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World of StarCraft Mod Gets C&D From Blizzard
eldavojohn writes "If you've been following the team who created World of StarCraft (an amazing mod of StarCraft II to be more like World of Warcraft), their YouTube video of what they've done so far has already resulted in a cease and desist from Activision/Blizzard. Evidently when you are given tools to make custom mods to games you should be careful about making something too good. The author of the mod is hopeful that it's just a trademark problem with the name of his mod, but few reasons for the C&D were given."
In other StarCraft news, reader glwtta recommends an article about how a Berkeley team won the world's first StarCraft AI competition with code that can beat even pro-level human players.
It's Starcraft II that they modified - to play like World of Warcraft.
You got that backwards. It's a mod of StarCraft, and it doesn't incorporate ANYTHING from World of Warcraft except the title. (Although I'm pretty sure "World of X" is pretty generic in and of itself.)
Other than the title, this is just a copy of any of a million 3rd person RPGs. I haven't done more than watch the Youtube trailer, so I don't know what the mod-team was promising to do and if any of that would cause problems, but changing the UI and the camera angle on the game doesn't seem to warrant any 'death by lawsuit' threats....unless, as other have surmised, they happen to have a 3rd person RPG in the StarCraft universe planned.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
Nope. They took the tools included with every copy of Starcraft II and used it to make a World of Warcraft-style.
A better analogy would be: they were given a bunch of Legos, then were smacked for putting them together to make the Lego logo.
Living With a Nerd
No. Read TFS, if not TFA.
It was a mod for Starcraft 2. They were making a mod of Starcraft 2 with serious RPG elements (all of which is perfectly reasonable, given the tools that are available) and named their mod "World of Starfcraft" (for obvious reasons).
If the cease and desist is just because their mod name was too close to that of an official Blizzard product, I'm sure this will be a non-story and the mod will continue with a more original name. If the C&D was just because Blizzard don't want RPG elements to be used in a mod for their strategy game, that is some serious arse-hattery,
Having programmed an AI for that same competition, I can assure you that nobody should be surprised an AI can beat a human.
You can find a list of the rules to the competition here. One thing to notice is that there are some glitches that are permitted. Having an AI that can control and make decisions for each individual unit almost at the same time (not really at the same time, the AI still has to go through steps and issue commands sequentially, but it's so fast it might as well be same time) means the AI has a HUUUGE leg up on even the best Starcraft pros whose actions per minute only range in the few hundreds.
All you need to beat a human is to program in strategies that just need the speed of an AI to execute
And if you want to watch some good micro-managment, on that website you can view the final matches between AIs in each tournament here.
That was the wrong link to the result. For a better summary go here.
From TFA: Update: Activision Blizzard has sent a cease and desist notice to YouTube in order to remove the videos showing off the mod. According to various sources, Blizzard's intention is not to stop the project itself, but to protect their properties names, whether they plan to work on a "World of Starcraft" game in the future is anyone's best guess.