

[SatanicPuppy]

You know that, even though the game is online, there has to be a player right? Glider is a computerized "player" that plays the game for you, doing mindless killing to level the character up.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[mollymoo]

In the end, he could claim he was just selling software that users happened to use to violate Blizzard's TOS and EULA with. I've heard the same arguments about BitTorrent and would probably side with the software makers in this case ...

It's not the same as BitTorrent at all. BitTorrent has legitimate, legal uses. Glider can only be used, and can only have been developed, in violation of The WoW licence. People don't just happen to use it to violate the licence, the very thing Glider is designed to do is in violation of the WoW license.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Hoi Polloi]

I'd support glider if it meant automated farmers were pushing more high need items like primals onto the market and pushing down their price and increasing availability in the process.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[IndustrialComplex]

Why are players bothering with online games that can be manipulated by manipulating the local client's RAM? Isn't the whole point of "Online" supposed to make client side vulnerabilities moot?

That would work for most online games where the character interaction is limited to 10-30 people at once. However with a MMORPG like WoW that, while partially instanced, definately places the emphasis on 'massive-multiplayer'. The computing power required to perform all of the positioning, calculation, and then the bandwidth to report that information to several thousand clients at once would be astronomical.

In the end, especially with PC and not console based gaming, there will always be a security gap that can be exploited. If you are giving a person the information necessary to draw their enemies position, their own position, there will always be some amount of that which can be exploited. Especially when the exploitation is something as simple as 'bot software'. Given Point A, Point B and a method to input ways to interact or travel between those two points, you will never be able to lock it down without completely locking down the client computer.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[SatanicPuppy]

Primals are more constrained by the scarcity of mobs that drop them, and the relative abundance of items that need them...If you can only obtain n primals through farming the mobs that drop them at 100% efficiency, and the demand would stablize at 2n primals, you're basically screwed, and the price is going to remain high, and the supply low.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[The Empiricist]

And there's your sticky issue, what exactly are the damages.

From the court order itself (which you can download for about $0.40) there were a set of undisputed facts:

1. MDY began selling Glider on June 14, 2005. Through September 10, 2008, MDY has sold approximately 120,000 licenses for Glider. The amount of gross revenues received by MDY from the sale of Glider from June 14, 2005 through September 10, 2008 is approximately $3.5 million dollars.
2. Blizzard spends at least $942,614.57 per year responding to customer complaints as to bots generally and implementing a bot enforcement program to decrease the number of bots in the game. Glider represents the large majority of bots used in connection with World of Warcraft.
3. Between December 22, 2004 and March 18, 2008, Blizzard received more than 465,000 in-game petitions from users complaining about bots. Several thousand of these petitions mention Glider by name. Blizzard has continued to receive complaints about bots generally, and Glider specifically, after March 18, 2008.

There were also a set of disputed facts and legal conclusions:

1. That MDY and/or Donnelly's conduct caused harm to Blizzard both in the form of the direct expenses used to combat Glider use and infringement, as well as in the form of lost subscription revenue, lost profits, and harm to Blizzard's goodwill and reputation.
2. That Blizzard's damages expert would testify that the lost subscription revenue and harm to Blizzard's goodwill and reputation can be quantified to exceed $20 million dollars.
3. That MDY and/or Donnelly's conduct was willful and wanton and an award of the highest amount of statutory damages--$2,500 per sale of the Glider software--would be appropriate.
4. That Blizzard is entitled to an award of punitive damages against MDY and Donnelly for their intent to cause injury to Blizzard or because they were motivated by spite or ill will or because MDY and Donnelly acted to serve their own interests, having reason to know and consciously disregarding a substantial risk that their conduct might significantly injure Blizzard.

It looks like the $6M are actually stipulated damages. That is, both parties have agreed that if there are to be any damages, they will be $6M exactly. Issues of liability can still be appealed. But, issues of what the damages should be are no longer in dispute. This means that Blizzard and MDY can both keep their legal costs down. Instead of sniping about damages (spending $10 to prove $1 in damages), they can keep their lawyers arguing a handful of core legal issues.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[TheRaven64]

I still don't really see the motivation. That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game. That people actually want a computer to play for them is a sign of a really badly designed game.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[mrrudge]

Hey !
Mindless ? How dare you, a murloc ate my father, mother, brother and sister.

And they will pay.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Uniquitous]

Why the flaming fugg would I pay for software to play a game for me, while also paying a subscription fee for access to the game itself? Man, I'm not saying all MMO'ers are retards, but sometimes it seems that way.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[MightyYar]

That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game.

Computers can (and have) beat the best chess players in the world. Chess is not a bad game, even though I can never beat the computer on the hardest levels. I'm not defending WOW, since I've never played it - but I disagree with your premise.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Duffy13]

Actually, bots usually play much much worse then real players. However, they have the benefit of being able to run all the time. The trade off is it may take longer to accomplish a level, but you don't actually have to sit there for it.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[jayhawk88]

That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game

It's not that the computer can play WoW better, it's that it can play it continuously for hours on end. Glider is a farming program primarily. You set it up, go to work or school or whatever, and when you come home you're 2000g richer.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Wooky_linuxer]

I don't see the conflict. In fact, I think this case is ridiculous. A game should be fair? Ok, I am all for that. But simply building a tool that allows people to play unfairly does not constitute a crime or a civil offense. It might be immoral, but then my moral may be different of yours. Perhaps if you were in a tournament and someone uses a cheat, you could sue the cheater (and not the developer of the cheat, unless he happens to be the same person) for damages. But Blizzard? What damages did they had?

Besides, I don't see how he could have infringed their copyright since he doesn't distribute the game. If people cannot meddle with their own RAM because what's in there is protected by IP laws, we live in a very fucked world already.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Tom]

But on the other hand, does it really ruin the game if someone magically goes from 1 to 70 in two weeks without working for it?

If the in-game economy depends on players, then yes it does potentially damage you. MMORPGs have economic systems built into them which usually work like real-world systems - prices depend on scarcity of items, among other things. So if automated playing makes rare items readily available, the economy changes.

For a normal player, this might result in the game "not working" anymore. If game progress requires gold, and most of the ways to gain gold depend on the economy being intact, e.g. you being able to loot, or craft, rare items and sell them for good value, then that part of the game might break down for you, and with it everything that depends on you having enough gold available.

On the other hand, game balance in PvP games might also become problematic. I stopped playing Guild Wars when not having all-green (green being the rarest item category) equipment had become a kind of mark. If everyone has a full set of "unique" items, they aren't unique at all.

My own game, for example, includes code that does actually limit the number of unique items - the more there already are in the world, the less the chance that a new one can be found. Which, on the other hand, also requires that items deteriorate over time and then vanish from the game - something that not every MMORPG player will want to happen with his equipment. (my game isn't a MMORPG and the items not very important, so it works in that context.)

As you can see, it can have quite extensive effects.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[mjeffers]

I still don't really see the motivation. That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game.

Exactly, which is why no one in the world continues to play that terrible game called Chess after Deep Blue beat Kasparov.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[maxume]

I agree with you, but their subscriber count suggests that it is an effective way to make money.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Zironic]

It's exactly the same kind of people that cheat in other games, they want the reward but they don't want to put in the effort so they cheat.

Having a program grind for you in an MMO is no different from typing in a money cheat in an rts.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[autocracy]

Mostly, I think, "So what?" Glider has no reason to be bound to the agreement, and I still can't see a basis for the damages. Violate the agreement, get kicked off their server.

This comment does a good job of quantifying Blizzard's argument... but this is still much more a user problem. Don't I wish I could sue anybody who ever pissed me off in a game and made me not want to play.

Maybe open a restaurant, and sue anybody who revs their engine on a motorcycle for causing a loss of profit and damaging the reputation of my restaurant (ooh, bunch of Harley guys hang there). Profit. :)

(For whatever it's worth, I ride a motorcycle)

Re:Finances & Conflict

[The Only Druid]

I don't see the conflict. In fact, I think this case is ridiculous. A game should be fair? Ok, I am all for that. But simply building a tool that allows people to play unfairly does not constitute a crime or a civil offense. It might be immoral, but then my moral may be different of yours. Perhaps if you were in a tournament and someone uses a cheat, you could sue the cheater (and not the developer of the cheat, unless he happens to be the same person) for damages. But Blizzard? What damages did they had?

Besides, I don't see how he could have infringed their copyright since he doesn't distribute the game. If people cannot meddle with their own RAM because what's in there is protected by IP laws, we live in a very fucked world already.

I don't think you read the documents involved (including the stipulated damages issues already posted here).

Basically, Blizzard isn't just selling the software to users, but also the ongoing experience of the MMO which involves not only operating the servers and updating software, but also ensuring that the use of the software by legitimate customers isn't interrupted by illegitimate users.

A tremendous number of players find themselves disrupted by these Glider bots, and that's the damage.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[StoatBringer]

The problem is that if you can't afford to buy primals, you have to farm them up yourself. Which takes a lot longer than it should if a couple of bots are farming them 24/7.

It's also very annoying when you realise that you have to spend several boring hours grinding mobs but the bot-user just fires it up, goes out for the day, and comes back to several bags full of precious primals (and no doubt the odd blue or purple item as well).

Re:Finances & Conflict

[MightyYar]

The premise of a "discussion board" is apparently hard for you to grasp.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Sloppy]

Why the flaming fugg would I pay for software to play a game for me, while also paying a subscription fee for access to the game itself?

Perhaps you're a sociocyberpath. You see, normal people empathize with their computer, and feel bad at what all they put the poor machine through. So they give it the enjoyment of mindless repetitive tasks in a virtual environment with others of its kind, all without some stupid and demanding user sitting there at the keyboard. It's "computer time." How sad that you can't imagine this simple kindness.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Jim_Maryland]

Actually, bots usually play much much worse then real players.

While leveling my priest alt, I ran several instances with players (amazingly mostly hunters...guess the "huntard" term is more appropriate than I had expected) that I would argue are worse than bots.

I think the damage to the game is that by allowing the economies to be influenced by bots and players to gain a high level character without actually learning to play it, real players become disappointed with the game. While playing a character doesn't necessarily make you a good player when you hit level 70, it certainly helps. I could sell my mage (wearing a lot of T6 gear) to a new player to the game and I'm sure people could easily tell that they have no clue how to play. If the server were heavily populated by "bad" players, I'd either transfer to another realm or quit playing the game. This is one of the forms of damage that Blizzard can claim (not sure if they can back it up, but at least they can claim it).

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Wildclaw]

Mostly, I think, "So what?" Glider has no reason to be bound to the agreement, and I still can't see a basis for the damages. Violate the agreement, get kicked off their server.

Read up on tortious interference.

Willfully helping someone to violate a contract is often illegal. And that is where the fact that the functionality sold that people use to violate the contract doesn't have any secondary legal functionality, making the intention clear.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Nursie]

Except that in an RTS the struggle to gain money is part of the game that makes the rest a struggle and rewarding, whereas in WoW it seems like it's the whole game, and you're gonna get beaten by people who can dedicate more hours to it than is sane.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Toll_Free]

If Blizzard is as shitty as you say in your last statement, WHY THE FUCK DO PEOPLE PLAY THE STUPID GAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?

I mean, really now. GO OUTSIDE.

--Toll_Free

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Ephemeriis]

And there's your sticky issue, what exactly are the damages. I hate this because if I know it's happening, it ruins WoW for me. But on the other hand, does it really ruin the game if someone magically goes from 1 to 70 in two weeks without working for it? I might be jaded that I had to put in hours of muscle distrophying arthritis inducing clicking to get there ... but what's different now? So another player has more gold or resources, it's a tiny leg up in that game as the best items are won in PVP or require meticulous PVE to acquire.

As a player, I want Blizzard to combat this crap at every step. If something is allowed to become too popular it becomes more-or-less necessary in order to play the game.

A good example is the CT Raid Assist mod. Makes raiding much, much easier. It's legal, doesn't break any of Blizzard's rules. And it has become insanely popular over the years. These days it is generally considered necessary for raiding. Any guild I've raided with recently actually requires you to have CT Raid Assist (or a similar/compatible mod) installed in order to raid with them.

Now, this isn't a problem, because CTRA is free. Just download it, install it, done! But if something like MMOGlider was allowed to grow, flourish, and become popular - it could easily reach the point where it is almost necessary to install MMOGlider in order to remain competitive. Everyone else out there will have their characters autonomously farming cash 24/7 and prices will skyrocket. Mere mortals who cannot farm all day long wouldn't be able to afford anything at all. I don't want to be virtually forced to purchase 3rd-party software just to play a game.

From Blizzard's standpoint, I think it can be evaluated in a more mathematical way.

There's probably some real cap on how much money or xp it is possible to earn in an hour. Say the best possible critter out there drops 10g a kill...and you can kill one a minute...so that gives you roughly 60g (or xp, or whatever) in an hour. So this means that you could theoretically earn 1440g in one day.

But I doubt if Blizzard ever intended for their players to remain logged in 24/7. They probably assumed that the game would be played by human beings who need to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom. They probably counted on something more like 12/7. Which means that their calculations have all been thrown out the window. People are achieving things (money, items, levels) in something like half the time they were supposed to. And with a subscription-based game like WoW, time is very literally money.

Let's say that Blizzard figures it'll take the average player a month to get to level 70, then another month to get some halfway-decent gear, then another month to save up for an epic flying mount, then another month of farming reputation. That's four months, at $15 a month, or $60 income for Blizzard. With MMOGlider theoretically cutting that time in half, Blizzard is out $30.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Sloppy]

1. MDY began selling Glider on June 14, 2005. Through September 10, 2008, MDY has sold approximately 120,000 licenses for Glider.

No wonder MDY lost. They should have disputed that point. They should have said they sold 120,000 copies of their software. Not licenses. Copies.

They played right into Blizzard's hand with that, and helped the judge to adopt the twisted view that copyright applies to software in a fundamentally different way than it applies to every other type of copyrightable product. Nobody ever even heard of people buying licenses for their books or music or movies, but along comes Blizzard's software... Oops, and MDY's software too. Way to go, MDY, teaching the courts that software is a special case despite the lack of legislation making it so. Set another precedent for us too. Gee, thanks.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[dnoyeb]

I have not seen an athelete sued for damages over using performance enhancing drugs. This appears the same to me. Yet blizzard is suing for damages.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[SL Baur]

But on the other hand, does it really ruin the game if someone magically goes from 1 to 70 in two weeks without working for it?

"Players" who do that will quickly find no one to play with as they have never learned to play the game.

But as to farming, yes it spoils the game. On the server I play on, raw mats tend to cost more than the finished crafted goods I produce out of them. Not to mention general inflation in the AH.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[TarrVetus]

Who asked you? Seriously?

Who asked you to ask who asked him?

Wait, who asked me to ask you to ask who asked you to ask him? And if no one asked us to ask, then why do we ask at all?!

It's all been for naught. Our keyboards... useless, now.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Gr8Apes]

If the game is so heavily skewed by stats, perhaps the game itself is flawed?

A bad 70th level player is a bad 70th level player, regardless of whether they used a bot or mindlessly wandered through the same tasks themselves. Going through the same motions as the bot will not necessarily make them a better player.

The entire concept of realms as blizzard and most others have implemented is flawed at its core. It's the divide via partitioning mechanism to deal with scaling, the simplest solution to that problem and possibly the least conducive to player immersion. (Hi <new friend>, I play <MMO Game> too, want to join my group on <server A>? Darn, you're not on our server? Oh well, talk to you later.)

Re:Finances & Conflict

[blahplusplus]

"The stickiest issue is that a lot of us are conflicted. It pisses us off that WoW is a little less fair but on the surface this was a guy who avoided all technical attempts Blizzard tried to thwart him in a great game of cat & mouse. In the end, he could claim he was just selling software that users happened to use to violate Blizzard's TOS and EULA with. I've heard the same arguments about BitTorrent and would probably side with the software makers in this case ... "

Personally I think liberty takes precedence here, software vendors are way too authoritarian already. Would you accept it if someone told you how to use your car, or your house? I don't buy the "software as a service" argument at all, it is not the same classification at all. If WoW was standalone it would fall under doctrine of first sale and all that, i.e. ownership. The fact that MMO's can get away with telling paying customers how they use "their" product is a bit of a slap in the face.

I may be in the wrong here (since I have not played wow in a long time) but isn't wow glider just a bot kind of application, it doesn't actually cheat or violate the rules of the game technically?

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Tridus]

Actually, it does constitute a civil offense. Thats how Blizzard won the case.

Look up here for the details on what damages Blizzard suffered. They get a lot of complaints about bots. They have a lot of customers who have problems because of bots. They incur a lot of expense paying GMs to deal with bots. These are all quantifiable losses due to Glider.

The bottom line is that Glider's only purpose is to allow people to break Blizzard's terms of service. The courts got this case right.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[MBGMorden]

The computer doesn't play the game "better". If you've ever encountered one out in the wild you'd notice that they're truly idiotic little critters that play terribly. It's just that they AUTOMATE the process. This allows to things: easy powerleveling or easy gold farming.

Regarding powerleveling, the real crux of the issue is that WoW, like many RPG's, really begins at max level. Sure some people enjoy the lower level stuff, but most people, particularly after they've been through all that stuff once already, just want another alt at high levels so they can raid/do dailies with etc.

In effect, the grind from 1 to 70 (soon 80) just becomes a very, very long tutorial portion of the game that you can't skip. Blizzard has somewhat acknowedged this themselves - Death Knights will start at level 55 instead of level 1. They've made leveling under 60 (and to be under 70 post-WoTLK) faster and faster. They've made harder areas of the old world easy to solo.

Personally, I'd like to just see a system that says that for any new character you create, you can either choose to start at level 1 if you like, OR, you have the option of starting them at 85% of the level of your highest level character. So if I have a level 80 mage, I can start a priest at level 68. That would give people enough time to learn the class, but wouldn't put them through so much repetitive content to try a new class or role.

The second issue mentioned was gold farming, and that is obvious. Gold is the money of the game, and even grossly inefficient bots can beat a human when comparing raw time input. For example, when I farm I can get around 100 to 150G per hour. However, given my schedule restrictions, I might get to farm in game for 1 hour, maybe 2, per week. So my farming income is 300G per week tops. Lets say the computer can do 20G per hour. This is often run on a second account with the gold later mailed to the main, so it's running pretty much 24x7. At 20G per hour on average this person has a weekly income of 3360G - over 10x as much as me.

Not sure about a solution there (other than ban the bots when they find them), but just saying that the computer is not "better at the time", it just has no time constraints and on games with heavy-time investment, it's tempting to let the computer grind out the boring parts.

Mike

Re:Finances & Conflict

[milkmage]

"I've heard the same arguments about BitTorrent and would probably side with the software makers in this case ... " ...well, you could argue that BT has legitimate uses. MMOGlider on the other hand, not so much. If you use it to farm gold, it messes up the economy.. which has an impact on others (you need to check the AH on my server).

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Hinhule]

Blizzard is suing the maker and seller of the drugs.

They just ban the cheating athlete.

I'm sure there is a bad car analogy in there somwhere.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[tlhIngan]

Why are players bothering with online games that can be manipulated by manipulating the local client's RAM? Isn't the whole point of "Online" supposed to make client side vulnerabilities moot?

Except it's not using a client-side vulnerability to achieve its goals. It's not modifying the client to say to the server "the player just earned 1000 gold". Instead, it's manipulating the client to perform actions that the server will award the player stuff. At worse, it would peek inside the RAM to find out where monsters are. In effect, Glider is the MMO equivalent of an FPS aimbot. Except in the case of an MMO, the visibility in the field is a lot lower than an FPS since latency is less of an issue.

If it was using client side vulnerabilities, people would use it to kill on just touching monsters/other players, really, by telling the server "I did 1,000,000 HP damage". At best, all it can do is send the "I hit monster" command to the server as fast as possible.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Kineel]

You think anyone here was asked their opinion? Seriously?

"You're an idiot, here's your sign." - Jeff Foxworthy, but it applies.

A good game isn't determined by whether or not a computer can play it. Nor whether or not a specific person likes to play it.

A good game is determined by the value people find in playing it when they do. Do people keep coming back to it because they enjoy the experience? By that standard WoW is clearly a very good game.

Tic-tac-toe is a bad game, whether or not a computer can play it.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[everett]

No, humans make mistakes.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[QuoteMstr]

Why the fuck shouldn't it be free to see the court order?

Re:Finances & Conflict

[MBGMorden]

While leveling my priest alt, I ran several instances with players (amazingly mostly hunters...guess the "huntard" term is more appropriate than I had expected) that I would argue are worse than bots.

I think it's mostly just a matter of frequency. Hunters, for various reasons, are EXTREMELY common. For one, it's a very easy class to solo level with (I mean you've got ranged DPS, a personal tank, and your own healing spell to cast on that tank - you're basically a 3 man group rolled into a single player :)). Second, there was a certain movie that came out a few years ago that featured a really badass elf with a bow, so a lot of adolescents want to play the badass elf with the bow . . . (I wonder if the Horde are now getting more of these now since a Blood Elf looks a lot more Tolkein than a Night Elf :)).

So, lots of players, plus lots of ADOLESCENT players, means that the number of bad attitudes and inept players is going to be very high. Just let me assure you that a hunter, even the night elf ones (I promise ;)), when played right is a tremendously valuable class. Workable CC through traps, some of the best DPS in game (I do BT weekly and the top DPS spots are always occupied by a mixture of Hunters and Warlocks), and with their armor and often high health, they tend to be pretty durable in a raid. We just get a bad rep due to a very bad minority (or hell they might even be a majority, but in any case the problem is with the players and not the class itself :)).

