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Blizzard Going After WoW Related iPhone Apps
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently Blizzard is going after developers making iPhone apps for World of Warcraft (free and otherwise) by giving them cease-and-desist orders. As Mike Schramm says 'Blizzard may be planning to do more with the iPhone,' but 'It would be a real shame if Blizzard legal was simply going after fans who have invested a lot of time and effort into these apps even when there's no clear reason for them to do so.'"
It's interesting that they're doing so around the same time a video for a (rumored, alleged, unconfirmed — take your pick) iPhone client for World of Warcraft has been floating around.
They didn't start with this until after people started charging for them.
Less focus on this crap, MORE focus on Star Craft II. The fscking game has was announce over two years ago. I'm still pissed off about the cancellation of Ghost. There is enough revenue coming in on WoW now. Please don't forget about your customers who don't give a damn about WoW. Thank you.
Milking WoW for all it's worth is a fine strategy for a company. But there comes a time when you want to play the game and enjoy it but you can't because fan-based stuff gets shut down, bugs, crashes, oh god the bugs and crashes, lag, and general lack of updates make you sit there waiting in Dalaran all day until you are allowed to "have fun".
2007? WoW has twice as many subscribers as it did at the start of 2007.
From Blizzard's point of view, is it really worth going after? If they put out an official iPhone client, a lot of people are going to drop the (at worst) buggy and (at best) unsupported unofficial clients for the latest and greatest Blizzard one. It's worth more to them to keep their customers happy then to be The Source for an iPhone ap that they'll like;y not even break even on developing and maintaining (since clients themselves are usually, what, free?), unless they plan on charging an arm and a leg for it (above and beyond the other arm and leg it costs your for your monthly fees).
Judging from my past experiences with WowArmory.com, I'd hope they let the alternate sites/software stay up. WowArmory seems to break itself on scripting and suffer lag/loading issues over the years. Whenever it acts up, I just use armorylite.com or other sites that take snapshots of the real WowArmory. It's not "cheating" or "hacking server/character data". But it's a lifesaver when I need to lookup info on a character and the official site is sluggish. Same thing can be said for the offical WoW forums. The search function rarely worked in the past. Everyone I talked to also shared the same experience in that their forum software worked poorly. Why is it that people choose 3rd party mods for displaying Raid Frames, quest trackers, and other things that Blizzard assimilated/copied from older mods? Even though I have to update 3rd party mods myself, they do the job better.
And three times as many juveniles as it did before.
No wonder this country<strike>'s economy</strike> is going into the shitter. It's beacause the post baby boomer youth are frittering away their lives.
Today's word is: descend
That number is about to drop significantly. The company in China running the servers there is about to end its deal with Blizzard.
40-Year Old Virgin: "But officer!! I was two hits from leveling up my Wizard and I didn't have time to stop for the light!!!"
Blizzard has said that the licence has been moved from The9.com to NetEase.com. I don't know how they handle character migration across servers but the game won't disappear completely.
Blizzard is welcome to do with its property whatever it pleases.
In a way Blizzard is no different than the NFL. Heck, the NFL does not let people play with the game statistics halting fantasy league applications.
Fans have to remember that they are just the consumers of someone else's product. It is not about sports. It is not about role playing. It is simply a product that is sold on the market. All you do is buy into it.
Read about trademark laws.
Read about nominative use. If you have developed a product or service Y that is compatible with another company's product or service X, it's OK to say Y is compatible with X as long as you don't imply that the maker of X endorses Y.
In order to maintain their rights on the WoW & Warcraft trademarks, they have to enforce it. That generally leads to Cease & Desist letters.
Not always; it could be a proceed and permit letter.
It's the old story of open approach vs closed one.
I like WoW because it allows me to play it the way I want, but other players hate me because thanks to this I have an advantage over them.
WoW is trying to balance this, but in the pursuit of making more people happy they are limiting others.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
This is old news. Give us something interesting, like the end of Noblegarden, Karatechop's ban, or even whatever the latest nonsense regarding the WoWMatrix/Curse/WoWinterface struggle!
Thanks for the clarification (same anon poster).
