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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.

12 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.

    --
    My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
    1. Re:I miss Blizzard. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Actually, if you read the EULAs surrounding Stacraft 2 map editor, you'll notice that ANYTHING you make becomes property of Blizzard. This jackassery was not unexpected.

    2. Re:I miss Blizzard. by seebs · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I don't think so. I was a WoW player for about 5 years, and they were great about dealing with the community and addressing concerns until a couple of months after the merger. After that, they started doing stupid things about privacy and security on a pretty epic scale; see, for instance, the "Real ID" fiasco.

      And before everyone jumps in with "they backed down!"...

      1. They said in an interview shortly later that they weren't doing that "for the time being". In English, "won't X for the time being" means "will X, but not yet".
      2. In fact, the new forums did display your real name on the screen when you logged in. Just your name, not anyone else's (yet), but... Plain text over the open internet? That's real smart.
      3. They still (last I heard) haven't added any capacity for aliases or handles to the "Real ID" thing.
      4. They still use your login name as your key for inviting people, making it much easier to crack accounts than it used to be.
      5. All of this directly contradicts statements Blizzard had made about privacy or security prior to the merger.

      Net result, I went ahead and wrote to privacy@ and told them to delete all my personal information, because I no longer feel I have justified confidence that they will not, at some unspecified future date, decide to show real names to anyone and everyone. Went from 3 active subscriptions to no chance of ever buying from them again. Very, very, slick relationship management, there.

      I used to know at least a dozen people who played WoW. Now, no one I know who has any kind of security or law background, or even a basic IT background, plays.

      --
      My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
    3. 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:They better... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Funny

    We don't have to care: We made World of Warcraft.

    Hugs and Kisses, Blizzard.

  3. As for the Starcraft AI... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:As for the Starcraft AI... by chemicaldave · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    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.

  4. Re:ummm by Patch86 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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,

  5. Re:When you see something like this... by locallyunscene · · Score: 4, Funny

    In unrelated news Valve has put out an offer to an unnamed independent team to help work on an upcoming also unnamed SciFi Action MMORPG...

  6. 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.

  7. Wrong link. by chemicaldave · · Score: 4, Informative

    That was the wrong link to the result. For a better summary go here.