Re:Finances & Conflict

[c]

> In the end, he could claim he was just selling software that users happened to use
> to violate Blizzard's TOS and EULA with.

He could make the claim, but it's a pretty good bet that he had to violate the TOS and EULA in order to develop, test and debug his software. Finding an expert witness to back that up wouldn't be much of a challenge.

He's still probably going to have better luck arguing that the TOS and EULA aren't legal agreements.

c.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[milkmage]

MMOGlider sits on top of the game and manipulates your character. it simulates human activity. watch the farmers in game, they do the same tasks over and over. move from point a to point b, kill mobs, loot 'em, back to point a, rinse and repeat.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[geekoid]

". MMORPGs have economic systems built into them which usually work like real-world systems - prices depend on scarcity of items, among other things."

No, they don't. Not one single MMORPG to date has anything more then a hazy shadow of a real world economic system.

People need to get over that myth so they can think about these issues using reason.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[kwerle]

Maybe open a restaurant, and sue anybody who revs their engine on a motorcycle for causing a loss of profit and damaging the reputation of my restaurant (ooh, bunch of Harley guys hang there). Profit. :)

So you open a burger joint. 30 bikers show up and order cokes. Then they sit in the parking lot for the next 23 hours hours and rev their engines, driving away other customers. And they do this every day. And you're not going to do anything about it?

'Cause that is essentially what is happening in game.

Now we can argue about who blizzard should sue and how much and all that - but my little point is this: they are doing something about it, and I think that's pretty reasonable.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[forgotten_my_nick]

I don't know about WoW, but when I played Asherons Call it was the bots that killed it for me. I would log into a near full server to find that majority of the players were trade bots.

Also my brother played Star Wars where they had bot players which would log into the dungeon and steal the items and log out again as soon as they spawn (long time ago so probably long fixed).

Still the point of MMO is that you are playing against other people. Otherwise you may as well play a single player game.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[torkus]

Hey, this guy...uhm...figured out how to count cards once. Then he taught people.

The casinos should sue him.

Seriously though, both sides of this argument have some merit. However I will fall back on blaming those who USE glider. The problem is, Blizzard would have a VERY hard time sueing them and it would have to be all individual cases. They'll go after someone who's apparently made a few million bucks recently.

The larger issue which I think needs to be addressed is the nonsense over EULA and TOS agreements and how they attempt to (and apparently succeed) write, re-write, and override existing law...much less common sense.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Jim_Maryland]

A bad 70th level player is a bad 70th level player, regardless of whether they used a bot or mindlessly wandered through the same tasks themselves. Going through the same motions as the bot will not necessarily make them a better player.

The general grinding task will to some extent make you better. If you think about it, why do students do repetitive math problems? Doing it once does not reinforce the skills. Now I won't argue that excessive grinding can also turn people from the game, but they do make people "work" to level. If you could get to level 70 quickly, you would still find bad players since it would be easy to find "guides" to help you. Maybe the grinding also discourages being "power leveled" since a level 70 would find it boring to easily kill the 30 murlocs for some quest when the player should be able to do it on their own.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[orielbean]

it is definitely civil offense

Re:Finances & Conflict

[genner]

Who asked you? Seriously?

Who asked you to ask who asked him? Wait, who asked me to ask you to ask who asked you to ask him? And if no one asked us to ask, then why do we ask at all?! It's all been for naught. Our keyboards... useless, now.

Say what now?

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Jim_Maryland]

I may have come off as being "all hunters are bad", but I certainly don't mean it to be that way. As you mentioned, hunters are often at or near the top of the DPS along with warlocks. Their CC may not be as reliable as a sheep (although some hunters spec'd for it, really are pretty close) but they can trap mobs that mages can't sheep, and that is valuable too. I've run with some very good hunters but I do see a larger number of bad hunters. In fact, the majority of the good hunters I see are often when I do arenas (or maybe I'm just a bad PvP mage...the more likely situation).

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Chris Burke]

(I wonder if the Horde are now getting more of these now since a Blood Elf looks a lot more Tolkein than a Night Elf :)).

Yes. Absolutely. I'm fairly certain that adding the even prettier than night elves blood elves to Horde, and allowing them to have hunters, was done in part to help the ally/horde imbalance. And exactly as I've predicted, I've been seeing tons of male blood elf hunters name "legololz" and similar running around.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Daimanta]

Is a EULA a contract now? I don't think so Tim.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Talderas]

They say the same thing about Lolret. I now drink the tears of whiners that are complaining about Blizzard's stance that hybrid DPS will be comparable to pure DPS classes.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[TitusC3v5]

You're assuming that EULAs are a valid and legally binding contract.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Chris Burke]

While leveling my priest alt, I ran several instances with players (amazingly mostly hunters...guess the "huntard" term is more appropriate than I had expected) that I would argue are worse than bots.

Bots can't even run instances. They're pretty retarded. When I used to farm demons and elementals on my warlock, if there was competition in the area I'd try to drive them out by repeatedly Banishing whatever they were trying to kill, freezing it and making it immune to attacks. Needless to say it didn't take very long for most people to decide to head off for fairer pastures (and btw they fixed this, because it was truly evil, but hey that's what warlocking is about!) But sometimes I'd run across a character that would sit there and pound on the banished mob forever. I'd be farming in the area for twenty minutes, repeatedly banishing the mob the other guy was whacking on, and they'd just sit there and keep at it.

It was quite enjoyable. :)

Re:Finances & Conflict

[TheLink]

It seems they sued the bike manufacturer though.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[TheLink]

Guns don't kill people, people kill people. If people use guns to do bad stuff, you shouldn't get rid of guns, or sue gun manufacturers.

Oh wait, wrong topic.

I think ;).

Re:Finances & Conflict

[ksd1337]

There's a difference. People don't actively use computers to beat other players in chess. Rather, it was a test in the ability of computers.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[torkus]

Which is all fine and good. Except who said blizzard was ENTITLED to that $60 income? Someone found a better/faster way to do something. Shocking.

Bliz doesn't like it - so pick up your ball and go home. Tell the kiddies who break the rules they can't play...but noooooooooo. That means $60 gets cut to $0.

What really irks me here is that they're not going after the individuals who are actually 'ruining' the game. They're going after one person/company instead because there's money to be had. A person/company who - themselves - is not accused of actually running the bot and hurting their income (as far as I know).

This is a dangerous road, are we going to start blaming any company that makes something which another company thinks hurts their revenue stream? I'll avoid the over-used gun analogy ... because i'd rather people read this than get modded troll or flamebait ;)

Re:Finances & Conflict

[billcopc]

It's not so much that it plays better than a human, but it is certainly more persistant. After killing the same mob over and over for 16 hours to loot rare drops, even a motivated korean farmer will start hating the grind.

MMOGlider, as far as I can tell, simply acted as a virtual player. It didn't "cheat" or use anything not exposed in the interface. It didn't play any differently from the thousands of wage-slaves in organized farming groups.

You could even say MMOGlider is a natural response to the ridiculous amount of boring boring grinding designed into the game. It really is excessive at times, and is used as a substitute for more intellectual balancing mechanics.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[10101001 10101001]

Read up on tortious interference.

Willfully helping someone to violate a contract is often illegal. And that is where the fact that the functionality sold that people use to violate the contract doesn't have any secondary legal functionality, making the intention clear.

So, I'll sign a contract with a friend where he's required to, through purely legal efforts, try to acquire majority shares in Microsoft. And when Microsoft repeatedly--again, through legal means--prevents this, I'll sue Microsoft for tortious interference. I don't know if it actually is tortious interference or not, but it sounds like it.

Btw, it's funny in a way. There is a secondary legal functionality. It's called running MMOGlider on a personal WoW server. Oh, that's right: Blizzard has used a contract (EULA) and threats of lawsuits to prevent the creation of a competing WoW server. I guess MDY should sue them over that for tortious interference.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[bdenton42]

I'm curious, as a end user of WoW, how am I to know that CT Raid Assist is "legal" and MMOGlider is not? Or any of the other dozens of mods available out there for that matter. Is this whole case simply about removing the need for me to figure that out?

Re:Finances & Conflict

[kwerle]

That's why it is an analogy - because it ain't perfect.

The sole purpose of this particular bike is to rev loudly for 24 hours straight and ruin the atmosphere. It isn't always easy to tell when someone is riding this bike or a regular bicycle.

So, yes, they sued the manufacturer.

Again, this seems pretty reasonable.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[MightyYar]

People don't actively use computers to beat other players in chess.

Okay, use poker then. Poker is fun - yet any online casino is full of bots.

I'd also argue that if chess were played online and statistics kept to rank players, people would absolutely use bots to raise their rank. I'd be surprised if it weren't going on right now, actually.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Richard_at_work]

This ruling does suggest that the court considers the EULA in this case to be.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[harl]

But if the coder doesn't play WoW then he can't be violating the license. Only the end user would be.

This of course raises complications on how you'd actually write the thing.

What are the legal remifications of having someone other than the coder agree to the license and then swap seats.

At that point they can ban the account for sharing but the producer of the bot has never agreed to the license.

EULA are contracts not law.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[pyrr]

I would agree with you that just because a computer can manage to play a game doesn't necessarily mean the game is bad; the key point (to me, anyway) is that upwards of 100,000 people preferred to let the computer play WoW for them, because they probably thought they had better things to do with their time, were bored to tears with farming, wanted to get ahead, or whatever.

Chess also is a different class of game from computer games. The basic game mechanics are almost painfully simple and moves are absolute (there is no random chance), it's the strategy involved with actions and reactions in a finite number of possible moves that make the game interesting. MMORPGs like WoW have nearly infinite movement sequence possibilities, since it's a freeform. It's just that these sorts of games just aren't as interesting, because there's minimal strategy required when you just have to go around killing things until you progress in some measurable form. This difference means that anybody (or nobody, in the case of MMOGlider) can manage to play through the menial tedium of a game like WoW and accomplish something, whereas not everyone can succeed at solving the strategic puzzles presented by chess.

This all reminds me of Progress Quest. I think that had to be about the most brilliant parody of RPGs I've ever seen, mocking the tedious filler that seems to be characteristic of the genre. MMOGlider sounds like it basically turned WoW into a graphical version of PQ.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The gamer in me says that games should be as fair as possible.

The gamer in me also says that games should be "fair" and that cheaters should not be allowed to ruin them.

However the responsible citizen of a free society in me, and in I hope all of us, knows that the integrity of fairness and justice in the laws of the land are more important by far than fairness and justice in the fantasy lands of my online games.

Let us be clear here, Michael Donnelly was found guilty because he was providing a way for other people to violate the private rules of a private company. Never mind about selling homemade bongs and breaking government rules. This ruling is a dangerous precedent.

Donnelly broke no law in selling the program, and the users broke no law in using it. Yet a court has found him guilty. And guilty of what? Copyright infringement? Get real. It is clear that he is de facto guilty of providing ways for third parties to break private company law. Apple says no third party software on iPhones. GM says no third party sat navs in their cars. Starbucks says no third party coffee in their cups. If I write iPhone software, sell sat navs, or offer fillers for passers by, this ruling means I'm in trouble. If I break any of the arbitrary and unregulated rules a private company decides to impose, I'm liable for large amounts of money.

This ruling is wrong. Liking World of Warcraft should not make you think otherwise. When it comes to things that are really important, you need to put down your controller and stand up for your rights.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[harl]

The 7th Circuit Court of the USA disagrees with you. EULA are legal, binding, contracts. The case that set this precedent was ProCD v Zeidenberg.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Ephemeriis]

I'm curious, as a end user of WoW, how am I to know that CT Raid Assist is "legal" and MMOGlider is not? Or any of the other dozens of mods available out there for that matter.

Is this whole case simply about removing the need for me to figure that out?

Blizzard provides a scripting language and plug-in framework for people to develop mods for the game. Basically anything you can create with their scripting language and plug-in framework is legal. If Blizzard discovers an add-on that is doing something they don't like, they'll find the underlying script element that makes it possible and break it. There have been a number of mods over the years that became very popular because they let you do things that Blizzard never intended, and then Blizzard intentionally broke them.

There have also been a number of mods over the years that became very popular, and were completely legal, and Blizzard rolled that functionality right into the core UI.

In the case of MMOGlider, the application was not developed using those scripting/plug-in libraries. And when Blizzard intentionally broke elements that MMOGlider used, the developers found a new way around them.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[harl]

There's no assumption needed. In the USA they are. The case that set this precedent was ProCD v Zeidenberg.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[PIBM]

So I take it that Kasparov just proved that he was human and not a computer ?

Re:Finances & Conflict

[SL Baur]

That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game. That people actually want a computer to play for them is a sign of a really badly designed game.

And that justifies doing that against people who just want to play the game?

Lots of folks here do not like WoW. Fine. Do not play it. For those of us who do play and enjoy WoW, is it too much to ask to be left alone to play a fair game?

Re:Finances & Conflict

[MightyYar]

Like I said, I can't defend WOW because it doesn't really appeal to me. But if you are using numbers, then you have to look at your 100,000 cheaters vs. the millions playing legitimately. It must be fun for someone!

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Zamerick]

Which is what gliders like myself did indeed do. On my server primals were in the 15-20 gold range each while glider ran. We were hit by a huge ban wave (incidentally, I lost my characters in that one) and primals shot up to 75 gold EACH. So glider actually made the game more accessible for those players that have a hard time getting gold. I am not claiming that its all good, I mean gold selling was a big problem and you can definitely lay that on bots (not glider so much, it was mostly cheap Chinese bots but bots none the less.)

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Ephemeriis]

Which is all fine and good. Except who said blizzard was ENTITLED to that $60 income? Someone found a better/faster way to do something. Shocking.

Entitled? How did entitlement ever enter into the equation? If you subscribe to WoW you pay a monthly fee... If you don't subscribe, you don't pay. I doubt if Blizzard expects to get money from random people who've never played WoW, but I suspect they'd be pretty unhappy if a subscriber stopped paying.

Bliz doesn't like it - so pick up your ball and go home. Tell the kiddies who break the rules they can't play...but noooooooooo. That means $60 gets cut to $0.

Blizzard frequently bans accounts. Sometimes a little too aggressively. You may remember a story from a little while back when they were banning folks running WoW through WINE.

Sure, that income gets cut from $15/month to $0... But that account's usage of Blizzard's resources also goes to 0. We aren't talking about people that get banned, we're talking about people who are using more resources, and using those resources faster than Blizzard expected. Which means Blizzard's costs go up. Which means, ultimately, an increased monthly fee. I'd rather not have my monthly fee raised because of some folks violating the EULA.

What really irks me here is that they're not going after the individuals who are actually 'ruining' the game. They're going after one person/company instead because there's money to be had. A person/company who - themselves - is not accused of actually running the bot and hurting their income (as far as I know).

This is a dangerous road, are we going to start blaming any company that makes something which another company thinks hurts their revenue stream? I'll avoid the over-used gun analogy ... because i'd rather people read this than get modded troll or flamebait ;)

Blizzard, like pretty much anyone else in the US, is free to sue anyone they want. It's up to the court to decide if there's any merit to it. If the case was completely baseless then Blizzard wouldn't be getting any money, and these folks could actually counter-sue.

Don't blame Blizzard for a legal system that you feel is broken.

As far as whether Blizzard has any grounds or not... This piece of software was designed for the sole purpose of breaking Blizzard's EULA. This isn't some tool that can be used for perfectly legal purposes. It isn't like BitTorrent that can be used to distribute content legally, or DeCSS which can be used to play the DVDs you legally purchased. This is a piece of software designed from the ground up to break Blizzard's EULA...a piece of software that was then repeatedly re-designed to get around the attempts Blizzard made to simply keep that software from working.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[NonSequor]

There are different reasons why people play these games. Lots of people enjoy playing with and/or against other people. A lot of people especially enjoy beating or having better stuff than other people. A significant chunk, but evidently not all, of the player population feels a sense of accomplishment in the labor they endured to get their stuff or to beat other players.

It may seem silly, but the fact that you and everyone else has spent hours and hours leveling your characters builds a sense of camaraderie. It's a rite of passage that you've all been through, and you've probably worked together with a lot of people to do it and had a lot of ups and downs along the way.

But if some guy just skips to the end without doing everything you had to do, your natural impulse is to view him as an invader trying to infiltrate your community. You feel like you deserve what you've earned because of the work you put in, but this guy hasn't done anything to show he deserves what you have.

It may seem silly that people take these games this seriously, but you see the same sort of behavior in people with other hobbies.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Intron]

Not true. There used to be postal chess, where you sent your move to your opponent on a postcard. Open tournaments have been killed off by technology - it is too simple to cheat with a computer to win.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[merreborn]

But on the other hand, does it really ruin the game if someone magically goes from 1 to 70 in two weeks without working for it?

I certainly hope not, because if it does, Blizzard's own "Recruit a friend" program is really going to ruin your day. Participants get triple XP (up to level 60). My wife and I started new characters and have made it up to 52nd in under an hour per level. As an additional benefit, for every two levels the recruit gains, they're able to grant the recruiter a free level (as long as the target character is lower level than the granter, and under level 60) -- so my wife has granted 26 free levels to my alts.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Metaphorically]

lol - 7 of the 11 logololz are blood elves at http://www.wowarmory.com/search.xml?searchQuery=legololz&searchType=characters

Re:Finances & Conflict

[angel'o'sphere]

So my farming income is 300G per week tops. Lets say the computer can do 20G per hour. This is often run on a second account with the gold later mailed to the main, so it's running pretty much 24x7. At 20G per hour on average this person has a weekly income of 3360G - over 10x as much as me.

Not sure about a solution there (other than ban the bots when they find them), but just saying that the computer is not "better at the time"

The solution to this and to gold farming / trading per se is very simple.
Remove gold from the game and let guilds or slightly bigger organizations be abel to define their own currency. For that you only need to have a kind of guild bank, you define the name of the currency and you define a "natural resource" that is used as "backing" for the currency.

Example:
We invent a currency called "Iron Forge Nuggets" (IFG).
We define that you have a "guild bank" (IFG-GB) with 100 slots (you might need normal gold to create such a bank).
We define that 10 "IFG" can be exchanged at the IFG-GB for 10 iron bars, 1 arcane crystal and 1 fel lotus.
We define that the smallest exchange is 10 IFG.

Money is created by depositing iron bars, arcane crystals and fel lotus into the bank. Everyone in the game can do that, probably for a small fee in "gold" or an extra contribution, lets say 1 fel weed per 10 IFG. You deposit materials and get a kind of voucher which is used as money in the player versus player economy, that means mainly: in the auction house.

Every guild / group meeting some stand up requirements can create such a bank. In the auction house you chose as starting bid: 15 IFG instead of 300 gold ... and as buyout price 45 IFG.

The gnome warlocks ofc have the "GWUC" (gnome warlocks united coin) as currency. The GWUC bank accepts deposits of Arcane Dust and Large Prismatic Shards.

If you want to sell something in the AH you only need to select the correct currency.

Why would you use such a "player defined currency"? Because you can use the "vouchers" visit the bank and hand the voucher in to get the raw materials.

Why is that better than "gold farming"? First: lots of materials are much harder to farm (e.g. to get a Large Prismatic Shard, you need to be in an instance, get a "blue" drop, disenchant/destroy the drop, and get a shard as result ... bots hardly can do that solo). Second: who cares if a bot is putting farmed stuff into the bank system? The bot has the voucher ... he can trade the voucher ofc ... but can't transfer it to another server.

angel'o'sphere

P.S. all that stuff is very well known in the industry, so I assume there is a good reason to stick to gold silver copper money ;D

Re:Finances & Conflict

[RogueyWon]

I used to play Final Fantasy XI.

You wouldn't believe how many white-haired Elvaan with names like "Sefiroth", "Sephirouth" and "Sephirothe" there were running around on each server.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[ickpoo]

I'm pretty sure that Blizzard goes after the users using bots too. Basically as soon as Blizzard can be sure that a player is using a bot the ban hammer comes down, perhaps even before that.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Metaphorically]

If that money cheat in the rts let you beat other people playing the rts. And camp their corpses.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[MBGMorden]

I'm not sure where you get the "lots of materials" are harder to farm for than gold. 99% of a bot's farming capability already comes from farming *materials* and selling them. The little bit of cash they get directly from each drop is trivial. Many of them grind for cloth - some for leather, many for Motes/Primals, etc. The fake currency idea would simply mean that they're exchanging for this new fake currency rather than in game gold. The end result is still exactly the same as before.

So long as there are limited resources in the game (and if there were unlimited resources it would be no fun - that would effectively be cheat codes), then there will always be bots farming them. You just have to try and detect and ban the bots at a reasonable rate.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Malevolyn]

There are in fact zero-player RPGs. IdleRPG comes to mind.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Evets]

That case and precedent is very restrictive.

1) The end user had to accept EULA every time the software was run.
2) The EULA contained no terms that would be considered unconsionable.
3) The court noted that the ability to return the software can be important according to the underlying law that they relied upon.

It's certainly very arguable in this case. Better for the industry as a whole if this one doesn't reach a courtroom.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[znerk]

Personally, I'd like to just see a system that says that for any new character you create, you can either choose to start at level 1 if you like, OR, you have the option of starting them at 85% of the level of your highest level character. So if I have a level 80 mage, I can start a priest at level 68. That would give people enough time to learn the class, but wouldn't put them through so much repetitive content to try a new class or role.