Does it matter? I thought all Chinese players already moved to EU/US servers to gold farm.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Being goth is still relevant? Kind of a stupid statement since it is a game that has had continual development over those years.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Some of my friends who still play admit to spending more time playing Peggle or Bejeweled inside of WoW than actually farming or PVP.
People like you just "accepting" this as reality is the only reason it is allowed to continue. Stand up for yourself, recognize bullshit for what it is, call these assholes on it, and refuse to be a good little corporate slave.
Remember, these companies have bought the overreaching copyright/trademark/DMCA laws that benefit them. They deserve no respect.
Karatechop's story was interesting.
My favorite e-drama was with Nihilum/SK-Gaming:
http://serbandsteel.dingblog.com/?loadblog=524&cm=
If you are selling some aimed at WoW expect Blizzard to sue you. If you make something free aimed at WoW and someone starts charging for something similar expect Blizzard to sue you unless they can use the TOU to shut you down. IMO its going to be a while yet before the full impact of MMOGlider is realized.
After the win against WoWGlider in court, Blizzard has gotten alot of air, too much perhaps.
Karatechop == Banned for knowingly and repeatedly cheating. Not that interesting IMO.
IMO this isn't nearly as interesting as the Carbonite thing which, when you look closely, really pushes the limits of what a company can/should be able to do.
Hi. What's your hobby? It sounds like a fucking waste of time to me though, just a preemptive FYI. (No, I don't play WoW, I quit, but I don't use my old WoW time being productive, I entertain myself with other also useless things).
Is the Apple silo so vaulted for the iphone? Isn't this what the Android model can help avoid? Sure, you won't get the program in the marketplace, but you sure can host it in another country where the C&D doesn't mean much and keep on innovating. Umm... Unless Blizzard forgot, these are people who are making free publicity and advertising for their pay application. Wouldn't you want to "integrate" the app into someone's life to ensure that when the time comes to cut the budget in the household, that is one of the last things to be cut? I would figure a better way to do it would be to say "listen, thanks for the free pub... We want it to look a little more like things, OK?" Do that, you get good will AND you get a more readily integrated subscriber who is less reticent about removing the Blizzard line item from his/her budget.
One Token Ring to Rule them All, One Search Engine to Find Them, One WAN to bring them in, and TCP/IP Bind them...
Before I quit I was playing almost exclusively for mount collection... Then they took two reward mounts out with the last patch so I quit. :-/
Well, you seem to forget that this is actually normal for Blizzard. They'll tweak the game until they consider it to be right, and that sometimes means 2 years past the planned release date.
I'm not even saying this as a bad thing. In the end, that's their main secret sauce. They're the guys who would agree with you that balancing the races and the game mechanics isn't just details, it's the game. Most others would (be bullied by the publisher to) shove it out the door now, and maybe patch it later.
I mean, think about it. What did WoW have that, say, EQ2 didn't have, as both launched in the same year? I can't think of anything major that Blizzard invented, other than the "rested xp" bar, and we could debate all evening if that counts as "major". Blizzard simply took the time to polish the turd, so to speak, and it paid off.
What set their RTS apart, since you mention Starcraft II? Make no mistake, Starcraft came out in an age where there were about as many "me too" RTS produced by everyone and their grandma, as there were "me too" FPS. There was everything out there, from fantasy to SF to historical. Again, it seems to me like all Blizzard did was actually give it a good long tweak and polish before it got released.
So I wouldn't be praying for them to do a rush job this time. If they feel that it still needs more tweaking, so be it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
IP is still a blanket evil with the small exception of company names and logos (a la trademark).
simple, this is nothing more than a VPN type of transmission from THEIR LEGAL COPY and their iPhone. Blizzard does not have any legal right to tell them as much as which computer their software.
Just silly and it seems like some department is trying to justify their existence or their pay
Say I write an app that does not use or distrubute any Blizzard content, nor does it use their API. The app does not use "Warcraft" in the name. It might store, calculate or reproduce information related to Wow that I have originated or collected solely from non-Blizzard sources that have already OK'd my use of it.
I cannot see how Blizzard can have any legal case to stop me selling my app.
That would be like McDonalds having a legal right to prevent me from selling my own original hamburger recipe, even though I have never worked for, or signed anything with, McDonalds.
