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.

Comments

Re:I miss Blizzard.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:As for the Starcraft AI...

[chemicaldave]

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.

Your memory betrays you

[orthancstone]

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

Re:I miss Blizzard.

[quanticle]

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.