Might I interest you in Guild Wars, then...? You can make a PvE Toon, and level it from 1 to 20 (max level), and then continue beating quests and mobs, exploring the game, earning new skills, etc. As an alternative, you can make a PvP character, start at level 20, and use the skills and weapons you've unlocked on the PvE side.

Sure, Guild Wars sucks as compared to WoW, but nobody said it was perfect. The lack of ability to jump, the lack of a Z axis entirely, the lack of variety in costuming, the lack of ability to use more than 8 skills in any given session... the list goes on. I just wanted to point out that what you asked for already exists.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[walnutmon]

The things that don't change in life... the last time I was on slashdot, we were having economic problems... it was a change of seasons... and nerds on slashdot were trolling WoW threads...

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Malevolyn]

I prefer taurens myself.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[harl]

1) That's not true. It can be a one time only thing at install.
2) That's the case with WoW. Please see Blizzard V bnetd for precedent. It's impossible for a game EULA to be unconscionable. You can just not buy the game (decline the contract). It's purely a luxury good. Unconscionable != unfair.
3) http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/eula.html In bold big letters at the top. "IF YOU REJECT THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT WITHIN THIRTY (30) DAYS AFTER PURCHASING THE GAME, YOU MAY CALL (800)757-7707 TO REQUEST A FULL REFUND OF THE PURCHASE PRICE."

Re:Finances & Conflict

[angel'o'sphere]

No, it is not the same.

By farming materials and contributing them into the "bank system" the materials are actually available. So "in a sense" they "participate" still in the game.

By just mining mines and selling the ore to the next best vendor, the veins are "farmed" and likely despawned and the price for the ore is artificial high (so you have the feeling you need money to be able to afford it).

As the banks are limited in storage capacity, the amount of money circulating is controlled. You are simply not able to farm the equivalent of 15.000 gold in an artificial voucher currency because the bank probably only has a 50k capacity and that is distributed over 200 or 300 players.

Result is: a bot has to do many different things and to "invest" into many differnt currencies ... and by doing that the bot is "playing" in a certain sense.

angel'o'sphere

Re:Finances & Conflict

[pbot]

I'd be interested in seeing whether or not an application could be designed to defeat a player of a first-person shooter (i.e. Halo, COD4, Counterstrike). It requires fast reflexes and good tactics to play it correctly. Not to mention working 3 dimensions.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Jim_Maryland]

A bot is much less likely to get into an instance since there will generally be some level of chat to make sure they are even compatible. What would be interesting (purely from a concept viewpoint) is "botting" an instance party entirely so they can run the instance repeatedly to farm rare BoE drops and shards.

repeatedly banishing the mob the other guy was whacking on

Pure evil if it wasn't a bot but pure genius if it was.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[MightyYar]

My guess is that it would come down to tactics, because you'll get crushed on reflexes. The computer will always be a couple hundred ms ahead of you - unless the AI runs too slow. But I imagine the threat-detection-and-reaction code would be pretty simple and fast.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Pollardito]

The general grinding task will to some extent make you better.

the extent is only as big as the player makes it since the types of encounters that you're grinding through solo are completely different than those you'll encounter in a group. after a certain point they can actually make you worse, ingraining in you the tactics of solo encounters rather than those that work best in a group. at best you learn a subset of your skills that works best for DPS and very little about how to work as a team, at worst you become a liability to groups by pulling aggro from tanks and not supporting others with skills like tactical healing that get short mileage while soloing.

If you think about it, why do students do repetitive math problems?

you grind through math problems that are similar to the math skill that you're training. unfortunately solo killing for some classes is as close to their group role as grinding through arithmetic is to trig

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Pollardito]

it's also easier to bot a hunter since your workable range of attack is much wider. you only need to be facing the right direction while in a wide band of fire range, and don't need to be both facing the right direction and within a small hitbox. maybe the reason that those hunters were worse than bots if that they got to the level they were at by using bots.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Schadrach]

So what would your stance be one something like MacroGoblin ( http://macrogoblin.com/ )? It's a fairly generic application macroing program. The website selling it also distributes several macro setups that are MMO bots, for assorted games.

There's a clear intent that it's an "MMO bot", but if attacked they could pull the MMOBot scripts for their app down, quietly let the code leak/get reverse engineered, and have someone out in the community producing "WoW goblin" or "WAR Goblin" scripts for use with their app.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Sun Chi]

Now I'm sorry I asked...

Re:Finances & Conflict

[MBGMorden]

Where do you get the idea that the bots are vendoring their main farmed items? Most of those items get auctioned on AH for the going price and "stay available".

I have to say, your whole idea seems very Rube Goldberg to me. Adding an extreme layer of complexity to a currently simple system, and in the end none of the original problems are solved.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Sun Chi]

Just don't leave your computer watching hulu.com all day - it'll rot its brain.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[hairyfeet]

Yes people still play chess,but you don't see 100,000 people shelling out $25 for a robot to sit in their chair and play the game for them. I played for a couple of weeks and it was just too "grindy" for me. And the fact that there was actually 100,000 people that were willing to shell out $25 each just to cut out the grinding tells me that maybe they should look into why grinding is such a chore.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[karmatic]

The computer doesn't play the game "better". If you've ever encountered one out in the wild you'd notice that they're truly idiotic little critters that play terribly. It's just that they AUTOMATE the process. This allows to things: easy powerleveling or easy gold farming.

There's a slight flaw with your argument. You only know you've encountered one in the wild if it's so mind-numbingly stupid that you can tell. The ones that play _better_ don't get noticed.

Some of them do play better than humans. Genetic algorithms work wonderfully when constrained to as few options as WoW gives you. In fact, it's even possible to train by observing the in-game data (player health, # of mobs, mob health %, player/mob mana, class types, cooldown times, etc.), and using that to build a genetic algorithm that plays like a player.

This gives you a bot that plays like a player.

You can extract terrain data directly from the .mpqs, use it to build a map. When going from point A to point B, assign a higher weight to points within a road, with points in the "middle" of a road higher than those on the edges.

Data-mining (or crawling thottbot) allows you to determine the average levels for mobs in an area, this also gets factored into the cost for the pathing algorithm.

To save space, the entire world is mapped at a very low resolution. There are then several intermediate resolutions used for more fine-grained navigation. Once you get close, MOBs are within the Potentially Viewable Set, and are sent to the client, allowing for detailed pathing to be done by the client.

So, to get from point A to point B, one loads the world map (with it's associated costs), loads the source and destination areas from the medium-res map, then paths the client area using live data. As you approach the next area in the path, the medium-level maps are loaded in order.

This gives you a bot that knows how to get somewhere.

Data-mining quests, combined with location data (start location, etc.), quest type (acquisition vs kill X vs escort) allows one to determine relatively quickly what quests can be stacked together easily to minimize grinding. Using the navigation system, one can determine the most efficient way to get to quests, and which ones will be fastest.

The only real issue with this approach is that you have to keep track of the XP the client has - if the XP goes up when the bot is not playing, you have to exclude all quests that _could_ have been completed, unless you want to run the risk of wasted time.

Yes, I wrote a WoW bot, and it plays almost exactly like I do. It won't get on more than 8-10 hours a day, and the start times and play times vary. I always supervise my bots - they check in, and alert me when people talk to them, try to group, etc. You would never know it's a bot.

My bot even automates Auctioneer, and is smart enough to know whether something is worth more by itself, as a stack, or disenchanted. It will mail things to alts, shove stuff in guild vaults (good if you end up banned), snipe auctions when the server is less busy. It uses neural networking to determine whether or not an action is likely to turn a profit, helping avoid issues where things get dumped on the market and there's a glut. It plays the odds and determines how likely I am to get burned on the deal.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[AntiNazi]

That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game.

In this case, it can't. What it can do is play when the player can't.

That people actually want a computer to play for them is a sign of a really badly designed game.

I agree. I wholeheartedly believe that leveling in the modern mmo is a ridiculous concept that achieves nothing a short tutorial could not. Blizzard has missed a fair bit of money from me because leveling sucks so bad and you can't play the real game unless you waste two months working through the pregame. It's a game, let me play it. I earned the right to play by plunking down dollars at Best Buy, I don't need to earn it by seeing how good I am at repeating a task thousands of times.

And I don't want to hear that it "teachs you to play your class" either. As the second you get to the level cap the entire gameplay and playstyle changes pretty significantly.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[bigstrat2003]

Lolret

Sir, I believe you misspelled "retnoob".

Although I too, drink those tears, and my classes are mage and hunter, for crying out loud. The game isn't going to end because hybrids can do good DPS.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[WK2]

People play MMO's because they are fun games. Not for everybody, but lots of people enjoy playing them. However, there are some parts of the game that they don't enjoy. Boring, monotonous tasks to make their character more "experienced", or to earn money. It's called "grinding". It's only a game, and some players figure the point is to have fun, not work, so they pay for a program to do the work for them, and then they do the fun stuff themselves. The computer couldn't do the fun part anyway, because it is only a computer.

Interesting history of grinding. It originally comes from pen and paper RPGs, especially Dungeons and Dragons. Generally, each player would have a character of a certain level, and then the Dungeon Master (who was a human) would create a quest for them that wasn't too hard or too easy for their levels. When they completed the quest, each player was awarded experience points, and their characters would often get stronger, faster, etc. It was fun, and part of the game. Anything that wasn't fun, like playing a level 1 character, the DM would allow the players to skip, because he was a human being and not a machine.

Then, somebody had the bright idea to convert RPGs to computers. CRGPs were born. It included some of the things from RPGs. Including levels, experience, and usually gold. However, because the DM was a machine, it would not allow players to skip boring parts. Players would often have to walk around a forest or something, mindlessly killing bad guys to gain experience. A human DM would have made the quests a little easier if the players weren't strong enough for it, but the machine is a machine. This flaw continues in MMORPGs.

Interestingly, the role playing part of RPGs did not make it into computer RPGs, yet they still call them "role playing games". Go figure.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[beholder77]

Hold up there Jim... this is Slashdot and you're not only admitting you expressed yourself poorly, you're apologizing. This can't happen on Slashdot, please make sure you go back and flame this guy's perfectly sensible and reasoned (also accurate) response and if you can, put a personal attack in.

It starts here, and before you know it civil conversation will erupt, then it's all over! :)

I love our guild hunters, they're all quite skilled and manage to top meters without getting themselves killed. But I've seen the other side of the fence in PUG runs... bad hunters who are level 70 who don't know how to ice trap. It's all relative to experience I guess.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[karmatic]

Why is that better than "gold farming"? First: lots of materials are much harder to farm (e.g. to get a Large Prismatic Shard, you need to be in an instance, get a "blue" drop, disenchant/destroy the drop, and get a shard as result ... bots hardly can do that solo).
It's not hard for a bot to get in a group - there are lots of (for example) HealBots. I bought a 60 priest off eBay (some time ago), and had a number of groups say I was the best healer they ever had.

Also, running an instance with bots really isn't that hard, since the game forces you into fairly defined roles to begin with. The game really doesn't require that much skill.

One of the projects I did (back before ISXWarden stopped working) was a genetic algorithm AI bot. It started with no knowledge of the game whatsoever beyond what one gets inspecting the spellbook.

The logger went through and took snapshots while instance grinding of all players and MOBs. How many enemies, who they were targeting, what spells were cast, how much health/mana everyone had, player levels, etc.

Next came the learning stage. Each player was examined in the Armory to determine their talent points spent in each tree.

Random algorithms were generated, including tests and actions. This was done for each class and talent tree, and the algorithms were run. The ones that behaved most like the recorded data were kept, and used to spawn more of them.

For simplicity sake, the bot didn't abort casting willingly, since it would greatly increase the number of permutations, and didn't seem to matter much in my (not particulary objective) opinion.

After about 2 months of part-time data gathering, and a month or so of "reproduction" - I had algorithms that behaved like very good players. They wouldn't do all the inventory management, etc., but that was all hard-coded.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Talderas]

Lolret, retnoob, freehk. There's multiple false names people call retribution paladins.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Uniquitous]

You don't have to explain D&D to me, I still run a group. If the DM is sending the players out to grind, then he's doing it wrong. There is all kinds of level-appropriate fun to be had... racing for high-level is just missing the point. Similarly, a video game should have appropriate challenges for all levels. If it feels like work, then it's not a fun game, and I'll spend my money elsewhere.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[The Gaytriot]

Just turn the difficulty on the bots from CS:S up (You can turn it up even higher than the preset options with a console command).

Re:Finances & Conflict

[tsm_sf]

Bots are old news in FPS. Some of the earlier games used them to fill out multiplayer matches. Their skill level can be anywhere from brain-dead to totally unbeatable, but you have to keep in mind that any time a bot misses you it's basically done on purpose.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[beholder77]

Alright I was wrong, I'm sorry.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Trolan]

Easily. They could stand in one spot, and kill you. The game client actually knows a little more about where people are than it's displaying, which why wallhacks can work. Add in the fact the computer will be 99.9% accurate to your forehead, and you're done. It's easier to make a completely accurate bot than it is to make one that misses.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Puffy Director Pants]

It is free, all you have to do is go to the courthouse and they can't charge you to look at it.

Providing an online service? Not required for the courts, though in most cases, you can just download it from somebody else who already pays for the service.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Le Marteau]

That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game

You mean, like chess?

Anyway, from the glider FAQ:

"Gliding is a bit different from a regular person playing. It's not as smart as you when it comes to additional monsters piling on, runners, casters, obstacles in the way, or anything else tricky."

So no, it does not "play better than a human". It just plays poorly for long periods of time, and thus earns the character experience points.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Puffy Director Pants]

"Would you accept it if someone told you how to use your car, or your house?"

I already do. Driving laws are pretty common. I can't use my house to operate a business, and for those in neighborhoods with housing associations, they can't always do some things to their houses.

I'd say it's pretty common for those things to be restricted.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[The Empiricist]

It's either have your taxes pay for it or you pay for it, but money is required for the service. As taxes aren't going towards it right now (or at most subsidizing it), they need to have you pay it. It is however, not-for-profit.

It's actually a pretty reasonable fee. Public records that are available for inspection on-site typically cost $0.25 per page to copy. With PACER, opinions are often provided for free. You don't pay unless you accumulate at least $10 worth of charges / year. Charges are capped at $2.40 per document (that is, you can get a 100 page document for the price of a 30 page document). You can also apply for an exemption in certain situations where an "exemption is necessary in order to avoid unreasonable burdens and to promote public access to information." And its all DRM-free, for those inclined to share digital court records with others.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[SL Baur]

Your reasoning is flawed.

There's probably some real cap on how much money or xp it is possible to earn in an hour. Say the best possible critter out there drops 10g a kill...and you can kill one a minute...so that gives you roughly 60g (or xp, or whatever) in an hour. So this means that you could theoretically earn 1440g in one day.

I don't think so. XP gain from a kill is graded solely on level difference between you and the mob. No soloable mob drops anywhere near 10g per kill.

Throughout the time I've been playing (I started a few weeks before BC) Blizzard has made it successively easier to earn money. The Quel'Danas patch added a bunch of extremely profitable daily quests. Daily quests are by far the quickest way to earn gold and raising the limit to 25 was almost overkill.

Your number is somewhat close though. I figure with an appropriate number of level 70 characters, doing the max 25 daily quests each day, 4 hours, 300g, one could earn 1800g doing dailies in a 24 hour run. The actual number would be higher due to additional drops.

That's four months, at $15 a month, or $60 income for Blizzard. With MMOGlider theoretically cutting that time in half, Blizzard is out $30.

Ignoring completely the amount of money Blizzard has to spend fielding complaints from legitimate players over bots ...

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Wildclaw]

This isn't an EULA though. This is a Terms of Service that you agree to as part of subscribing to a monthly service.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Skuld-Chan]

If you cruise over to their forums - it seems like the vast majority of people who use this are gold farmers and people selling accounts.

You'd never find a bot actually playing the game (ie - doing quests, dungeons, raids and playing with the game economy).

Re:Finances & Conflict

[p0tat03]

but I disagree with your premise.

I think the bigger issue is that you have a *game* that's so un-fun that people would rather have a computer play it *for them*. I don't know about you, but I'd never use a computer program to "beat" a game like Doom, or Command & Conquer, etc etc. The reward for those games lies in the experience, IMHO the way gaming ought to be.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[MightyYar]

I think the bigger issue is that you have a *game* that's so un-fun that people would rather have a computer play it *for them*.

Correction: you have a game that SOME people would rather have a computer play. There are millions of WOW players. Something like 0.1% cheat... that's not exactly an indictment of the playability of the game.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Poltras]

Sorry to disagree here (well, not that sorry).

You know very very well that repetitively killing a mob to get its horn to get xp to get more horn-needing quests will not get pass the Kara level of brain you need to do raid. Heck, put five of those people together and they won't even finish Steam Vault regular (I've been /rw "Kill the tanks! Kill the tanks!" way too much). Put some of them on Supremus and you'll have 20 players who want to quit ("stay out of fire!"). We're not yet talking about Archimonde and Gorefiend, damnit!

The fact that those guys didn't buy or bot their 70s doesn't guarantee they have the brain. It doesn't even guarantee they understand their own class (I've never played hunter and I know what clipping is...). So yeah, I'd bot an alt anytime if I could get some of the classes we need in the guild to 70, and I'd still be considered a good player. I don't want to force myself 5-10 days /played time to get there, I have other things to do (IRL or not, raiding takes time).

Gimme the possibility to start a char at half the level of my highest char and I wouldn't consider botting. I'm not doing it (don't want the ban hammer), but I can understand why some would.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[AK Marc]

So the bots harm you. But they don't harm you financially. And if you play and hate it, it doesn't harm Blizzard financially. The harm is if Blizzard is dealing with lots of reports of bots and that costs them money, or if people are dropping subscriptions or failing to subscribe because of Glider. Of course, there may be people that would have dropped their subscription if not for Glider, so that should be accounted for as well. When you consider all that, you get the "harm" done to Blizzard. What is the dollar figure? No one knows.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Wildclaw]

I don't know if it actually is tortious interference or not, but it sounds like it.

Just because I gave a simplistic description doesn't mean that that is all there is. Of course there is limits to exactly what is counted as tortious interferance. For exact definitions, look up the laws in your jurisdiction.

It's called running MMOGlider on a personal WoW server

Sure, and you have the right to argue that. I doubt you could find a judge that would buy the argument though.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[AK Marc]

The general grinding task will to some extent make you better.

Horse pucky. Most holy priests leveled as shadow. They respec to holy when they reach 60 or 70 and play without ever having ground anything. Same for resto shammys, holy pallys, and resto druids. Most level as a hybrid or DPS class (the same goes for tanks, but to a lesser degree). Grinding the same thing repeatedly in the same way hasn't taught me anything. Occassionally there is an unusual situation while out grinding where I might learn something, but the actual grind gains me nothing.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[duckInferno]

I don't know about "runining the game", but there are negative effects to bots that are not immediately apparent.

Problem: Bot users gain more money than they would usually.
Why this is bad: Inflation moves a little faster. It means that that shiny 100g sword you want to buy from the Auction House now costs more as gold is depreciated in value.

Problem: Bot users gain more valuable items than they would usually.
Why this is bad: This is the anti-point of the above: there are now more of the above swords in the AH, pushing down prices. Yay! And that's the end of the positive effects of this. The tangible negatives are
- if you find this shiny sword and don't want it, the above point will work against you when selling it
- it's less rare than it should be, turning "whoa you have a shiny sword!" into "oh yeah I got that sword for my alt, its not bad eh"
- said shiny swords become standard. they're relatively easy to get now, but if you don't have one, you're at a hella disadvantage to everyone else. it's just another widening of the gap between the lowest geared char and the highest.

Problem: Bot users get to 70 with little actual play experience.
Why this is bad: If you're on an instance run with this guy, I feel for you. When you're done wiping over and over because Retardbotterxyz doesn't know what aggro is or just isn't fast enough at moving from a bosses' aoe or the run doesn't start at all ("whr is the place guyz? lol wht do u meen key?"), you'll know EXACTLY why this is bad.

Problem: Botting removes much of the challenge from the game.
Why this is bad: The botter is likely to tire of the game quicker. You're less likely to get a "productive" guild/instance/raid member and more likely to just suffer the above residual effects with the server having nothing to show for it.

Problem: You spent X days getting to 70. Botter spent a fraction of that.
Why this is bad: How does your accomplishment feel now? This is a social game. Competition between players makes up a large part of it. Players who insist they just do it "for the fun" (no shit sherlock, what am I here for then?) will deny this, but in an MMO, status means quite a lot. The spirit of competition is nothing to brush off or, in this case, cheat.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[duckInferno]

To stave off a potential botter's excuse I would also like to add: "No single raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood."

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Satanboy]

On the other side of the issue he was just a guy writing software and selling it. I could throw him in with the likes of spammers and botnet masters but it was just a legitimate client program running on a paying user's machine.

This argument is baseless and I hear it all the time in regards to Glider, so I have to address this.

This program, if you think about it, specifically targets world of warcraft. This program would have no use without world of warcraft.

Since it requires world of warcraft to be useful, it becomes less a program that does automation of tasks and becomes a modification of world of warcraft.

Let me ask you this:

When was the last time you saw a mod author sell his mods without a license from the main company and not get sued?

