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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.
They better be making a "World of Starcraft" game, otherwise this just reeks of asshattery.
Living With a Nerd
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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...a smart company with plenty of resources like Blizzard/Activation should be saying: "Hey, you guys want a job?"
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
The AI article was quite interesting, on all the various techniques that they had to use to avoid hardcoding exploitable behaviors and use heuristics to obtain desireable emergent behaviors. Fascinating stuff.
Disappointingly, though, the punch line boiled down to "We discovered a tactic that is functionally unbeatable if you have superhuman micro and aren't handicapped by starcraft's(sorry fans) frankly shitty interface". Much of the most interesting AI work was them allowing their team to survive long enough to build the unbeatable mutalisk swarm, along with a little bit to build a threat heat map and a target value map to guide the swarm as it picked the enemy apart.
Essentially, mutalisks' virtues were "balanced" by the fact that their range sucks and they tend to clump, which makes them easy meat for AoE AA attacks. It turns out, if your micro is inhumanly fast, you can break and reform the mutalisk clump fast enough to avoid most AoE attacks while still achieving concentrated fire on high value targets.
It's Starcraft II that they modified - to play like World of Warcraft.
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,
Following the link, no copy of the C&D letter. So we have no idea WTF is going, just the incoherent ramblings of a developer who is whining about not allowed to have anything good. Apparently he e-mailed the tech support department for clarification....
It could be as simple as the legal department scouring the web for the name "Starcraft" - not even knowing there is a tool out there to build mods.
Bottom line, we know nothing at this point. No need to pucker up.
The problem in the RTS genre is that there's *way* too much emphasis put on micro-management. When I write *way*, I really mean **wwaayy** or something like that (jokes welcome).
The fact that so much emphasis is put on micro-management instead of strategy leaves the door to a great many hacks/cheats and also make it easy to write AI beating even top-notch players.
Bring us RTS where the 'S' means something. A lot of people would love it.
Btw, I was highly ranked on Case's ladder at Warcraft II but not in the top 10. Yet my rank was due to me outsmarting my opponents using real strategies. In Warcraft III it became much harder if not impossible (besides a few cheap builds that get rendered useless by the next anti-imba-patch anyway and that anyway aren't "strategies").
So yup, please, bring back the 'S' in RTS...
This is the same company that stomped on people over Starcraft LAN tools long before Activision got in the picture.
That was the wrong link to the result. For a better summary go here.
Blizzard is suing people for a mod that makes one of Blizzard's games, Starcraft 2, more like another one of Blizzard's games, World of Warcraft? How exactly is Blizzard harmed by this; is it causing Blizzard to lose game sales to themselves?
Your description of the cyclical nature of this controversy evokes an image of Blizzard with their own head up their own ass.
So apparently they already had his demo yanked off of youtube, and the above linked youtube video is just a repost - so they are taking it fairly seriously.
I am always amazed on how little forsight is put into legal decisions like this one.
Why don't they just hire the guy, and let him run with it. He clearly has the skillset they are looking for - he made the entire app, demo and produced a bulk of materials by himself. Sounds like he deserves at least an interview with them...
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.
I hate C&D as much as anyone here, but where did the original idea come from? World of Warcraft, by Blizzard, of course. Then from that, it was Everquest. Then various MUDs and MOOs.
The _idea_ is clearly not protected by anyone's laws (IANAL, usual disclaimers etc.), but the name "World of Starcraft" is obviously Blizzard's trademark.
However, if the C&D is not clear about what is the eact violation so that the authors can rectify it, I think Blizzard should be hammered down, maybe even lose that exact name. Such behaviour should not be tolerated anymore.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Well, yes. Remember that StarCraft 2 is something you purchase once and then are finished spending money on, while World of Warcraft requires a monthly subscription.
Have you played Warcraft? Apparently, World of Starcraft is to Starcraft what World of Warcraft is to Warcraft (clever, huh?)
In case you haven't - it's a completely different game in a completely different genre.
The original Warcraft is a realtime strategy game, where you control an army of either orcs or humans, and need to destroy the opposing force through a combination of resource management (macro) and direct control of your trained army units (micro). Warcraft 2 and 3 are sequels.
World of Warcraft is, as you probably know, an MMORPG, set in the world of Warcraft (now you know how they came up with the name too)
Starcraft is Warcraft in a sci-fi setting.