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World of StarCraft Mod Gets C&D From Blizzard

Posted by samzenpus on from the imitation-leads-to-litigation dept.

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.

4 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. I miss Blizzard. by seebs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I remember back when Blizzard was an awesome company with great customer service. Well, that, and when the gamers buying their games were the "customers" they were so great to.

    That Activision merger seems to have totally killed the company we used to know. Not that this is totally surprising, mind you, but it's sad. I would guess that this was a matter of the Blizzard company officials not being paranoid enough to check the fine print in their merger deal. Either that, or they were ready to cash out.

    --
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    1. Re:I miss Blizzard. by quanticle · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I remember back when Blizzard was an awesome company with great customer service. Well, that, and when the gamers buying their games were the "customers" they were so great to.

      What timeline were you living in? Blizzard has been known to be quite hostile to modders and independent developers for some time now. Just look at the original map editor for Starcraft. Look at what they did to bnetd. Heck, I'm surprised to no end that the makers of bwapi have been allowed to continue with the project, given that the project relies on hacking the Starcraft client via DLL injection.

      --
      We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
  2. Re:As for the Starcraft AI... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    True; but things like Valkyries and whatever the Zerg AoE aircraft is were introduced in Brood War as a counter. Apparently, with the APS provided by an AI interacting through an API, you can even outrun those.

    Since the competition was AI vs. AI, and the Berkeley guys cleaned up, they obviously deserve kudos; but it is arguably a weakness of Starcraft's design that such a lot of it revolves around high-speed micro. The AIs just make that more blatant.

  3. Your memory betrays you by orthancstone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is the same company that stomped on people over Starcraft LAN tools long before Activision got in the picture.