To put that into perspective, let me make a mod using Unreal3, and then sell it, let's see how far I get.

I hope that finally people can see the broken argument of 'this was just a programmer making a program and trying to sell it'.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Arancaytar]

That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game. That people actually want a computer to play for them is a sign of a really badly designed game.

I would suspect malice rather than incompetence. It's not bad design; it's their business model.

You have just described the essence of about 90% of MMORPGs: Induce a player into a world of some apparent depth and complexity, then grant them a rapid initial growth of status (wealth, character power) that will generate a perceived need for more status and hence more investment of time and fees.

Jack Thompson is an idiot. Game violence is harmless compared to the enormous waste of time and effort that is generated by players of MMORPGs - it's like SETI for brains, but less productive. It's nothing social either. Deeper interaction can be had at a fraction of the investment on text message forums. The effect is equivalent to a drug, right down to the part where excessive playing is harmful to health and can (in at least one documented case) lead to actual death.

The invention of a tool like MMOGlider, or any bot, is by necessity feared by the makers of the MMORPG. They claim they outlaw them for the benefit of the players, but let's examine that claim for a second. Who exactly is the person who wants to use the tool, and benefits from it? A player. What does it harm? The company's business model, which depends on a continuing addiction of the player to investing effort and money. If an MMORPG is an addictive drug, then a bot tool is the antidote. And that's why they go after it.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Cornflake917]

That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game.

You realize you're basically saying that every game ever created is a bad game, right? FPS's, RTS's, RPG's... all these gametypes have AI that are able to beat humans.

That people actually want a computer to play for them is a sign of a really badly designed game.

Any MMO that has a grind in it, or basically ALL MMO's, will have an activity in the game that the player rather have automated for them while they are away at work or something. That doesn't mean that there are aspects in that same game which are enjoyable and fun.

Also, no one ever said that this Glider Bot played WoW better than a human. I honestly doubt that it does. So even your premise is wrong. It's amazing so much wrong can be packed into such a little comment!

Re:Finances & Conflict

[tm2b]

Nobody ever even heard of people buying licenses for their books or music or movies

You're really, really wrong about that. For example, when you buy a DVD you do not have the right to play it, for example, to a large auditorium of paying customers. Radio stations and places open to the public (business like bars) have to acquire specific licenses that allow them to play music to their patrons. Hell, it's illegal to show an NFL football game from freely acquired television signals to a paying audience.

All you can really say is that there's a lot of ignorance going around about how intellectual property has worked in the US for a very long time.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Cornflake917]

You sound like a Eve fanboy. It's not like you can't transfer to different realms most of the time. Regardless, you realize that 10 million people play WoW right? I mean CCP barely pulls off an unsharded server with only a couple hundred thousand subscribers. Eve is still unplayable at times. It's not really fair to call WoW's shards "flawed" when the alternatives are just as a flawed if not worse.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[spir0]

I guess for me 'sticky' isn't a good description of it. No, there are two core ideologies which are conflicting here. The gamer in me says that games should be as fair as possible. WoW is already naturally flawed to some degree in this way and it is Blizzard's responsibility to keep the playing field level. MMOGlider upsets this 'fairness' and destroys the inherent fun in the game.

I believe it's not just the fairness, but the perceived value is diminished. If Blizzard *didn't* go after these guys with all guns blazing, then that would be the same as Blizzard saying "it's OK."

Now that would then set a precedent allowing other bot writers to do whatever they want. This devalues the game, and millions of people will suddenly start wondering why they're paying US$15 a month to play a game, grinding their way to the top, while others are getting a free ride.

And while a reduction in fees may be great for the players, I don't think Blizzard (or any company for that matter) would want to piss on such a cash cow. I mean really, how are they going to be able to survive if WoW is reduced to only pulling in a 5000% profit margin?

I don't feel special having grinded (ground?) for months on end to get my character up to a high level, only to have the guy next to me get to the same place in two days while he slept.

Blizzard aren't your friends. They are a business whose model relies on you giving them money to play on their playground. They're going to protect that business and that money or they're going to die trying.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Machtyn]

And golf is an atrocious game. Have you ever seen anyone (not drunk) have fun at the game?

/i keed

Re:Finances & Conflict

[pyrr]

True, many people do actually play it, I'd question whether they just view a lot of the tedium as a chore ("can't have your pudding if you don't eat your meat" sort of thing), or if they really enjoy the entire game including the mindless repetition. I'd be most inclined to think it's skewed towards the former, folks who don't really enjoy all aspects, but don't loathe them enough to either stop playing or cheat.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[murdocj]

That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game.

Please RTFA. Where does it say that the computer plays better than a human? In fact, I can guarantee you that it doesn't.

I doubt anyone goes from 1 to 70 using this. What it can be used by is gold farmers who want to gather cash by repetitively trying to gather resources at a spot, regardless of whether there is actually a resource there.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[djp928]

/reported

Re:Finances & Conflict

[SatanicPuppy]

Well being a priest almost always sucks, and that's double if you're a healer because being a healer is pretty thankless as well.

Amusingly though, I could often spot the people who had used bots to level by their performance in instances; they just didn't use their class abilities like someone who'd had (literally) days of their life to learn the ins and outs of their class.

Still though, there is a whole class of people who is incapable of managing in a team situation, and the Hunter team role is extremely picky and requires all kinds of special skills...You have to be able to trap kite and pull like a master, and most of them can't.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[SatanicPuppy]

It depends...I leveled my druid all the way to 70 as feral, but I often had to heal in instances, and I kept a full set of heal gear.

So when I'd top out (at the 60 cap, and later 70) and respec to resto I was a much better healer because I'd had to learn timing and mana management without having a ton of talents to make it easier...When you're used to working with a feral mana pool, you feel like a fricking superhero when you go full resto...Mana management is a snap, and you've got the sort of badass feral-spec reflexes that can save a raid.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Kaashar]

Having actually bought Glider a long time ago and using it up until the the first expansion I can testify...it was better than a real player at it's job. If you spent a few hours setting up tings such as sufficient waypoints, added in modifications to automatically discard low value items and picked low traffic areas it was brutally efficient at making gold. Once you set up the proper parameters it would work nonstop letting the hunter pet do a significant portion of the damage (saving on ammunition which conversely saved trips back and forth). It never got distracted by the sheer boredom of target-kill-run to next target tatics. I ran it for several months nearly 24/7 and the account was never caught...and is still a valid account if I cared to reactivate it. I'm unrepentant...I've used various bots to do tedious tasks better suited to a CPU since EverQuest. I see it as a design flaw in the game that was brilliant filled by a 3rd party developer. To me it's no different than using a calculator in lieu of busting out the papyrus and doing my math that way.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Nefarious Wheel]

This all reminds me of Progress Quest. I think that had to be about the most brilliant parody of RPGs I've ever seen, mocking the tedious filler

I worked hard to level my Demicanadian Battle-Felon up to 50, you insensitive clod!

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Nefarious Wheel]

In fact, the majority of the good hunters I see are often when I do arenas (or maybe I'm just a bad PvP mage...the more likely situation).

It depends on the spec, and what you do. My 70 hunter generally sucks PvP against a mage because I keep forgetting about ae's and using the snake trap against a real person is kind of an oops. Spec'd beasty, which is really the best for solo work imho but a marksman-spec'd hunter has that silencing shot that tends to make mages very squishy. So the answer is really, it depends on who you meet.

Oh, and solo there's a better way to multi-pull. Send your pet in, let the second mob join in, send the pet to the other mob to grab aggro, wait a tick then hit your multi-shots. Works a treat. Otherwise just set a freeze trap and multi, the guy who isn't on your pet will walk right into it.

A word here to non-WoW players -- the above is jargon, and unashamedly so. I'd like to postulate that (a) jargon is fun, (b) games have in general as much jargon loading as technology, and (c) that as a result, there is not a lot of difference between technology and gaming for most of us.

Note to sociologists on the above. You're probably out of your league here without a bit more research. I suggest starting out as a blond, blood elf paladin. You may not enjoy much of an advantage, but at least you'll look good when you're being ganked. People play trickses they do, my precious.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Dachannien]

The court order is not protected by copyright or anything, so anyone is free to download it and make it publicly available. However, there is a nominal fee to cover the access costs to obtain a copy of the court order from PACER.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Molt]

What if the only chess club in town paired evenly-ranked players and you only got a few rating points per game and you knew that in order to have a game which'd actually present enough of a challenge to stop you falling asleep you'd need a rating of 2,000 rather than the measly 150 you're given when sign up? You're now looking at literally weeks sitting at the board before you can start to have fun.

Now you have the equivilent of grinding on mobs in order to get up to level 70 and be able to start raiding with your new character, not too bad the first time you do it but if your Guild is shouting for 'Moar Healerz!' then it's going to be tedious with your shiny new Healydude.

Personally I do play WoW but I'm not a raider, I like grouping with a few real-life friends on a Monday evening and hitting one of the 5-man dungeons that it contains whilst we chat over Skype. Whether the dungeon's a low-level one in a newbie zone or one of the 'Heroic' ones only doable at maximum level doesn't bother me- it's just whether we all have a good time doing it.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[dlanod]

Well might we say "Who asks the askers?"!

Re:Finances & Conflict

[hokeyru]

That is a ridiculous statement. If you were talking about prescription drugs, which people actually do need, or even luxury items, which improve real quality of life, it might make sense. But WoW is a game world: There are no "needs, and quality of life is strictly relative.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Molt]

If that's true then there're a lot of computer he beat earlier which're more human than him. This makes my brain hurt.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Bazar]

Have you ever seen the glider bots in action.

They don't play the game better.
You'll never see one in a group or raid, their too stupid to manage even basic teamwork.

All they ever do is that the owner finds a patch of land where there are mobs of such a low level that they can hardly harm the player, yet still grant experience.

It will then spam a series of buttons, move to target, attack, kill, loot, heal, and repeat.

If the bot ever encounters trouble, it'll usually not notice until its far too late, and get itself killed (usually because its pathed itself into a wall/fence/ditch)

As for calling it a badly designed game, that's not very well thought out.
You'll want rewards for achieving massive kills, kills that require the aid of 4, 9, even 24 other players.
But what about those people that don't want to group up, or want a quick simple kill, with quick simple rewards.

There is a demand for such rewards, and to exclude it because it can be automated or because you don't find it fun is naive.

If you've ever wanted to do mindless killing in a game, and FPS games excel at such choirs, then you can't say its bad game play.

Put simply, bots do harm the economy because they dilute the rewards earned by those who do the tedious tasks, and there are plenty of people who enjoy doing such solo tasks, just are there are plenty of people who enjoy doing group tasks.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[AK Marc]

Ok, so I could take that to mean that if you level the spec you plan on playing end-game that you will be worse at it than if you level in the same spec you play. I'm not sure how I feel about that. As for "feral-spec reflexes" I'm curious what you are talking about. The only thing I can think of where a phrase like that may be applied is if someone were to swap from DPS to tank in the middle of a pull (for instance, if there's a bad pull and the DPS off-tanks 3-4 mobs for CC). But aside from people leveling that spend all their time in instances, every class must tank, DPS and heal as they level (even if "healing" for a rogue is eating or bandages, and "tanking" for a mage is kiting).

Re:Finances & Conflict

[eabell]

I haven't played WoW in well over a year, an only then for 5 or 6 months before my attention span dropped. But I seem to remember that at least back in the day, there were designated 'RP servers' and 'PVE servers' and 'PVP servers'.

I wonder what would happen if there were designated 'bot-allowed' servers. Would those who used bots still enjoy their bot-enhanced abilities if everyone was allowed to use them? Or would it let them level up or grind items or whatever just the same as they did illegally, so all would be happy?

Then again, since I haven't played in forever, maybe it's easier to move characters/items/gold between servers now (legally or otherwise) so this might mess up even non-bot servers, if bots were 'legalized' and there were suddenly ten times as many.

I personally thing it would be fun to see them all following the same farming scripts in the same areas, though. Mass chaos! Though as a programmer geek, working on bot AI modules is kind of appealing.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[GaryPatterson]

Personally I think liberty takes precedence here, software vendors are way too authoritarian already. Would you accept it if someone told you how to use your car, or your house?

I see what you're trying to say, but you must remember that there are many laws around how you use your car. I think there are plenty of illegal activities that can be done in a house as well, and certainly some local government by-laws restricting noise, etc.

You will accept people telling you how to use your car, house and other property because you have no real choice in the matter.

If Blizzard put up terms of service and you agree to them (which every player did initially, and does again after every patch) and you feel that you don't want to abide by those terms, your choice is to leave or suck it up. If you violate those terms and are banned, then that's fair enough. If someone helps you violate those terms, well now we know that Blizzard are within the (civil) law to go after them.

The damages are higher than I'd have imagined, but there were no surprises in any of this.

If you want a free-as-in-speech MMO game, you either have to make it yourself or convince a vendor that it's a good idea. Currently no such game exists at anything near the scale of WoW, WAR, Eve or other commercial offerings. Maybe that's a better direction to head to, maybe not.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Gr8Apes]

so you learned to pay attention. Perhaps some of us are capable of that already and the grind puts us to sleep?

Re:Finances & Conflict

[TheLink]

They could have used it to rev at other restaurants except that Blizzard sued those restaurants as well ;)

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Gr8Apes]

Repetitive math problems are drills, and much like playing piano scales teaches basic techniques.

We already know the basic techniques for any MMO within about 10-20m, depending upon how long it takes to gain the initial abilities to start using all the "basic" versions. As you get higher, all that happens is group dynamics and can you get enough people together long enough and pay enough attention when you get to the point of opening that final door (portal, whatever) to prevent whole party death? The entire thing on a game play level is barely better than the original MUDs almost all MMOs are based on.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Macgrrl]

I suppose it is also a question of what perentage of the people who bought Glider are players who only wanted to skip some of the levelling/grinding component of the game to get to the 'end game' faster, and what percentage were people who were farming to sell in game assets for real world cash?

Gold farmers have been a real problem in game and caused significant inflation in the in-game economy, making it more attractive to new players to use a tool like Glider or a levelling service to get a leg up.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Gr8Apes]

Never played Eve. Watched a friend play during work and went, yep, that's about the only way to play that game, let it do all the long term boring crap while you're working with occasional input from you every 15 m or so.

As for server transfers, so you're going to transfer to play with 1 new friend while leaving behind your other 25 or 40 "friends"?

BTW, you'll note I stated all MMOs are flawed.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[rastilin]

But consider, if it was a bot and the person running it was doing something else while on holiday; who spent more effort in this encounter? I mean the other player will neither know or care what happened while Chris here actually had to dedicate brain cells to this.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[DerWulf]

As some blizzard dev has stated once "It's easy for the game to kill you". That's always true and even more so for FPSs. A bot can turn, aim, shoot and kill you in probably under a millisecond which is less then the typical latency you have in online games, let alone the WHOLE seconds that pass while your brain is figuring out and reacting to what's happening. So the challenge for AIs is not simply about winning but about giving the player a fun expierience which seems to works best if the game/AI can determine the limit of your ability and play exactly as hard as you can handle.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[DerWulf]

Really? Why is it then that computer game magazines come with whole pages dedicated to game cheats? If there are no build in cheats people will always find a way to increase their money etc with a hex editor. Isn't a hex editor a program and aren't some people using it to 'beat' a game? WoW glider is just the form this cheating has to take in an MMO that is almost invulnerable to client side hacks. I don't understand why people do it either but it's been happening in almost every game since the dawn of computer gaming. If you want to determine the quality of a game by the willingness of people to cheat then there simply are no good games.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[karmatic]

/reported

Have fun with that. I sold the bot off, and quit the game.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Fex303]

This is really interesting. I'm a lapsed WoW player, but always wondered about stuff like this.

How does the bot handle combat for various classes? Can it buy skills/talents/etc? Does it select gear automatically?

Do you have any more info about this that you'd be willing to share? Especially screenshots etc.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Tom]

Of course the MMORPG economic system is trivial, simplified, etc. compared to real world.

However, I pointed out one specific aspect, and for all I know it is still true: scarcity. All the MMORPGs that I played do indeed follow the rule that rare items are more expensive than common ones.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[KDR_11k]

Not necessarily, sometimes over-the-top gamebreaking is a way of having fun too, just like watching a Tool Assisted Speedrun. The bot doesn't really allow that, it just gives you a high level but you can't go higher than legitimate players anyway.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[idontgno]

Pay no attention; this whole thread has degenerated into the Barrens general chat channel.

All we need is a rousing round of Chuck Norris facts to make it complete.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[MightyYar]

Wow, you totally missed the difference between playing AGAINST a computer and having a computer play FOR you, INSTEAD of you.

I didn't miss that distinction at all. I was replying to:

That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game.

I disagree with that assertion, not the other.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[idontgno]

Well being a priest almost always sucks, and that's double if you're a healer because being a healer is pretty thankless as well.

Oh, I don't know; before my priest went deep shadow he was a basic heal-bitch and got lots of thanks. Stuff like, "Thanks for not healing me, n00b. Now rez me."

It warmed the cockles of his undead heart. That's why I now prefer dealing damage rather than healing it.

Amusingly though, I could often spot the people who had used bots to level by their performance in instances; they just didn't use their class abilities like someone who'd had (literally) days of their life to learn the ins and outs of their class.

And that's the in-game social cost of botting or buying a power-leveled character: you're useless to anyone but yourself. People who put some faith in your basic gameplay skill, and have some minor expectation that you at least know how to play your class, will be bitterly disappointed. You will get your party wiped, repeatedly, because you don't know the myriad tricks and traps awaiting you, because your bot didn't care. Hilarity will ensue. You will get kicked from parties, blacklisted, and be reduced to an overgeared incompetent bullying low-level player characters. Because you could not be troubled to "l2pyc n00b".

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Hoi Polloi]

Well duh. I was talking about the in-game auction house market not any real life market. Do you get mad at people at baseball games who say "We need a home run!"? "Need" as part of game play.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[mimimi]

it all sounds so logically and easy in theory but I am willing to bet that although you seem to have part of that knowledge you did not program that bot and never will.

Maybe you thought a great deal about it but that is a long way from a bot that "You would never know it's a bot". What you are essentially telling everybody is that all the data is finite, is not so big and is out there and once you gathered it in your own usable formats all the algorithms just somehow seem to fall into place with easy decisions such as if CurrentXP > NextQuestXP.

give us a break dude

i know its frustrating to farm 8-10 hours/day but that's not a reason to come here and brag about things that you wish you'd do.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[angel'o'sphere]

Well,

I only "sketched" the system. You can make / improve it in any way you want.

On the servers I have been, the bot farmers sell most stuff to vendors, not on the AH ... why should they? If they sell on AH the prices for "natural resources" would be extreme low. In fact certain resources are very rarely on the AH, and are corresponding expensive.

A lot of money is not even farmed from natural resources but the bots just farm areas like Azshara and simple make money from looting silver coins (similar area is Burning Stepps) from dead mobs 24/7 a week.

The only stuff which might be farmed and put on the AH is e.g. various forms of cloth for leveling tailoring, and probably low level enchanting dusts.

Probably we have to distinguish between bots and farmers. Farmers usually run plenty of PCs simultaneously and "watch" the bots. They manually interact in certain situations (e.g. when you kill their bot repeatetly you can see them taking over manually and fighting back).

Such farmers ofc, also AH stuff, e.g. world drops.

I play on european english realms, probably the situation in the US regarding farming and AH is different. Bottom line I don't know anything for sure but can only tell my observations.

angel'o'sphere

Re:Finances & Conflict

[vldmr_krn]

That people actually want a computer to play for them is a sign of a really badly designed game.

"People" don't want a computer to play for them. There isn't a single thing that "people" want to do.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[karmatic]

What you are essentially telling everybody is that all the data is finite, is not so big and is out there and once you gathered it in your own usable formats all the algorithms just somehow seem to fall into place with easy decisions such as if CurrentXP > NextQuestXP.

Um, no.

What I'm saying is that the _combat_ and _navigation_ portions of a bot are relatively easy. If you play WoW, you will notice that most people, when soloing, have a very repetitive pattern. It may be pull with pet, DoT, DoT, fear, rinse, repeat. It may be pull with a frostbolt, then arcane missles until the mob gets there, then freeze him in place. Perhaps you psychic scream then heal when health is less than a certain percentage. Those are simple to map genetically, and I did. It still took a long time to gather the data and calculate.

It would have been easier to hard-code, but that would have defeated the purpose.

As for the pathing, there's a lot of work already done on that. No biggie.

As for the "easy decisions such as if CurrentXP > NextQuestXP" part, no, it doesn't work that way.

In my bot, the AI was lovingly dubbed "skitzo", due to the way it worked. It had many different goals, from resting, to gathering, to repairing, to fleeing, to combat and quests. Each "tick" (I did this asynchronously, so there wasn't a _direct_ mapping to frames), the goals would recalculate their priority, and the bot would (more or less) do whatever the highest priority was.

The reasoning behind this was to better emulate the player reasoning - for example, if your gear is completely broken, you will stop to repair. If it's slightly broken, you might repair if it's convenient. As such, the repair weight was calculated based on both how damaged your gear was, and how far (as the crow flies) the repair guy was from the straight line between you and your target. Resupply was handled the same way.

Similar logic was used for combat vs flee - if you've got aggro, the weight for combat is higher. If you're about to die, or repair is urgent, etc., flee will be higher.