The day Blizzard dies (all companies eventually fall to newer, better competitors) I will not shed a tear. It's sad to me that such an arrogant, litigation happy, customer-bashing company has succeeded as well as it has to this point.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
When the title is "Warcraft Arena Calculator"
This implies that the maker endorses it.
In which case, the proper response is "cease and desist using our trademark in a confusing manner", not "cease and desist developing your product under any name".
why is blizzard so cold? With all the open source development whether it be googles sketchup, or microsoft xna free developing resources, open source is def the way of the future. But blizzard is obviously retarted like many big companies today. can someone please slap me cause im going crazy with all these big companies doing what they want?
Blizzard does not have a clue about customer relations. I play Eve Online and there are a number of player developed applications such as Evemon and Eve Fitting Tool which not only have the name of the game in their title but make use of an API system developed by CCP that allows these apps to connect to the servers and get information such as currently training skills, assets and their locations, the status of research or ship, module or ammunition building jobs, etc. CCP also release a database which contains information on all the ships, modules, etc so that people that create the player made apps can have the correct information for the modules and ships, such as their bonuses, etc. The whole idea is to work with your player base rather than be a bunch of whiny bitches like Blizzard. Players will always try to create apps based around their MMOG. Blizzard should wake up to this and work with their player base (although I bet most of the "players" are nothing more than gold farmers), instead of against it.
The first person that manages to multi-box 5 iPhones running Shamans through arenas wins at WoW.
"Blizzard should wake up to this and work with their player base (although I bet most of the "players" are nothing more than gold farmers), instead of against it."
Oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. There's a small base of legitimate players paying the salaries of millions of gold farmers.
Let's guess 30 cents an hour per worker (just a guess), and the account is used 24 hours a day in shifts, so... $7.20 in wages per day. I'll assume by "most", that you meant 75% of the players are gold farmers, and by players I assume you mean accounts.
75% of 11 million is 8,250,000 accounts. So daily wages will run you $59,400,000.
That means that the remaining 2,750,000 accounts have to pay $21.60 to the gold farmers each and every day.
Naturally that can't be true. So you begin to peel back your variables until you admit the math doesn't work.
Most of the players cannot be gold farmers. Most of them have to be legitimate players.
Officer: "Do you realize how fast you were going?"
40-Year Old Virgin: "But officer!! I was two hits from leveling up my Wizard and I didn't have time to stop for the light!!!"
Officer: "Hits? You're meleeing with your wizard? Stupid nub. Learn to play."
I find it really sad, I would have liked to have tried glidder, it would have made my life simpler, but now I can't even get an Iphone app that at least let's me know when my AH item has been sold...or when I should log on, before I lose that email someone sent me a while back....sheesh.
I've been trying to think of what they can have on an hand held platform that would actually be worthwhile. So far nothing comes to mind except for perhaps watching auction house prices. Anyone have any ideas?
Wow, the system specs must be incredible to run WoW if it will run on an iPhone.
10 million subscribers. Hahahaha. That tells you how dumb people on this planet are getting when 10 million people are dumb enough to get this game and pay $15 a month.
Reasons:
Graphics: This runs on an iPhone. Proof is in the pudding.
Controls: They hacked the controls based off of legacy MMO's like pre-NGE SWG. Now that is pretty bad.
Sound: Ok, they have good sound.
StoryLine: Doesn't really matter. Of all of the WoW players (most of my friends), not one person can tell me the story outside of there being a war between the alliance and the horde (funny how they decided to not do it like warcraft 3 and have alliance races combined instead of just humans).
With how many better MMO's there are out there, the only reason why people play this game is because of how many other people are on it, but they are failing to realize that the game sucks.
And yes, this is coming from a 3 year vet of WoW.
I played WoW on the weekends and was pretty into it when I shifted from SWG to WoW.
Can 10 million people be wrong? Yes, they can.
Play a real game noobs.
I think it's a means by Blizzard to make sure the general public isn't making money off of any of their products, especially WoW. I don't agree however with their decision and I believe that fans making iPhone apps would only increase the overall popularity of WoW or other Blizzard games.