The weights were set using the oh-so-scientific method of "I made up numbers that sounded good", and tweaked them after extensive playtesting. One of the changes I made was adding "stickiness" to tasks, and some randomness to avoid "little lost robot" syndrome where it wanders between two objectives helplessly.

The bot worked well, and I sold it (before the dalies came out) to some farmers. The market has since dropped a bunch, making it much less worthwhile. In addition, the addon I used to interface with WoW (InnerSpace/ISXWoW) has been detected, and is still detected, so the bot would no longer work anyway.

i know its frustrating to farm 8-10 hours/day but that's not a reason to come here and brag about things that you wish you'd do.

I don't farm. Heck, I don't even like WoW. For me, the fun in a game is exceeding the rules - proving I can beat the system.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Anonymous Coward]

So?

Is it YOUR PC?

is it YOUR money buying glider?

is it YOUR money buying wow every month?

is it YOUR risk in getting caught using glider on wow servers?

Then how can it be their fault? they're offering a service to people to use or abuse, I'm suspecting that most who used it were people who couldn't be bothered to grind another alt again to 70.

I'm very annoyed that the law was bent as much as it was for blizzard to win, they should never have won it. The wow code is running on MY computer, I ALLOW IT to run on my computer, and if I bought Glider, I allow glider to run on my computer. Blizzard can deny and ban people to enter the servers because they don't like people who use glider, but how the hell can they sue the program creator and win?? that's just stupid.

This should be a free society, and guess what, blizzard should not have won this because of the basic premise that they can't control and shouldn't have control over what I use on my computer. They control their own servers, not the users pc, and they should respect that.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Jim_Maryland]

The repetitive killing of a mob does help develop skills that you can use. They won't necessarily be the only skills though. As you said, end game instance mob/boss fights requires a bit of learning that you can't get from solo or even some group questing. Ideally you picked up some of the required skills from instances (hunter feign to wipe aggro for example, mage keeping the scorch buff up, warlocks using the right curses for the fight, various forms of crowd control, etc...).

"The fact that those guys didn't buy or bot their 70s doesn't guarantee they have the brain."

I completely agree that leveling to 70 on your own won't guarantee that you'll be a good player in many instances. My wife's warlock is a perfect example. She is not a hard core gamer and panics when things don't go smoothly in an instance. To fill out a party for Leo in SSC, she initially hated doing it, even though she oddly enough ended up being near the top for damage (which you could read as either our group was bad or she was better than she thought...I'll suggest the latter). I've helped guild members as they approached level 70 and wondered how they made it as far as they did, but they are generally fast to improve if you help them understand their role in instances (tell a mage that they are spamming sheep for their first time in a series of pulls, and they'll be upset that they don't get to do any damage that fight, but at least they begin to learn it is a matter of working together).

"Gimme the possibility to start a char at half the level of my highest char and I wouldn't consider botting. I'm not doing it (don't want the ban hammer), but I can understand why some would."

Personally I wouldn't do it, even with my alts. Now what I wouldn't object to is making request to Blizzard to improve leveling an alt. I don't know that your suggestion would work very (1/2 the level of your main) since you'd need to figure out how to fairly setup gear on the alt (maybe just make your main fund the purchase of level appropriate gear?). Now what I would love to see is modifying the reputation grind. My alt obviously doesn't require the building of wealth as much as my main character so the quest designed with rep/gold rewards end up primarily being rep grinds. Couldn't alts start at "friendly" or "honored" just by association with your main being exalted with a faction?

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Walter Carver]

The thing that the users clicked away on "Yes"? That wasn't a contract! You need to put your signature for it to become a contract.

Re:Finances & Conflict

[Wildclaw]

Where did you get the idea that a signature is nescessary for a contract. That is simply not true. Of course, a written signature on a contract is the preferred way to seal a contract as it stands up very well in court, but it is in no way the only way to seal a contract.

You can make the points that it is a unconscionable contract because of it being loopsided, but as this is about using blizzards servers, it is questionable if it will work.

Desperation

[suso]

Actually, from playing WoW for 2 months now (through Wine no less), I'm not too surprised that MMOGlider made a good deal of money. Seeing the desperation of a
lot of players, I wouldn't be surprised people would pay $25 for this thing. I probably would too if it was allowed by Blizzard.

Re:Desperation

[Jaysyn]

World of Warcraft - A game so fun that people pay for programs to play it for them.

Re:Desperation

[eldavojohn]

World of Warcraft - A game so fun that people pay for programs to play it for them.

You're telling me! I can't wait for World of World of Warcraft to come out! I'm going to roll a 90 lb famished Chinese man working for pennies an hour!

Re:Desperation

[BeNJ-GoS]

I'm sorry, i don't understand that.
i've been playing for over 2 years now, granted i don't play every single day since i also have other life related things to do, but i'm still not bored with the game.
Yes, sometimes when you need to kill 30 of this and 20 of that it can get a little old, but that's why i have 7 chars, i just re-log and go do something else.
also, if i get bored, i just go do some battlegrounds for a while.
people seem to have a notion that the point of the game is to reach level 70 (soon to be 80) as soon as they possibly can, i don't think that's the case, the game is so full of things to do before reaching end game raids, why hurry? i can easily take months to level a char and enjoy the whole way up...

but that's just my opinion...

Re:Desperation

[Aladrin]

I agree. I played briefly on a 40x experience pirate server and found the leveling to be a tad slow. Playing on the live servers was horrifyingly slow.

But all this program did was run you from place to place, no? (At faster speed, I think, too.) If running from place to place is such a tedious and repetitive task, Blizzard should have implemented changes that drove these people out of business and pleased their customers, rather than sueing and pissing everyone off.

Then again, they're still the King of MMOs, so maybe they aren't too wrong about how to make the game right. I did play longer on the live servers than the pirate ones.

Re:Desperation

[GaryPatterson]

World of Warcraft - A game so fun that people pay for programs to play it for them.

Or a game with a company behind it that prefers players to actually play, rather than automate and sell gold.

But hey! maybe it's all down to interpretation.

Re:Desperation

[Lord_Pain]

Desperation... so people are being forced to play a game that they consider so uninteresting that they have to buy a $25 piece of software to endure the game... riiiight.

I find it breath taking the amount of excuses and spin coming from folks who used this kind of product.

Re:Desperation

[IndustrialComplex]

It isn't so much desperation, but rather the annoyance that the longer this game goes on, the more you are pigeon-holed into your first character choice.

Lets say you want to try a new character now, you better hope that you have the support of your guildmates/friends because it will take a good player 5-6 days to level that character to 70. And that is if you do nothing but grind the character up. So you don't build any of the relationships that you normally would when leveling a character normally and at a reasonable pace. You are banking on using that character with your already established guild relations.

I can't imagine what it will be like when the level cap is raised to 80. The old content is barren enough as it is, now we will have a fairly empty outlands as well. That is unfortunate because a good many of the later quests are group quests which even now are hard as hell to gather a group for. So the game will soon be a 70 level pure grindfest for anyone interested in trying something new or joining the game. Then, add on the rep/gear grinds once you catch up to your friends again.

To paraphrase Chris Rock, I'm not saying I agree with people who use MMOGlider, but I understand.

Re:Desperation

[SatanicPuppy]

I played WoW for a long time (by my standards). It's not too bad to level your character up to 70, and the raid game is entertaining; requires a lot of strategy and some decent skills.

The problem for me is that the game only really rewards time committed. Nothing else. If you put in a ton of time, you get all the rewards.

Glider really exposes that. It is a program that doesn't have any particular skills beyond the ability to spend 24/7 playing the game.

Re:Desperation

[Jaysyn]

Uh, no. The parent poster specifically said that *after two whole months* of playing WoW he wouldn't mind using it to avoid the despairing grind of WoW. He didn't say a damn thing about gold bots.

Re:Desperation

[arth1]

World of Warcraft - A game so fun that people pay for programs to play it for them.

Indeed. It's not like the game becomes more fun after leveling up -- the satisfaction you get each time you level up and each time you find new loot that's better than what you have is the fun. Each time you are being conditioned with a reward, and move into unknown territory. Many gamers even start a new character once they get to a high level because such a large part of the fun is in advancement.

I think a large part of the griefers are people who have power-levelled, and are really bored when they find out that the game isn't fundamentally different at a higher level -- you are stronger, but so is the enemy. Only other players who haven't advanced yet are weaker.

That said, I don't think a tool like this should be illegal. Not any more than a car that can drive at 180 mph should be illegal. But using it on a road with a speed limit is another issue. It's easier for Blizzard to go after one guy than a hundred thousand, but it's still the hundred thousand who willingly broke the "speed limit" and should get the fine. If this program is unavailable, they'll find another. Perhaps one made by someone anonymous and outside Blizzard's jurisdiction. Will that be any better?

My suggestion to Blizzard: Set up a server where bots and similar are allowed, and police better against them on the main servers. Even work with the developers of such programs so you can identify them if used on the main servers. Lend them insight into the code if they sign an NDA and contract stating that Blizzard will be given means to identify the software when (and only when) used on the main servers against the TOS.

But going after the guy with a lawsuit like this isn't going to stop the phenomenon. It's going to ruin one person's life completely, and create a fair bit of animosity.
Plus, it's a misuse of the court system, which has too much to do already.

Re:Desperation

[twosmokes]

Now is a great time to level new characters to 70. With the expansion right around the corner you don't have to go through the gear grind at level 70. It'll all get replaced once the expansion hits anyway. I've pulled a few ~40s off the shelves and plan on hitting 70 with them (along with some friends) before the expansion comes. The expansions are great since they effectively reboot your first character choice. We're all level 1 (70) again!

Re:Desperation

[Shivetya]

Well there is always Eve, which has character progression while your offline.

So while you might need other programs to play WOW for you you don't need one for Eve, in fact it seems they don't want you to actually play it.

Re:Desperation

[SatanicPuppy]

I noticed that when I was grinding my second lvl 70; it was about a zillion times harder to get a group for a group quest than it had been for the first character...We're talking the 60->70 grind here, not the 1->70.

I can't frankly imagine what it must be like in the 1-60 right now, even with the massive boost to gained XP. Just skip the instances and the group quests, because there is just no point.

Re:Desperation

[arth1]

Or a game with a company behind it that prefers players to actually play, rather than automate and sell gold.

One could argue that if that was the purpose of the game, they should have made it more fun and profitable to play than to automate and sell gold.

Stopping bots is easy enough, e.g. by adding forced NPC conversations with an ever-changing phrase list.

Re:Desperation

[bonkeydcow]

Uh no, you can kill mobs all day without talking to an NPC. No offense, well maybe a little, but you should actually know something about the subject matter before commenting on it.

Re:Desperation

[Tom]

As a matter of fact, Eve's concept has always struck me as an excellent choice for more casual players (like me).

I've got a life, you know? The one that includes a job, a girl, and activities that don't involve computers. There's no way I can compete with school kids who start playing at 2pm and stop playing when mommy shuts down power at 1am - every day. That's fine with me, I don't have to proof I'm cool in a fantasy world. But it does kind of bug me that I can't play with many others who fall in that category, that I always have to find new groups to go questing with, because the old friends from last week are now several levels ahead of me.

In Eve, they wouldn't be. They'd have gained some money in the meantime, and some stuff, but not advanced beyond compatability.

At the same time, it did bug me in Eve that no matter how good I am, I can never catch up to someone who started playing a year before me.

So it all has its good and bad sides.

Re:Desperation

[arth1]

Uh no, you can kill mobs all day without talking to an NPC. No offense, well maybe a little, but you should actually know something about the subject matter before commenting on it.

No offense, but you should actually read what you reply to a bit more carefully before replying. Let me repeat what I said:

"Stopping bots is easy enough, e.g. by adding forced NPC conversations with an ever-changing phrase list."

Talking to NPCs was an example of things that can be done to prevent automation, not something that is done. What part of "e.g. by adding" was it you didn't understand?

Re:Desperation

[Zironic]

How it worked was that you told it to go a certain path and it would kill everything it saw, skin everything it could and gather anything it happened to cross. Basically it was able to play the entire game for you lvl 1-70 and at 70 it could make you gold.

Re:Desperation

[jbezorg]

That said, I don't think a tool like this should be illegal. Not any more than a car that can drive at 180 mph should be illegal....

The problem with this analogy is that the car in question can only go 180 mph on a specific road that has a posted speed limit of less. While I may have an issue with a program in memory being protected by copyright, the following quote from the article removes most of the doubt for me in this case.

"It was also helped by an admission in court that it would be reasonable to pay some form of damages."

Re:Desperation

[IndustrialComplex]

That is exactly what I did. I've moved my character to 70, bought him his mount, and shelved him. 3 days into the expansion he will end up with better gear than I could earn him doing any of the content that exists right now.

Maybe. I am enjoying Warhammer Online quite a bit.

Re:Desperation

[IndustrialComplex]

I noticed that when I was grinding my second lvl 70; it was about a zillion times harder to get a group for a group quest than it had been for the first character...We're talking the 60->70 grind here, not the 1->70. I can't frankly imagine what it must be like in the 1-60 right now, even with the massive boost to gained XP. Just skip the instances and the group quests, because there is just no point.

Level to 15, do the deadmines. (chances are, someone will be running through it with a 70 friend)
Level to 30-35, do the scarlet monestary. That place is always busy.
Level 40-45, Zul Farrak
Level 50-52, BRD, Sunken temple.

Then grind to 58, go to outlands and experience real XP.

Thankfully outlands has enough group quests to push you to 70, because there are very few people that even bother with the level 60-65 instances anymore.

As I said in my previous post, I'm loving Warhammer Online right now because the PvP gives you XP.

Re:Desperation

[Phrogman]

Setting up a separate server would do nothing. The people who use this sort of software seem to be using it:

* To save time, they are too busy to level up a character and just want to get to top level so they can "play the game". These people miss the point that the game *IS* the leveling up and any end game is a bonus.
* They want to get to top level and get whatever advantage they can so they can be dominant over other people - suggesting they all play on a server where they all do that is counterproductive. Its not the griefer mentality.
* Cheating at a game is a sign of poor sportsmanship (a lost concept these days it seems). If someone is willing to cheat at a game, can you trust them to agree to play on a particular server where is not cheating?

I am glad they sued the living shit out of this guy and hopefully they bankrupt him. Next up they should go after his customer lists and sue the crap out of them as well. Cheating should not be tolerated, period. That leaves the rest of us who play MMOs legally to enjoy our balanced and fair gameplay if we can find it.

No I don't actually play WOW, I thought it sucked very badly, but I am tired of seeing people cheat/exploit in games and not get punished for it when they are caught.

Re:Desperation

[TheGeniusIsOut]

Just require players to solve a captcha every hour or be disconnected, with another required on reconnect after failing. Give them 5 minutes to answer if they are in combat. Problem solved.

Re:Desperation

[jbezorg]

People play MMOs for many different reasons besides leveling. Lot of players I know in WoW collect the pets.

Heck, I've heard of some players in SWG that competed against one another trying to collect full sets of junk drops (e.g. All the various colors of the junk wire spool ). From what I heard, some of the junk had an extremely low drop rate and were in fact harder to get than the better weapons.

Re:Desperation

[farker haiku]

I just want to point out that I used refer a friend to get my second character up to level 60 in about 30 hours of game play playing with my brother and his first character. I'm very very new to the game. /just sayin'

Re:Desperation

[Metaphorically]

Great. I can have an NPC ask me to spell the word in the picture. Sounds like a great addition to the game. Now if only I could buy a program that sent those off to someone else to answer so I wouldn't have to...

Re:Desperation

[Bengie]

actually, Blizz reduced the exp requirements per level, upped the exp per kill and exp per quest, made quests soloable, made gear better, lower the gold costs of mounts, lowered the required lvl for mounts. They made it a ton easier. I know people who could level 1-60 in under a week with any class before these changes.

Re:Desperation

[bonkeydcow]

The part where the NPC magically appears out of thin air and says "Halt! You can not hit this monster again until you answer a random question." That is the part of adding it that I don't understand.

Re:Desperation

[Tridus]

Sure, if you want to annoy five million players into quitting.

Going after the source of the problem is more effective then inflicting stupid and ultimately unsuccessful nonsense on everybody else.

Re:Desperation

[_Sprocket_]

I played WoW for a long time (by my standards). It's not too bad to level your character up to 70, and the raid game is entertaining; requires a lot of strategy and some decent skills.

The problem for me is that the game only really rewards time committed. Nothing else. If you put in a ton of time, you get all the rewards.

Glider really exposes that. It is a program that doesn't have any particular skills beyond the ability to spend 24/7 playing the game.

Note that Glider won't get you that raiding play that requires strategy and skill (not to mention gear). And that's really where the big rewards are to be had.

But it will enable you to grind on auto-pilot. The rewards aren't as big. But there are more than a few grinds that will lead to pretty decent rewards. These grinds will also produce items and various tokens other players will gladly buy in WoW's in-game market. Which produces the most versatile in-game token of all: gold. Enter gold sellers.

Re:Desperation

[Metaphorically]

Interesting ideas. More eyes might improve things. And having a place where you can play with your bot friends really reduces the people using bots on the "no-bot" servers to just cheaters.

I think a large part of the griefers are people who have power-levelled

I think that's just a reflection of a desire to vilify the 70 jackass that keeps ganking your level 34 toon in STV. Just as likely that 70 is the main of the 34 toon you killed 20 minutes ago. Or his buddy.

Re:Desperation

[_Sprocket_]

Uh, no. The parent poster specifically said that *after two whole months* of playing WoW he wouldn't mind using it to avoid the despairing grind of WoW. He didn't say a damn thing about gold bots.

Actually - he noted that in two months of playing, he saw desperate players. Whether he was one of those or not is up to interpretation. And it does make a difference.

I've played for considerably longer than 2 months and have yet to feel despair. But I have seen people really eager for the quick fix.

Re:Desperation

[Tridus]

No, this program actually does everything. I've watched people using it out in an area farming everything. It runs around, kills everything in sight, skins it, etc.

Besides, the only people pissed off are cheaters and a few people here on Slashdot trying to proclaim that this is a bad legal decision despite their total lack of understanding of the legal issues.

Blizzard's customers are overwhelmingly against Glider, and suing people doesn't piss off the people who pay the bills at Blizzard HQ - it makes them happy.

Re:Desperation

[geekoid]

The game is about the endgame, not the path to get there.
I don't think that was their initial intention, based on the number of unfinished early plot hooks.

Re:Desperation

[bidule]

It isn't so much desperation, but rather the annoyance that the longer this game goes on, the more you are pigeon-holed into your first character choice.

Lets say you want to try a new character now, you better hope that you have the support of your guildmates/friends because it will take a good player 5-6 days to level that character to 70. And that is if you do nothing but grind the character up.

I don't understand why people want to race to 70. Once you get there, there's no challenge left other than learning 25-man instances. Any Kara-geared toon can do any solo quest in your sleep.

No, the real fun is in the 30-50 bracket. I had fun all summer long AoE grinding a pally to 55, and now I'm idling away on a lock. It is a challenge to push your toon to the limit, and once you're done you know how to play that class. Something you cannot claim gliding to 70.

Re:Desperation

[lymond01]

Not to beat a dead horse, but this is why I stopped playing MMOs. The first 20 or so levels of EverQuest (the original) were exciting, fun, adventure-driven. I dropped out for awhile, but then got back into it and found Unrest, and eventually lower Guk for my Paladin to re-slaughter Undead with his new Ghoulbane.

But at some point, anyone I played with started refusing to die. They'd rather sit around and take one mob at a time in a place near the zone line (for escaping), than have any sort of adrenaline rush involved with dungeon delving. It was all about that XP bar.

So hell yes. That was boring. The point of these games for me was to give my life a little extra community, and get the adrenaline going of near-death battles. But no one was interested in a challenge. Gaining XP was "work" not for fun. If you wanted fun, go play Team Fortress.

I'd say that, like any game, it can get boring no matter your outlook. But for some reason, likely their online community of friends, people continue to play even though their bored of the game itself. But they have friends, and there's always another level to get or get them to. So I understand why you'd want to skip the leveling part -- you're bored with the game mechanics. But don't blame the game. It was fun the first 10 times. :-)

Re:Desperation

[Jaysyn]

Since he's playing & not gold farming, what part of "I probably would too if it was allowed by Blizzard" is so hard for you to parse when taking the previous sentence into consideration?

It's not that difficult, but you're probably just trolling for this response anyhow.

 

Re:Desperation

[_Sprocket_]

One could argue that if that was the purpose of the game, they should have made it more fun and profitable to play than to automate and sell gold.

Yeah - sure... the argument can be made. But I'm not buying it. At least, not entirely.

WoW has grinds. Many of them. Some seem daunting at first but are fairly benign if you take them for what they are - rewards for casual play. Some are completely frustrating. Which ones are which is an exercise for the player.

And that's the key - the player. There are many in the WoW world(s) that desire quick fixes. They are under the illusion that the game must be "won" and that they are somehow entitled to everything everyone else has in the world around them without the luck or time invested in playing.

I would be tempted to say that these individuals should give up on WoW (and perhaps all MMORPGs) and look for a FPS where the game resets constantly and everyone starts new. Except, I know that won't solve the problem. Every FPS I've played has seen cheaters who justify their actions as leveling the playing field against other players who've honed their playing skills through hours of playing the game.

Sometimes gaming is more about the player than the game.

Re:Desperation

[Metaphorically]

I don't think it speeds your character up (although it's definitely doable it should also be easy to detect).
Blizzard is making changes that make it easier to get place to place but it takes time and effort. They've added a lot of new flight paths since I started (a couple years ago). They've added a couple teleport mechanics. In the new expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) they'll make travel to the new area easy from a major city. Apparently a side-effect of this will also make it easier for low-level characters to get from continent to continent.
As for travel speed they recently reduced the level requirement for mounts from 40 to 30. They also reduced experience requirements for getting from level 20 up to 60 (and with the next expansion they'll make 60 to 70 progression faster).
Balancing is still a trick though since people enjoy the challenges that come with leveling and one of those challenges is, oddly enough, organizing where to be in order to finish quests quickly.
okay... gonna go blog instead of rambling on forever...

Re:Desperation

[_Sprocket_]

Since he's playing & not gold farming, what part of "I probably would too if it was allowed by Blizzard" is so hard for you to parse when taking the previous sentence into consideration?

The issue is that I didn't notice him implying that. And he certainly didn't SAY it. So it would seem that the concept is entirely your interpretation.

I've seen desperate players as well. Doesn't mean I'm one of them (as I actually said - black and white - no interpretation needed).

It's not that difficult, but you're probably just trolling for this response anyhow.

There you go with those interpretations again. :P

Re:Desperation

[Tenek]

It isn't so much desperation, but rather the annoyance that the longer this game goes on, the more you are pigeon-holed into your first character choice.

Lets say you want to try a new character now, you better hope that you have the support of your guildmates/friends because it will take a good player 5-6 days to level that character to 70. And that is if you do nothing but grind the character up. So you don't build any of the relationships that you normally would when leveling a character normally and at a reasonable pace. You are banking on using that character with your already established guild relations.

I can't imagine what it will be like when the level cap is raised to 80. The old content is barren enough as it is, now we will have a fairly empty outlands as well. That is unfortunate because a good many of the later quests are group quests which even now are hard as hell to gather a group for. So the game will soon be a 70 level pure grindfest for anyone interested in trying something new or joining the game. Then, add on the rep/gear grinds once you catch up to your friends again.

To paraphrase Chris Rock, I'm not saying I agree with people who use MMOGlider, but I understand.

60-70 will probably get easier after WotLK comes out. Remember that the 1-60 grind is a lot easier now - you get more experience, you need less to level, and most of the old group quests have been toned down so you can solo them. The same is likely in store for 60-70 as well.

Also, Glider gets you something for nothing. You're supposed to play the game yourself, and if you invest some effort you are rewarded for it. Breaking the effort-reward link will annoy a lot of the people who did invest into it - hell, this happens already when Blizzard makes things easier.

So it's hard not to be annoyed when you level your character to 70, slaughter monsters and players alike for hours on end, and then you walk into a battleground and get stomped on by a guy who botted his way to 70 and kickass gear. You get the sucker's payoff, and if that annoys you enough to quit, Blizzard lost your business thanks to the guy with the bot.

I think the critical issue here is that WoW is an MMO. When you cheat the system you're not just affecting yourself, you're affecting the integrity of the game. If Blizzard doesn't work hard to keep the botters from ruining the game, then it will crash and burn, and they shouldn't be forced to do so just because someone feels like making a quick buck off of it.

Re:Desperation

[guardian-ct]

There are a few MMOs that have implemented similar bot checks. Every once in a while, you get a question in chat from their bot-checking NPC. "What is 9 plus 4", and similarly easy questions. If you don't answer the question, you get kicked off.

Re:Desperation

[Metaphorically]

I can kind of get what you're saying. My main is a 70 mage and it took me about a year and a half to get there. Almost exclusively solo questing. I was mid-40s when TBC came out so I missed the rush while the rest of my guild was leveling for 70.
Now looking at getting one of my other toons that range from 30-45 up to 70 seems like a lot of effort. That is to say, getting one up there fast. Leveling my druid is actually a lot of fun when I have the time for it. Thinking about how long it will be before she's 70 (or 80) is a little frustrating.

Re:Desperation

[Metaphorically]

You're going to level a few 40s up to 70 in a month and a half? PvE or PvP realm?

Re:Desperation

[Pervaricator General]

Its better on your fingers (and another organ) than what you COULD have been doing for those 32 days...

Re:Desperation

[Widowwolf]

Personally i think there should be portals from every major city to every other major city like Shattrath has. Put em in TB, Org, Shatt and UC. But to use the shatt one you have to be 60, to use Northrend one you must be 70..Easy enough

Re:Desperation

[Aladrin]

I stand corrected. It wasn't the app I thought it was.

I still think Blizzard should have taken my money when I wanted to speed level and created a 'fun' server that I could play fast on, instead of grinding for months to get level 70. I simply don't have time for grind.

Instead, I gave that money to someone else (I donated it to the server) and had my fun there, instead. Actually, I'm considering going back again soon for some more fun... Blizzard's missing out on potential revenue for no reason that I can fathom. They don't have to ruin their existing servers, they can just copy the 'private' server structure and state what the stats are on each server.

Re:Desperation

[Pervaricator General]

Look into Warhammer Online. Everyone is brought up to the same level when a quest is started. You might not have the cool new spells of your higher level compatriots, but you will be able to compete.

Re:Desperation

[PIBM]

Similarly easy question means that any 2 bits bot running on an 8 bit os could answer it ;)

Re:Desperation

[Shade of Pyrrhus]

One thing Guild Wars does to curb botting is to detect people who are farming and simply give them less or no loot. I guess the difference in this case is that in WoW a lot of what you do is grind, and killing the same thing over and over wouldn't be out of the norm.

I don't know if those forced NPC conversations would be accepted by players, since it would be more of an annoyance than anything. Seems like the best way is to either detect and curb it or try to make the game less repetitive, so it doesn't require botting (or so botting doesn't end up being so helpful). In GW all you get from farming is money and items. New items are nice, but you can usually get better ones by questing, and bosses will likely drop the item you want anyway (assuming you're not teamed up with lots of NPCs). Having a lot of money is only really useful for making your characters look pretty, and trading if you're lazy (prices can go pretty high due to economy being screwed up by gold farmers - one bad thing).

Re:Desperation

[Krojack]

There are a few MMOs that have implemented similar bot checks. Every once in a while, you get a question in chat from their bot-checking NPC. "What is 9 plus 4", and similarly easy questions. If you don't answer the question, you get kicked off.

Once I was playing FF XI and while fishing several multiple choice questions popped on my screen in a dialog style box and I had to click on the answer else get kicked off line. I figured while fishing I triggered some sort of checking system.

Re:Desperation

[Krojack]

Just require players to solve a captcha every hour or be disconnected, with another required on reconnect after failing. Give them 5 minutes to answer if they are in combat. Problem solved.

most captcha are already broken. Few examples: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001067.html its just a matter of time before a new one is broken.

Re:Desperation

[znerk]

The issue is that I didn't notice him implying that. And he certainly didn't SAY it. So it would seem that the concept is entirely your interpretation.

No interpretation required. If you didn't see the poster say

I probably would too if it was allowed by Blizzard.

then either you didn't read the same post as everyone else, or your reading comprehension is abysmal.

--
If at first you do not succeed, you fail.

Re:Desperation

[Oktober Sunset]

I'm going to roll an overweight basement dwelling American nerd. It will take a lot of grinding the pizza delivery to get him over 300lbs tho.

Re:Desperation

[twosmokes]

PVP. And that's my intention. I have no idea if it'll actually happen. Rotating rested xp is helping a lot.

I probably should have said as close to 70 as I can bear.

Re:Desperation

[arth1]

The part where the NPC magically appears out of thin air and says "Halt! You can not hit this monster again until you answer a random question." That is the part of adding it that I don't understand.

Moving the goal posts? That's a completely different statement than what you made 3 messages upstream.

Anyhow, it can be implemented in a more believable way. Like meeting a traveller when there are no monsters in sight, asking which town you just came from. Or an NPC that joins at the end of a battle asking how many monsters there were. Or when you pick loot, and are told that you find a box has a magical lock, and you need to answer a riddle to get the loot.

Only your imagination would stop you from generating bot-hindering encounters that aren't OOC. And I'm pretty sure that Blizzard has better imagination than what you've just demonstrated.

Re:Desperation

[_Sprocket_]

No interpretation required. If you didn't see the poster say

I probably would too if it was allowed by Blizzard.

then either you didn't read the same post as everyone else, or your reading comprehension is abysmal.

....

Hmmm... going back and re-reading the post... you might be on to something after all. ;)

Yeah. Apparently I didn't pay attention.

Re:Desperation

[Metaphorically]

K, I can see that. Big time commitment still.

Re:Desperation

[SL Baur]

In the new expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) they'll make travel to the new area easy from a major city. Apparently a side-effect of this will also make it easier for low-level characters to get from continent to continent.

The easiest way to get around is to set your hearthstone to Shattrath, even for level 1 characters. Get a friendly lock in your guild to port you there, or buy a port for the first trip.

It's got instant portals to all capital cities and the one hour cooldown does not really matter. How much easier can they make it?

Re:Desperation

[BennyBigHair]

Actually, I would like to disagree with you. The end-game raid content (like many MUDs/MMORPGs before WoW) is quite a bit different than the solo game. Yea, it's still just "some people vs. some mobs" but there is a huge focus on using different classes together. After moving from my MUD (which had a similar end-game system as WoW) to WoW, the most annoying part is how long the grind to the top takes. I also understand that you *can* group up and do lower level instances and experience this kind of gameplay early, but unless you're in a guild or have some way of getting a group of people who understand things like "class roles" and "tanks need to build up fury (or threat or whatever it's called)" the experience sucks and is a huge time waste/frustration station.

Re:Desperation

[znerk]

120,000 licenses out of 11 million paying players isn't too bad.

120,000 software purchases != 120,000 bots.

I don't have any idea what your experience with cheaters is, but I have a confession. I used to cheat, for a very limited time, and in a very limited fashion, in an online game. Not WoW, it was an FPS that was popular several years ago. The mindset of a cheater is that one is entitled to the rewards, without having to invest any time or effort.

Therefore, piracy is simply rampant. After all, why should one's friends have to pay for something that you have already acquired? And once the pirate package has been created, there's simply no reason whatsoever to not give it away for free to anyone else who asks, or even those who don't. After all, it didn't cost you anything to cheat at this game, why should it cost your friends?

I would guess that a large portion, perhaps 10%, of WoW subscriptions are gold farmers and bots (Glider-type bots, and advertising bots). Yes, this is an order of magnitude larger than Glider's apparent sales. Yes, I'm fabricating numbers out of thin air. I feel that the ranks of WoW players have been infiltrated heavily by people out to make a quick buck, or gain some rep without actually having to do anything. These people have little or no compunction about ruining a perfectly decent game through their efforts to "one-up" themselves.

On the bright side, bots ruin ones' ability to play effectively without them. Don't believe me? Try an aimbot for a few days in your favorite FPS, and watch your shots/hits ratio go to hell when you remove it again. You'll find yourself waiting for the aimbot to "zero in" on your target, instead of doing it reflexively yourself. Cheating just trains you into the mindset that you can't function without the "crutch" of your computer-aided skillset, and makes you become even more of a failure than if you had never cheated, and just sucked at the game.

(As an aside, the various "info-mods" cause a similar "dependence" effect. For instance, I find it very difficult to play without my MetaHUD, as my warlock has a hard time balancing mana and health usage when I have to look at the top-left corner of the screen to see it, rather than looking at the action in the center of the screen.)

The upshot to all of this is that those who are botting will leave sooner than those who actually enjoy playing, even grinding. Mindless farming behavior is common in my WoW playing, because I'm typically just giving my fingers something to do while I talk to my friends and family on the phone, or via VOIP. It's fun to shout "ding!" into the phone when I hit level 26 while farming murlocs in Menethil, just for something to do while I chat with my wife (she's currently in another state, and we farm together to feel like we are not so far apart).

Re:Desperation

[SL Baur]

I can't frankly imagine what it must be like in the 1-60 right now, even with the massive boost to gained XP. Just skip the instances and the group quests, because there is just no point.

They nerfed the hardest group quests. I did the elite Murloc quest both before and after the great nerfing and as much as I hate Murlocs, it was kind of sad doing them non-elite.

There's little point in doing the instances other than for rep. But if you must, it's easy enough to find a bored fellow guildie to run you through.

Re:Desperation

[Metaphorically]

Yeah I did that for one of my toons but it becomes a pain when you take several days to finish the quests around some remote town in Kalimdor. You end up spending a lot of time on the gryphon.

Re:Desperation

[bonkeydcow]

There are locked boxes now. Loosing out on a bit of loot will not stop a farming bot, just ignore the "magic box" and move on.

Maybe the part you are not realizing is that I have played wow for years. I have used wow glider, and am familiar with it's capabilities.

Given these 2 facts I am able to express 1) What works within the context of the game. 2) What would affect the automation tool.

My initial objection to your statement was that the bot can be defeated

easy enough

, surely if it is so easy

And I'm pretty sure that Blizzard has better imagination than what you've just demonstrated.

They would be able to implement such an easy solution.

Reality, even the virtual kind, is a more complicated than your platitudes and tautology. Things aren't as simple as you say, while maintaining a realistic and consistent world for real players.

Re:Desperation

[bigstrat2003]

Er... maybe "any of the content that exists" and fits into your schedule (if you can't raid). T6 is lasting until 80 or so, much like T3 lasted until 70 or so with BC's release. You won't be replacing your gear 3 days into the expansion.

Besides, if you play for gear, you're doing it wrong. Play for fun, and take the gear as a happy bonus. So much frustration in the game is caused by making gear, rather than having fun slaying monsters, the goal.

Re:Desperation

[duckInferno]

And to vilify the guy who won't take you on where the footing is equal, is wrong?

Re:Desperation

[duckInferno]

As someone who was cheated out of seeing BWL, AQ40 and Naxx pre-BC because half of my guildies didn't want to play so close to the expansion, I very much disagree with your logic. I wish to hell that I had got a set of Tier 3 to parade around in (you know that stuff's good to level 70 right?).

Besides -- if you're going to stop playing just because your gear will be replaced, why stop now? Why didn't you stop a year ago?

Why stop at all? Aren't you having fun? Then why did you play in the first place?

Re:Desperation

[SatanicPuppy]

I absolutely HATE asking someone who no doubt has better things to do with his time to walk me through an insanely boring instance...Though I'll admit my mains were healer and tank spec, so I tended to be the "lead your low level guildies through the instance" bitch, and I didn't mind it very much.

After getting repeatedly pwned in the high level instances, it's nice to hit a low level instance, pull massive aggro, and have the baddies fail to hurt you at all.

Re:Desperation

[SL Baur]

I absolutely HATE asking someone who no doubt has better things to do with his time to walk me through an insanely boring instance...

True, so do I. There're a few questlines that are required though. I can't think of one offhand in the 1-60 range.

After getting repeatedly pwned in the high level instances, it's nice to hit a low level instance, pull massive aggro, and have the baddies fail to hurt you at all.

Heh.

Ogri'La rep (I love the Bomb them Again! and nether ray wrangling dailies), Netherwing rep and the Fel Reaver (just because they've killed me so many times) will still be worth doing after the expansion.

I don't think the low levels are that deserted now. There appear to be a lot of people doing the same thing I am - frantically leveling alts before the expansion comes out (at least on a PvE server). My wife surprised me the other day when she managed to get into a group doing Black Fathom Depths. I was going to run her through on one of my level 70s, but she didn't need the help.

I'm sooo looking forward to this expansion. I'm with the same guild I was in when BC came out, but THIS time I get to level the new content with everyone else.

Re:Desperation

[znerk]

Respect for the retraction.

That is all.

Re:Desperation

[myowntrueself]

Unless you raid or really love doing 'dailies' (ie the same set of quests every. single. day) the game ENDS at the level cap (whether it was 60, 70 or as will be, 80).

I've leveled 2 toons to 70. In both cases hitting 70 was the point at which the game became boring.

I've leveled another to 60 now and I have NO intention of going to Outland with it. I'm having fun in Azeroth at that level. Outland is boring as hell (especially the instances) and I am going far far away from computers for a very long time in a few short weeks. I intend to enjoy the last few weeks of WoW and that means not leveling this toon to 70.

But some players do enjoy their dailies... or being a cog in the corporate machine that is a raiding guild.

Re:Desperation

[Tom]

City of Heroes/Villains also had a feature like that, in which you could become the "sidekick" of some higher-level player and when you do you're brought up to his level minus one. I liked that as well, and it fit well into the game's theme.

The other alternative was Guild Wars, where the level cap was at 20 and - at least in Factions and Nightfall - was reached very, very quickly, so the majority of gameplay happenend at Lvl 20 anyways. I didn't like that very much, because character advancement is one of the most interesting parts of the game for me.

Just some more angles.

Re:Desperation

[the grace of R'hllor]

Nice. Someone provides a service people are willing to pay for, without causing harm to anyone, and you want his life to be ruined.

When I stopped playing WoW, I sold my game+account to a friend, who got to start with a level 43 priest, with mount. If I ever go crazy and decide to play again, I'd want to start with a mount and an ability to go on raids. That's not a bonus, that's the main game.

Finances have nothing to do with awards

[gmezero]

They might not have a penny to them. That has no relation to the award made by the court.

Re:Finances have nothing to do with awards

[Kramer80]

Right. I doubt Blizzard ever thought they would collect. This is about deterring the next guy.

Re:Finances have nothing to do with awards

[Metaphorically]

In some cases they do. Here's the oblig. wikipedia reference.

That Kind of Cash?

[autocracy]

Quick math using numbers from TFA:

$25 * 100,000 = $2.5 million

Seems they've been ordered to pay more than twice the revenue they've ever taken in. Unless the company has some other product to prop this judgment up... well, oopsie.

In other news...

[cjfs]

MMO Glider sued Blizzard for trying to decrease the amount of grinding in WoW, thereby depriving them of sales.

Gold Farming

[mrroot]

Mostly I'm amazed that MMOGlider had that kind of cash.

Maybe they just used their own application to farm some more gold. Just a thought.

Correction:

[geminidomino]

$5.99994 Million.

Their pissing on everyone's right and the concept of computer ownership to punish one douchebag means they'll be selling one less copy of D3.

Re:Correction:

[MasterOfMagic]

You, sir, are an intelligent customer who is willing to take a stance on an issue and back that stance with action (or, in this case, in-action). Not a consumer. Thank you for destroying my belief that intelligent customers did not exist.

Re:Correction:

[Tridus]

More like enforcing existing laws against tortious interference. Deliberately interfering in a contract is illegal, it doesn't magically become okay because computers are involved. Its not about freedom. Its about a person making money by helping people break another companies terms of service. It has no legitimate use.

Did you actually read the court order before flipping out?

Re:Correction:

[CanadianBeaver]

Stop being e-tuff, you know you'd be drooling over D3 just like the rest of us. Every time Blizzard releases a game it is game of the year, they release quality. They are one of the good guys, just trying to protect its player base from cheaters that ruin the e-economy.

Re:Correction:

[geminidomino]

Sorry, but you're wrong. I'm no blizzard fanboy. I'm not going to drool over something just because they put it out. I was interested in Diablo 3 because I liked D2. Unfortunately, my dislike for Blizzard now overpowers my interest.

Hopefully your superiors don't read this post before they cut your Marketing Department's paychecks for the week.

The only thing they are trying to protect are their profits. They are not "good guys" or they could have found better ways to do it.

Re:Correction:

[geminidomino]

Did you actually read the court order before flipping out?

I didn't flip out. I just decided I was not giving them my $60. As for reading the court order, no. What I read were Blizzard's arguments. Those are what I take issue with and why they will not get any more money from me.

Re:Correction:

[CanadianBeaver]

My marketing cheque is the only one I have coming in now that Glider killed my Chinese gold farming empire. How can you support such an evil program, think of the Chinese children!

Re:Correction:

[brainstyle]

I think I'll buy two copies of D3, just to make up for it. Ain't I a rapscallion?

Re:Correction:

[bigstrat2003]

I just decided I was not giving them my $60.

You mean $50. PC games, last I checked, were still $50 fresh from release. It's only the 360 and PS3 which have embraced the retarded $10 price increase (for no real reason, I might add).

Re:Correction:

[bigstrat2003]

The only thing they are trying to protect are their profits.

Bullshit. If you knew WoW at all, you'd know that many, many players don't want this crap in their game. Blizzard is trying to protect their profits only insofar as trying to better the customer experience is protecting profits.

You seriously have no clue. Blizzard is fighting for their customers, and you cynically say they're trying to protect their profits. Laughable.

Re:Correction:

[duckInferno]

I'll buy three, just to spite the douchebag. A lot of people are happy by this ruling. Blizzard acted on behalf of both themselves and the majority of their customers to crush a group of people who were making money by allowing people to cheat. It's pretty noble and one needs to do a lot of word twisting and take on a lot of ignorance to say otherwise.

Re:Correction:

[Draek]

Every time Blizzard releases a game it is game of the year

ORLY? I thought 2002's GoTY was widely considered to have been GTA3, not Warcraft 3, 2004's to have been Half-Life 2, not World of Warcraft, and 2007's to have been BioShock, not The Burning Crusade.

Speaking of which, while BioShock got famous for it's annoyingly idiotic DRM, both Rockstar and Valve have been much, *much* friendlier to the gaming community at large, and to their customers in particular, than Blizzard has been so *they* shall get my money. They, and Epic who also competed on all three years with UT2003, 2004 and UT3 respectively, beating Blizzard at quality at every one IMNSHO while also refraining from misusing copyright law to sue their own customers.

Re:Correction:

[geminidomino]

Fair enough.

Re:Correction:

[geminidomino]

Yeah yeah yeah, and Michael Morhaime died on the cross for your sins. Blah blah blah.

Fuck Blizzard.

Re:Correction:

[bigstrat2003]

Hey man, if you want to believe that Blizzard is pissing on their customers by giving them what they want, that's your damn problem, not mine. I live in the real world, where giving your customers what they want is considered a good thing.

Re:Correction:

[geminidomino]

Except they're not.

See, *I* was a customer before this. I don't like botters, but since Blizzard decided to get the idiotic argument that twiddling my own bits of my own PC's memory is a copyright issue, they hurt me more than the botters ever did, and I like them even less. I let them slide on the bnetd thing, but now they've proven that such behavior for them is the rule, not the exception.

Re:Correction:

[bigstrat2003]

Except they're not.

Except they are. I'll be the last to say Blizzard's methods are great in this case, but they are trying to serve their customers. They're using bad methods to achieve a good end, and you're crucifying them for it... not fair in the least.

Re:Correction:

[geminidomino]

How is it not fair? You say yourself, their methods are bad. Their methods have consequences more far-reaching and potentially damaging than is proportional to the good they are (ostensibly) trying to achieve.

They want to play Machiavellian games with the courts, they can. They've got the money to do so. I do, and will continue to, judge them by their means, not their ends. The road to hell and all of that.

Not fair, indeed...

Re:Correction:

[bigstrat2003]

I judge someone's character by their intent, not their results. Results are something which need to be addressed, but have no bearing on character. You're looking at results and judging character based on that, which is insane.

Re:Correction:

[geminidomino]

You're looking at results and judging character based on that, which is insane.

And doing the converse is naive, since you can only guess at their intent; or you take their word for it, which is REALLY naive.

Re:Correction:

[bigstrat2003]

If I have to pick between heartless and naive, I'll pick naive every time. Then again, I don't believe it's naive to think that something is being done with good will, considering there's every reason (in the form of what the fans want) to believe that Blizzard's intentions are good.

Re:Correction:

[geminidomino]

If I have to pick between heartless and naive, I'll pick naive every time.

Fair play to you then. I prefer that my choices not be at right angles to reality.

Then again, I don't believe it's naive to think that something is being done with good will, considering there's every reason (in the form of what the fans want) to believe that Blizzard's intentions are good.

No, there is only one reason, which may well be more than sufficient for you: you want to.

Re:Correction:

[bigstrat2003]

Fair play to you then. I prefer that my choices not be at right angles to reality.

You say that as if judging by results is any more realistic. Neither is a perfect method, which is why I said, if I have to choose...

No, there is only one reason, which may well be more than sufficient for you: you want to.

No. You're descending into sheer idiocy at this point. You may feel that Blizzard's intentions are bad, but doing what their fans want is certainly a reason to believe that their intentions are good. There may be more reasons, there may not be, but saying the only reason to believe in their good intentions is personal desire merely indicates that you want to hate Blizzard, no matter the facts.

Damages, or Punishment to Hurt Imitators?

[GaryPatterson]

Surely the damages are more about stopping future Glider-type automators. Along the way, they'll bankrupt the company behind Glider, but that's less important than stopping game-automators.

Re:Damages, or Punishment to Hurt Imitators?

[geekoid]

except the next one will be distributed from overseas, along with the source code.
Pretty much SOL at that point.

conversion help

[Digitus1337]

US$6 million? How much is that in gold?

Re:conversion help

[atomic-penguin]

Today that would be 567.98 troy pounds

Re:conversion help

[pushing-robot]

About two ounces.

Re:conversion help

[DolomiteZipper]

about 6 million dollars worth

Re:conversion help

[ilikejam]

It's about 4 quid.

Re:conversion help

[geekoid]

Excellent point.
Maybe they should ahve tried to bargain that they would returned 6million in gold to blizzard.

Re:conversion help

[_Sprocket_]

US$6 million? How much is that in gold?

Depends on whether you buy the gold directly or use it to fund a gold-farming sweatshop.

Re:conversion help

[Zamerick]

that would be 600 million gold

Re:conversion help

[plasmacutter]

at today's exchange rates via google.. about 1 trillion

Re:conversion help

[cirrustelecom]

265,486,725 gold. According to Susan.

$6 million for a EULA/CoC violation?

[Carbon016]

Oh man, they should do this more often. Bring everyone who names their character something obscene to court too.

Re:$6 million for a EULA/CoC violation?

[plasmacutter]

not to mention those freakish unicode characters you can't type into a gm window to report them.

So how long,,,

[anomnomnomymous]

So how long until other developers will follow?
On one hand I wouldn't mind getting all those cheatmakers too scared to create any more cheats (or at least refrain them from publicly releasing/selling them), on the other hand I'm still in doubt if the current verdict is any good (or at least, good enough to be the base of a precedent).

Then again, maybe developers could start developing with security in mi.... oh, never mind, sueing someone with hordes of lawyers is much easier.

Re:So how long,,,

[cowscows]

There's only so much you can do to make creating bots impossible. At the end of the day, the client needs to have enough information to allow it to display everything the player needs to play the game. If all the bot is trying to do is play the game, then it's going to have access to that same information.

I guess my point is that there's a difference between security in terms of keeping someone from hacking the game, and security in terms of keeping someone from automating parts of playing the game. At the end of the day, there's still an unknown player running the game on a machine that they control. You can't stop them from running other software along side your game. You can try to detect what they're doing, and I believe Blizzard does that to some degree, but that's still a reactive approach.

Re:So how long,,,

[mmalove]

Speaking of other types of games (FPS and chess come to mind) - maybe Blizzard could have considered a different possibility, create a new server that explicitly allows botting. In fact, it could even be a sort of competition - try to design the most successful bot. Once bots that could reach level 70 are achieved, perhaps designers could look for ways to make them work together more effectively, even going so far as to work in the finer mechanics of tanking, positioning, aggro, proactive and reactive healing, and effective use of crowd control. Possibly even learning to effectively pvp against other bots, or players. A whole new e-sport appealing to those very same that argue that WOW is too simple minded - to play WOW at a macro level instead of a micro level.

Blizzard wins, because they get money from all the bot's accounts. Curious minded programmers win, because they get the opportunity to explore a new world of AI. And folks that think botting is ok, can be free to play on a server where botting is encouraged. Meanwhile folks that are against botting, should hopefully encounter less of it since most that would use one would rather play on a bottable server.

Or... Blizzard could go the Vivendi route, and successfully sue Glider for more revenue than they ever took in. Yea. Makes sense to me.

Re:So how long,,,

[cowscows]

I guess that's a decent idea, but it relies to a degree on the assumption that the people creating the bots are doing so just for the fun and challenge of it. But with Glider, there's a clear example of someone creating a bot for financial gain, and if that is their goal, then it's unlikely that the customers will limit their bots to a specified server.

Although you can make an argument that having a purposely bot-ridden server would give Blizzard lots of useful information on how the different bots work, which would help them detect bots on other servers, and also help them modify their game to be less bot friendly, so that's another good argument.

A sad statement about grinding in WoW

[elrous0]

WoW has so much grinding (and so much of it is required to advance) that players need an automaton program just to advance without being bored out of their skulls.

Re:A sad statement about grinding in WoW

[Vagnaard]

Is that from someone who played the game?

Wow is no grind feast. Getting from one to 70 takes time, that's true, but a casual player can do it in less than three months, whithout having to grind its way to glory, just by doing the quests and playing with friends. If you want a grind feast, play the original everquest.

No, gliders are used by people who wants to Farm gold or level up characters for money.

# Bots are often used in Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games to farm for resources that would otherwise take significant time or effort to obtain; this is a concern for most online in-game economies.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bot

Re:A sad statement about grinding in WoW

[WormholeFiend]

I do enough grinding IRL to earn money as it is... Why would anyone want spend money to do grinding in a game is beyond my understanding.

Re:A sad statement about grinding in WoW

[djh101010]

Sorry, but if you're that bored with it, just give up - or consider that maybe you're doing it wrong.

Re:A sad statement about grinding in WoW

[geekoid]

There are guilds online that if you follow you can level every hour.

Re:A sad statement about grinding in WoW

[MistrBlank]

You don't play wow much do you? After 70 there's still faction grinds, money grinds, and farming of profession materials (for potions, enchantments, gemming, etc.) WoW is very much a grind game. The level 1-70 part is the smallest portion of the grindfest.

Re:A sad statement about grinding in WoW

[Fozzyuw]

You don't play wow much do you?

You haven't played MMORPGs much have you? Would you like 2 hours to level from 51-52 or would you prefer 40 hours? Would you prefer being able to do that by completing a book full of quests or have to sit in the same forest, with 4 other plays, waiting for a snake to crawl by? Would you prefer to raid for 4 hours or for 12 hours? Would you like to die and just run back to your corpse invisable and instantly get all your stuff back or die, loose half your your level XP, loose a level if loosing enough XP, and on top of that, have to run back to your corpse, alive, with no weapons or armor, because they all stay on our corpse, which will disappear if left too long. Would you like to stand at the Zeppelin in Org. for 3 mins, or stand around a dock for 20 mins and then have to take a 10 min boat ride through an ocean, before arriving at the other city? Did I mention the boat could bug, dropping you in the middle of said ocean, with deadly sharks and small islands too far away to normally reach but typically covered with super-powered giants or sirens and dieing from exhaustion in the ocean meant your body sinking to the deepest depths, nearly unrecoverable. In a game were it was near impossible to solo a single monster of equal level.

Sure there's "grind" in WoW, but it doesn't mean what it use to mean back in my day! Now get off m'ah lawn! =D

Re:A sad statement about grinding in WoW

[bigstrat2003]

These things are ONLY grinds if you're concerned about doing them as fast as possible. I play WoW plenty, and I agree with the GP, it is most certainly not a grind-fest.

So I never played WoW but I saw SouthPark.

[GlobalColding]

Does this Glider program kill the Boars for you?

Why I was never interested in WoW

[g0bshiTe]

I've read comments here and seen comments from others that play WoW, and their comments share a common idea, "mindless" this or that. This mindless whatever is the exact reason I've never played the game. My question to those that play and feel that way, is if it's so tedious and so mindless why play in the first place?

If it's some sort of camaraderie you could get that from other games, flight sims, FPS, hell Second Life even.

Why waste the money monthly in support of a product you think is mindless?

Re:Why I was never interested in WoW

[swordgeek]

"If it's some sort of camaraderie you could get that from other games, flight sims, FPS, hell Second Life even. "

Or even, in fact, from...REAL LIFE!

(I know, I'm talking crazy again. Forgot my meds this morning.)

However, your point is well taken.
"Why waste the money monthly in support of a product you think is mindless?"

I've never understood that either. I ground my way to the highest tier of armourcrafter in Dark Age of Camelot, the hard way. I didn't mind, although it was very slow. A coworker bought a cheat much like this one because it was too painful for him to level/craft without cheating. "WHY ARE YOU PLAYING THE #$(&# GAME THEN???" Even moreso, why are you creating a crafter character by cheating, when that's a completely optional trait? I eventually quit because the admins refused to deal with him.

Re:Why I was never interested in WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used the program, and it worked quite well. The main reason i used it is that sometimes the higher level content needs more of one class than you currently have online. You can use the bot to level up a character class you wouldn't normally be concerned with or actually like playing so in the event that the guild needs more priests for something you can use that character instead of your favorite class.

Re:Why I was never interested in WoW

[iceperson]

WoW's not much different than everything else in life. I remember running wind sprints in football practice. Hated doing them, but I loved playing the game enough that I put up with the hours of work for the opportunity to play on Friday night. If I could have payed someone else to do the 2 a days and still had the same results in the end then you bet your ass I would have.

Re:Why I was never interested in WoW

[Toll_Free]

Cheating is cheating, period.

Just because YOU can tell everyone how YOU justified YOUR cheating doesn't make you in the right.

Guess it lets you sleep better at night?

--Toll_Free

Re:Why I was never interested in WoW

[MadKeithV]

Because the next guy is level 72 and I'm only 71 and we just can't have that! ;-)

Re:Why I was never interested in WoW

[grumbel]

My question to those that play and feel that way, is if it's so tedious and so mindless why play in the first place?

From those 20 levels I played on a two week trial account I would say it gets played because its addicting and the game being mindless just helps the addiction part because its easy to dive into and do stuff without using your brain to much. I see WoW pretty much the same as soap operas on TV, its pointless and repeating and such, but its easy to sit down in front of it and let the time pass, you can't do the same thing with a flightsim or even Second Life, because for those you actually have to think about stuff, in WoW on the other side you can just go from quest to quest to quest. There simply is always a quest waiting for completion in WoW and you never really reach a point where you have to ask yourself "What do I do know?", so people keep playing. Its constant progress without an end.

Re:Why I was never interested in WoW

[DeadManCoding]

Anyone that immerses themselves in a fake world, instead of interacting with other humans IN REAL LIFE for a majority of their time (daylight hours, so to speak), is, for the most part, some type of anti-social.

Maybe some of us are tired of dealing with real life, where we're judged more by what we look like instead of what we're capable of. I'm in IT, no beard, eyebrow piercing, and I run rings around some of the other guys here. Yet since I work for doctors, I still feel like the idiot. When I play WoW, other players may judge my gear, but it's a hell of a lot easier to type /ignore Asshat than deal with real people.

Re:Why I was never interested in WoW

[RightSaidFred99]

Haha. Yeah, cheating in WoW is such a monumental wrong. How can he possibly sleep at night?

What you're missing

[Moryath]

is that WoW killed this for the wrong reasons.

The ability to set this to run completely unattended? BAD. I totally agree that botting is no good, it's killed a lot of MMO's.

However, the ability to set this up to do ordinary tasks for users who have disabilities would be GOOD. It would enlarge the potential WoW audience. I'm not saying make it fine as-is, I'm saying that a "semi-unattended" setup where people playing the game just set up and monitor their macros isn't any worse than the normal mode of play (hell, wasn't that the entire control system of Final Fantasy 12?).

A lot of potential WoW players (potential gamers in general, actually) have problems. Someone who has partial paralysis or has had a hand/arm amputated has trouble using the standard game controllers. Now think about the game systems that get around this. If you've got two good legs, you can do DDR or Wii Fit without arms. If you only have one good arm, you can use the Wiimote and at least 50% of the Wii's games (though you still can't play Zelda). On the other hand, if you go near the Xbox360 or PS3, you're pretty much fucked.

Older titles didn't have this problem. If you have one hand, or even one of those face-stick setups with a single button, you can play Space Quest, King's Quest, and probably map the joystick to play single-button arcade games. If you have a working thumb and two fingers, you can get a two-button joystick and play NES titles.

Do I really care if someone who has disability problems, or even carpal tunnel, is able to set off macros to do the same thing I would do in multiple steps? Not really. I can still group with them, or play the game without them.

For some reason, however, the WoW designers don't want disabled gamers playing their game. They have ignored REPEATED entreaties from the disabled community to program in ways to make it feasible for disabled gamers to play. For quite a few, programs like WoW Glider were the fix. This is just one more symptom of the gaming industry not getting it when it comes to making their titles and systems accessible.

Re:What you're missing

[Moryath]

blind gamers are definitely "disabled" - but there are limits to what can be done (we can't, for example, allow the blind to drive cars due to near certainty of accidents). We CAN compensate relatively easily, especially in pseudo-turn-based games like WoW, for people without the manual dexterity to control a mouse and keyboard all at once, hitting 6 different keys every 30 seconds.

Of course, eventually the "blind" will all get visors with direct nerve inputs hooked up to little CCD eyeball replacements... but until that happens, that doesn't mean real solutions for those with dexterity problems (whether from amputation, physical defect, or nerve damage) should be disallowed or destroyed.

Re:What you're missing

[Moryath]

Helping disabled people play is one thing; Build something to play for disabled people is another.

What's the difference between a gamer hitting alt-c, alt-q, w,r,t,6,2,7,8,0,m,p,z for their attack actions... and just hitting a single button for a macro that does the same? More to the point, what's the gameplay difference as seen by any other players?

Also, how can they be sure that someone really need some automated actions? I bet if it were easy, they would do.

Not if they don't care... which is kind of the point. The gaming industry, as a whole, has become less and less open to those who are physically disabled as time has gone on and control systems added more and more levels of sometimes needless complexity.

My point is: Blizzard can't mold it's software for an small piece of market with the risk of make it worse in a general view.

How does it make it worse? Show me how it negatively impacts the play experience of anyone to have usable controls by MORE people, especially in a game that's supposed to be multiplayer to begin.

Re:What you're missing

[PIBM]

The problem with providing such thing is that even non-disabled people could use those to trivialize the game. At that point subscription would start dropping and that's certainly not what blizzard has in mind. Actually, since WoW has been released we've seen the exactly opposite trend.

Re:What you're missing

[Moryath]

The problem with providing such thing is that even non-disabled people could use those to trivialize the game.

Why would it trivialize the game? Because people wouldn't get frustrated with the control system, they'd play less? You're saying that the entirety of the gaming community are a bunch of masochists?

That would make game designers sadists... which actually makes sense now that I think about the controller designs we've been subjected to over the years (Dreamcast anyone?)

Re:What you're missing

[Travis Mansbridge]

What's the difference between a gamer hitting alt-c, alt-q, w,r,t,6,2,7,8,0,m,p,z for their attack actions... and just hitting a single button for a macro that does the same? More to the point, what's the gameplay difference as seen by any other players?

These type of macros are usable in WoW as it stands, and in-fact can be written in-game using the /macro system. The macro in this case would be castsequence, which lets you use one command to cast spells or other actions in a sequence.

In fact, there are many other examples of macros, currently available, that simply require the minimum of player interaction. Player interaction is the baseline by which macros are judged vs. automated gameplay. Crossing the line, and involving no player interaction, is what is considered botting and is against the ToU.

Re:What you're missing

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

we can't, for example, allow the blind to drive cars due to near certainty of accidents)

Don't be so sure of that.

Re:What you're missing

[Moryath]

And the difference between someone using Final Fantasy 12-style macros (literally, control where the character goes and let it fight the nearest enemy, or not, or click an enemy to engage) and someone building in-game macros that must be triggered manually, is what precisely?

Re:What you're missing

[Travis Mansbridge]

Player interaction. The player must actually initiate any interaction with the game.

Re:What you're missing

[Moryath]

And if I'm guiding my character around from point A to point B, and directing them to an enemy (but letting the fight itself work as it would on stats anyways because I don't have the muscle control to time everything perfectly), where is the problem?

Again... "Player Interaction" is a widely defined field. What line, specifically, it that gives you a problem when crossed? I'll offer you a few points.

#1 - Automatically moving the character around the world
#2 - Player moving character around the world... but character automatically attacking enemies it can.
#3 - Player moving character around, AND having to tell character to attack enemy
#4 - Player moving character around, AND having to tell character to attack, AND having to set off macro for each individual attack command
#5 - Player having to do everything one button-press at a time.

Well?

Re:What you're missing

[Jtmoney528]

I have no experience with WoW, but I know with a few other games I have played in the past I have ran a macro to level, and to cast spells to gain XP. In my experience it is a great tool because a great number out there play for the end game, as in PvP and not PvE, and having the ability to level without sitting there pressing 1-3 1-3 1-3 1-3 really helps. In DaOC I used this all the time because that game was all about the end game, and as long as the person has a grasp on the character they are going to be playing in the end I think its fine to do.

Re:What you're missing

[Moryath]

Bad decisions by incompetent legislatures notwithstanding... did you read the article and see the rate of accidents?

Re:What you're missing

[Travis Mansbridge]

4, The player must physically interact to perform anything, however these can be macroed so that the player need only press one button to do most, or all, of the work. This satisfies your original example of a macro that can perform "alt-c, alt-q, w,r,t,6,2,7,8,0,m,p,z" by "just hitting a single button"

Unless you meant that hitting the button multiple times is too interactive for the disabled.

Re:What you're missing

[Kawolski]

Blizzard used to support this through it's advanced scripting system prior to the 2.0 (Burning Crusade) release. The problem was that using these helper scripts would've been required, especially with the introduction of PvP arenas, to stay competitive, diminishing the skill aspect involved of making decisions what spells to cast on what or whom vs. allowing an addon or 3rd party program to decide for you. Sadly, the disabled become a casualty in their philosophical shift.

Re:What you're missing

[MikeDirnt69]

Sorry, but you want to transform WoW in D&D with graphics.

Re:What you're missing

[Jeanius]

What's the difference between designing your own macros and downloading the warlock macro set? A few of the aspects of MMO gaming that differentiate top tier players from the n00bs who bought their 70s are reaction time, strategy, and second-to-second adaptability, although adaptability may be hindered without a wider array of macros. If you take out those factors from WoW, what sort of skill set now separates the cream from the curd? The computer's ability to run a macro? Your internet connection? (which is true for FPS, but shouldn't be for MMO) Or worse yet, with an essentially level playing field of macros, does overall time spent physically playing the game in order to obtain massive purples become the most important player attribute? I thought that was the main WoW gripe to begin with. I'm not saying assisting the disabled is bad, but I'd feel wrong using those aids if I didn't need them.

Re:What you're missing

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Yep, I was just pointing out that - accidents or no - there are places where blind people are allowed to drive. However bad an idea that may be...

Re:What you're missing

[PIBM]

There was previously addons that were doing a lot of the work for the user. Pre-TBC, some addons were healing automagically with the best spell in your inventory, talking with the other addons to make sure none would overheal, auto-dispelling if there was a bad debuff on select target, again, all automated between accounts, checking for range in the decision making to minimise the total time until everyone would have been dispelled.

There also was automated kill button, which were chosing the best attacks and stuff. If you would expand the API further, almost no user interaction would be needed at all steps of the game, and you would end up with a brain dead game.

Get the correct addons and mash a button for 4 hours, end up with tons of epic loot. There might be a market for that, but I don't think it could last =)

Re:What you're missing

[jayhawk88]

No they killed it for the right reasons, I assure you. If some disabled individuals were using Glider to play WoW that's fine, but does not excuse Glider giving the vast, vast majority of it's users the ability to "game the system" as it were, allowing them to gain vast amounts of gold/items/honor with little or no effort. WoW does have it's own, extensive macro system that would probably allow for some level of play by many who are disabled. Certainly it cannot accommodate everyone, but this is something that is unreasonable to expect, by your own admission further down this thread.

It's unfortunate, but you really have to look at this from the perspective of "how might a program that helps disabled people play the game be abused by those not disabled?" If you design a program to help automate your gameplay in Kings Quest or any other single player game, if someone chooses to use it just to "cheat" or make the game simpler, they're only affecting their own play. In an MMO however, the abuses one might perpetuate via an automation program - namely mob tagging/stealing/constant killing or gold/item/honor farming - affects other players as well.

Perhaps Blizzard does need to be more aware/do more to help disabled people play their game, not being disabled myself I can't really speak to that point. But I do think they cannot simply give users the ability to distill the game down to simply pushing a "Go" button, because of the potential for abuse it brings along with it. Again, it's not fair, but not everything can be made equitable for all.

Re:What you're missing

[Moryath]

It isn't already?

Are we playing the same World of Warcraft?

Re:What you're missing

[Fross]

but until that happens, that doesn't mean real solutions for those with dexterity problems (whether from amputation, physical defect, or nerve damage) should be disallowed or destroyed.

Just because something COULD be used by someone for a positive purpose, doesn't mean it is therefore unattackable for all sorts of bad purposes it could be used for.

Yeesh, way to have a blinkered view. You're treating this as though Blizzard specifically banned MMOGlider to hurt disabled people (which, if you see my other post regarding your inaccurate view on MMOGLider, is not on target to begin with). Disabled people's use of WoW is entirely orthogonal to this argument.

Re:What you're missing

[MikeDirnt69]

Not at all. Basically, D&D is turn-based, WoW is not. WoW won't stop and wait your next action, like Heroes of Might and Magic does; it demands fast reactions and decisions. If you limit a big set of things to a button press or automatic actions, you'll kill the gameplay.

One option is to assemble one specific server with some automated features, but Bliz will not do anything like this if they dont have numbers (how many players would play on it, what features are needed, how much it will affect the gameplay, etc). If you really want it, show them solid arguments.

Re:What you're missing

[Moryath]

Funny. D&D Online is certainly "real-time." What you're saying is that putting in enough automation that WoW stops being an annoying clickfest and starts being a reasonably-paced game somehow kills the charm?

I think you're not playing WoW.

Re:What you're missing

[MikeDirnt69]

I said "D&D" or "D&D Online"?

We will never agree with each other... I'll go back to work, later. :)

Re:What you're missing

[Zanthor]

What you're missing is that Glider wasn't used for the handicapped, it was used to totally automate gameplay and level from 1 to 70 while farming loot.

The running joke in my guild was that the UI mod (BOT) I wrote was for my crippled friend who could only press one button over and over... the fact that the one button was hooked to a logic trap that played the game for me is what was cheating.

Glider doesn't even require a button press now and then, you start it, and off you go, for as long as you stay connected, running the script.

Hurray

[mseeger]

Hi,

"The makers of MMOGlider have been found in breach of the World of Warcraft terms of service and are forced to pay Blizzard $6M in damages."

Now surely Blizzard with come up with some payment for my frustration and lost fun due to the gold farmers. I already sent Blizzard my bank account details. I'm waiting guys.....

CU, Martin

Re:Hurray

[Toll_Free]

Wait a minute.

I > that wasn't Blizzard you sent that info to...

Wasnt it some Nigerian prince?

Wait, I think I just snitched on myself reading your emails :)

--Toll_Free

But the licenseee is not Glider....

[brunes69]

The licensee is you, or the player of the game, not Glider.

They are just making software. If you USE it then YOU are violating the license, not them.

It is not like they signed a development license with Blizzard.

Re:But the licenseee is not Glider....

[Tridus]

Read the comment directly above yours about tortious interference. Here, I'll quote it:

"Read up on tortious interference.

Willfully helping someone to violate a contract is often illegal. And that is where the fact that the functionality sold that people use to violate the contract doesn't have any secondary legal functionality, making the intention clear."

appeal pending

[janopdm]

virtuallyblind does the best coverage of the case. MDY itself keeps virtuallyblind up to date on their case.

There will be an appeal that MDY has to win on all counts to negate the damage judgement.

2. Blizzard shall not be entitled to double or triple recovery for counts I, II and III. That is, Blizzard shall be entitled to receive a total of $6,000,000 in damages for counts I, II and III. However, should liability on any one or two of the counts be reversed on appeal, any one of these counts independently supports the $6,000,000 award.

Re:appeal pending

[bduranske]

Thanks for the nod. Cheap work by the BBC reporter blatantly pulling from my post with no credit. They even cite me as "some experts" for the idea that damages could have been more at trial, at least I suspect so. I doubt they called some other expert. Bah. Mainstream media hates blogs... unless they can rip them off. Anyway, yeah. I've covered this. I talk to both sides from time to time, and get all the docs first. Stay tuned for the certain appeal.

Re:appeal pending

[bduranske]

Thanks again for the mention. I'd emailed the BBC guy, who I thought had sourced that story from Virtually Blind without citing me (I had it a day or so earlier) and to my total surprise, he wrote back personally and apologized, and offered to add a mention retroactively. It would have been nicer to have it originally, of course, but still, that's a pretty classy move on his part, and I want to acknowledge it.

hypotethically ..

[savuporo]

I i had a real robot ( no i dont mean biped humanoid ) that would be able to play for me using a mouse, screen and a keyboard .. they would sue the company that made the robot ?

And its not that far fetched, as a hardware you need just a camera watching the TV, and two inputs to PS2 and USB ports on my puter ..

So where do they draw the line ?

Re:hypotethically ..

[yenne]

[If] i had a real robot ( no i dont mean biped humanoid ) that would be able to play for me using a mouse, screen and a keyboard ..

This is what children are for.

"Suzy, it's your night to do the dishes. Johnny, gather and take out the trash. Joey, we need four primal fires."

Re:hypotethically ..

[Anonymous Coward]

They draw the line at how much you can spend on lawyers.

Re:hypotethically ..

[savuporo]

Ok, if i copy it through the digital->analog->digital as in TV->Camera->image recognition chain its going to be ok ? Only if i make bitwise copy in RAM its violation ? Or .. ?

Re:hypotethically ..

[Puffy Director Pants]

Is your hypothetical robot solely created simply to play WOW?

Re:hypotethically ..

[savuporo]

Have you ever heard of DARPA Grand Challenge perchance ?

Re:hypotethically ..

[savuporo]

they very specifically state that they dont _modify_ the games RAM, just read it. So again, just where is it OK to read ? What if i read from the frame buffer , which technically does not belong to a game but the video driver?

Re:hypotethically ..

[geohump]

> This is what children are for.

> "Suzy, it's your night to do the dishes. Johnny, gather and take out the trash. Joey, we need four primal fires."

You clearly don't have any kids... :-)

9:30 PM Thursday Night

"Mom! I NEED 25 CUPCAKES AND 2 PRIMAL FIRES FOR SCHOOL TOMORROW!"
"Oh my God Steven, Why didn't you tell me earlier?"
"I FORGOT 'TILL JUST NOW!" (begins wailing) ....

3 AM

Steven has been asleep since 10:00 PM, Mom has just logged off his account for the night and can now (totally exhausted and drained) go to sleep for 3, well deserved, (but totally inadequate), hours of sleep.

Nicely written

[Gr8Apes]

Nicely written, and a completely different take on "helper" apps.

Important note

[geekoid]

When creating something like this, don't actually use the program you writing your tool for.
If I was to write this, and never have installed WoW, I don't see how they could sue me.

Anyone have the decision?

[burris]

I'd really like to read the decision. I'm curious how a third party could be found in breach of the players contract. Do all software developers now have to worry that they may breach any contracts their customers have entered?

It makes no sense

[geekoid]

"of lost subscription revenue, lost profits, "

What? what lost profits? people use the tool to gain levels to play the end game faster. That means they are paying to play the end game.

OR
People us it to farm, so they can get money to buy gear for the high levels.

OR
People us it to farm and make gold to sell to the other players for the end game. Since Blizzard doesn't offer this services they can't have a loss.

Bots in WoW do not have the effect people complain about. EQ did, but the steps Blizzard took prevent the distortion those effects had in EQ.

Re:It makes no sense

[TriezGamer]

Lost subscriptions in the form of OTHER players who leave due to real or percieved botting ruining a fair gameplay experience.

Re:It makes no sense

[billcopc]

In that case, Blizzard should sue all the korean farming groups that are essentially human bots. They add nothing to the game, strip-mine the resources thus inconveniencing legitimate players, and they enable the aforementioned high-level morons who have monster gear yet can't play worth a damn.

To me, there is absolutely no difference between those farmers and MMOGlider. To bash only one of them is hypocritical.

Re:It makes no sense

[ScrewMaster]

To bash only one of them is hypocritical.

Welcome to the world of Blizzard.

People, if you have an principles at all, don't support an outfit like Blizzard that absolutely has to have everything their way. Hell, bad as Microsoft is, they're nowhere near as litigious as these assholes have proven to be. Furthermore, Blizzard is setting a lot of bad legal precedent in the software realm, and I won't give them a penny.

I feel pretty much the same way about Apple, for that matter, another jackass corporation that uses lawyers as anticompetitive tools.

found it!

[burris]

here is the decision.

Step back a moment... this was about copyrights

[MobyDisk]

Blizzard sued Glider for copyright violation. But they are basing their damages on the added tech support costs of dealing with bots, and the projected number of people who quit the game out of bot frustration. I can actually understand Blizzard's arguments here, but how can they base the damages on something that they didn't sue them for? If the suit was copyright violation, then they can base the damages only on the # of copies that Glider supposedly made (which is zero).

I'm not actually nearly as mad that Glider lost, as much as I am mad that the court is making such a farce of this. Bllizzard sued for something that Glider didn't do, and for something that Blizzard is not damaged buy. The case never had merit, and based on the precedence that loading something into memory is not a copy, Blizzard doesn't even have a case. It should never have gone this far.

I hope Glider appeals on that grounds and the ruling is thrown out. Then Blizzard can try to sue them for what Glider actually did, not some specious charge.

Wrong redneck...

[brouski]

The "Here's your sign" guy is Bill Engvall.

Jeff Foxworthy is "You might be a redneck if...".

The Alternatives?

[EXTomar]

Unfortunately Blizzard's hands are tied. If Blizzard didn't go after the real world company, their only recourse is to say "Stop! Or I'll say 'Stop!' again". On a semi-open platform like PC/Mac there is only so much one can do to "seal the system". At some point it touches open parts of the OS to do things outside the what is dictated by the rules. They've ratcheted up the technology side as far as they can go for PC/Mac. The next step beyond Warden is to do something DRM and we know how well that goes...

To stop Glider with just technology, they would have to abandon the PC/Mac platforms and retreat to DRM enforced, console style systems. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Sometimes a blanket policy is not good...

[fprintf]

I have never played WoW, finding the monthly fee a bit too steep (and thinking I am too late to join in now anyway). But I used to play Diablo2 a lot. One day I found MapHack, a tool used to light up dungeons, highlight drops and other things. I got very used to playing with it on... so much so, that when Blizzard finally completely banned it and anyone using the tool, the game was almost completely unplayable.

The thing is, that tool was an enhancement to features of the game I found "broken". The first was that the dungeons were almost too dark, and the sight distances ridiculously short even when leveled up. The second was the insame amount of left clicking/mousing - the MapHack tool showed all items so you knew which ones to click on and which ones not to bother with.

Oh well, I was a cheat. Now I don't bother, even though DII was a really fun game for a long time. I have no idea what the WoW experience is like, but have to wonder if there is some baby-out-with-the-bathwater going on at Blizzard when they ban all cheats.

Re:Sometimes a blanket policy is not good...

[IhuntCIA]

Haha ... You call THAT cheating?

Let me tell You something about World of Warcraft cheat plugins. In early days people used plugins that could tell what item monster will drop before they even attack it. There was plugin similar to maphack that You were using, but hey, in MMO You could use that plugin to help your friends. The plugin that pissed me off the most was one that enabled the cheater to roll the highest greed or need every time he wanted, gaining all the important equipment that dropped for example during the group quest in an instance.

I see the MMOGlider as minor annoyance. If people want to play fast and level up fast, let them. The World of Warcraft is not about leveling fast, it is about having the best equipment for the level.

Grinding for the expensive equipment (mounts, enchanted items, rare drops) is boring, and people usually do everything in their power to avoid it. Using unfair or cheating scripts, ninjaing, buying gold and leveling using the payed helpers is nothing new, and it is far worse than automated playing / leveling.

Re:Sometimes a blanket policy is not good...

[duckInferno]

The difference is that UI stuff like the MapHack is "legal" in WoW, via UI mods. Hardcore stuff like cheats that grant levels and money (and let's face it, that's what Glider is when it boils down to it) are banned. If this sounds wierd to you, well, let's agree to disagree :P

What I don't understand

[G00F]

What I don't understand is how shrink wrap licenses is even legal.

There is no signature, there is no proof they saw or agreed to it, there is no one to explain legalese to English with other contracts like when buying a house, and the big one: they only see it after they rightfully own a purchased copy.

Why the hell are these shrink wraps legal and enforceable in courts?

And why does the only gaming company who makes games for me and my friends, such a PITA. I've boycotted them since bnetd, but they are the only ones to make fun games, and games that don't require insane hardware. </RANT>

next?

[steveaustin1971]

Now can someone sue the crap out of the companies that make FPS cheats? I consider them the same as an attack on a server, and the people that use them should be prosecuted as such. We spend alot of money hosting our servers, and theres always some douchebag with an aimbot or commander hack ruining it for everyone.

Re: Computers to beat players

[TaoPhoenix]

Actually, the issue is remarkably similar. Only the enforcement is different.

A: "Leadership of Blizzard is upset that computers are used to get secret advantages".

B: "Leadership of Chess is upset that computers are used to get secret advantages."

For every game there is an unspoken challenge to build an AI to bust it. Some games are easier to crack than others. Checkers is completely toast. WOW is still "only partly broken".

Night Elf Mowhawk Next

[chazman113]

Mr T is going to be next for haxxing he game and creating his night elf mowhawk class

the bot making games bad argument is old

[Satanboy]

I find it funny that people say 'if a game can be botted it must be a bad game'.
People that say this have a very short memory.
What about quake, counterstrike, and unreal tournament?
These games are all FPS and all have had people botting.

Botting has been a scourge to online games for over a decade, wow is just running into the same thing as any other online game, if people think they can get an advantage they will cheat, it's just human nature.

A Strange Game

[MarkGriz]

The only winning move is not to play

Don't invoke Godwin.

[Fross]

I hope you don't take it as offensive that I consider this the inverse of Godwin's Law - mentioning that something (MMOGlider in this case) helps disabled people in such a way that any attack on the program is seen as an attack on disabled people. Actually, I'm not overly bothered if you are offended by it, as it's a rather underhanded argument you're making there.

Your research is also poor, as MMOGlider does not make playing for disabled people easier - the point is that IT PLAYS THE GAME FOR YOU. Anyone can sit there and watch the bot play the game. Running MMOGlider, you're not playing the game, whether you're disabled or not.

The primary audience for MMOGlider is people levelling alts in WoW. When you've seen the content 2, 3 times or more, but you want a 70 of another class, it's a grind. I have 5 70s, I know what I'm talking about ;) (And no, I didn't use any bots). To just grind the levels with a bot makes it less painful than trying to do the now boring 30-58 level span.

That is the badly designed part of the game, that you have to play the low level content of the game again whether you want to or not, if you want an alt. They have tacitly agreed with this, given the next expansion gives you a new class... that you can start at level 55. Arguments above the parent post of "That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game" and the like are particularly ill-informed.

Back to the matter of disabled users and WoW. There are many, many ways to set up the game so those who can only (or even, only want to) mash one button and play the game can do so. It is not the default setting, of course, because most able-bodied people want more of a challenge of coordination. Balancing the requirements of those who want their abilities challenged, versus the requirements of those with challenged abilities, is essentially impossible for most computer games where the interface is so central.

Phrases like "For some reason, however, the WoW designers don't want disabled gamers playing their game" are distasteful, you know fully well the implied discrimination is indefensible. Factually it is inaccurate (hell, I was able to set up one of my characters to be playable only with a 3-button mouse, for instance, including macros to cast spells in sequence using the scroll wheel), both on the customisability of WoW and MMOGlider's suitability to replace the interface. The tone implying that it is an insult to disabled people because it doesn't do what you or someone else wants it to do, is a distortion of political correctness for your own ends, and is foul.

Ultimately, Blizzard is under no legal or other requirement to make the interface to their game function in any particular way. Disabled people should vote with their dollars to buy games that they are able to play. Trying to insist that every single game cater exclusively to their needs is on a par with idiot parents trying to censor the world so their children don't have to deal with any of it.

Re:Don't invoke Godwin.

[duckInferno]

As another with five 70's, I disagree - leveling the character for me is a huge part of it, even if I've done it before. It helps me get in tune with it, to learn its basic play and abilities gradually. Perhaps most of all, by the time it's 70, I've got a good sense of the work that's gone into it which helps me appreciate the character even more. It's kind of like being given $10 vs earning $10.

Re:Don't invoke Godwin.

[Fross]

I agree somewhat, the reason I have all those characters too is I enjoy the levelling more than the endgame grind when you hit 70. However when the content converges pretty strongly onto 2 or 3 routes in some of the middle levels, it's quite tough to just go over the same areas again and again. Levelling the character itself IS fun, but that interminable run from 40-58 where it's almost impossible to get a group for an instance since TBC came out, and you have to do tanaris/feralas/un'goro, or hinterlands/wpl/epl yet again, is too grindy. Hell, it's enough to make you want to do felwood ;)

Re:Don't invoke Godwin.

[duckInferno]

Let's not be hasty now!

I've started up one of those refer-a-friend deals with my flatmate. You should give it a go -- it gives 300% XP for monsters and quests. We were 8 before we left the newbie start area, without trying. We're level 23 now after only 7 hours of play (it'd normally be about a day by now for me) and have skipped a couple of zones. I can get from 40 to 47 in a full saturday session -- with this buff, we'll be able to get from 40-60 in one day no sweat. :)

Re:Don't invoke Godwin.

[Fross]

How long does that last, when you're in a party with that person? And any of your characters on the account?

Re:Don't invoke Godwin.

[duckInferno]

Yeah, you need to be in the same party, +/-4 levels of each other and in "visible" range. It lasts for 90 days and works for any character on either account, until the character hits 60.

So basically that 2-week hardcore session it normally takes someone to get to 60 is cut down to a full-on weekend.

Another cool thing is that the recruitee can give levels to any of the recruiter's chars, equal to the recruitee's level / 2 (goes away if they hit 60). My friend and I are aiming for four level 59's, then an instant level burst from 1 to 59 on two additional characters. Should take about a month. :)

AI

[Krneki]

In the end we will see the first proper AI thanks to games. :)

BBC's Source

[bduranske]

Really frustating. Really frustrating. The BBC article took every fact from my story on this over a day earlier. I know the /. poster has linked to my stuff on this before (I've been covering this from day one) but this one slipped through the cracks. Hazard of being a little guy, I guess, but frustrating to see your stuff used by a big outlet without citation. The BBC guy even refers to me -- at least I suspect so -- as the "some experts" who say that damages could have been higher at trial. What BS. Here's original post: http://virtuallyblind.com/2008/09/29/mdy-blizzard-damages/ Original stipulated damages Order (as PDF) and significantly more in-depth coverage of the backstory there.

Re:BBC's Source

[bduranske]

Unexpectedly, the BBC writer actually responded to my email and apologized. He's adding a retroactive mention to the piece. Would have been nicer to have it there at first, of course, but still, what a class act to own up to it and fix it.

Re:OCZ's Nerual Impluse actuator would help

[Sithdemon]

Actually disabled people now might not need to play games that require few controls. Check out OCZ's Nerual Impluse actuator. It literally uses your thoughts, and some facial expressions to fully control the charecter, even for fast paced games like unreal tournement hands aren't really needed. You can check out user videos on you tube, people are only using the mouse to look around, but apparently you can control that with this too, it's just not as convient.

Seriously look this up, it's not science fiction, I work at a computer store and we sell this for $150 (CAD), there are reviews out there. It's not perfect, but I mean if your disabled this could change your gaming life atleast.