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Blizzard Wins Legal Battle Against WoW Bot Company

Posted by Soulskill on from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept.

New submitter gamersunited writes with news of Blizzard Entertainment's defeat of another company that created bot software to automate World of Warcraft characters. Ceiling Fan Software faces a judgment of $7 million, and must disable any active licenses for the software. They're also forbidden from transferring or open-sourcing the bot software, and from facilitating its continued use in any way. The court order (PDF) follows more than two years of legal wrangling. Blizzard won a similar judgment a few years ago against another bot company called MDY Industries, which created the popular Glider bot.

7 of 285 comments (clear)

  1. forbidden from transferring or open-sourcing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Only in the US where the ruling was made surely.

    Is it enforceable elsewhere in the world?

    1. Re: forbidden from transferring or open-sourcing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Botting is evil incarnate, and anyone that quits because they can't bot anymore is a welcome loss.

    2. Re: forbidden from transferring or open-sourcing? by flimflammer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I really hate this mentality. An account I had since the game launched became very loosely associated with botters a few months back (I was buying large quantities of herbs for a discount from someone who could have been a botter) and my account was permanently banned a couple weeks later for being associated with botting accounts. There were no blemishes on my account prior, but Blizzard didn't want my money enough to keep my account alive.

      Clearly they do ban users for being in the botting scene (and apparently even those who buy unspecified quantities of materials from bots knowingly or not [guess we're just supposed to know deals are too good to be true or not, even though in retrospect I don't think the deal was that great at all])

      The email they sent me sounded like a joke, at first, or a poor phishing attempt, because it basically seemed to allude to the idea that I didn't personally do anything wrong, but because I was, quote, "associated with World of Warcraft licenses that were closed for participating in exploitative activities", I was a threat that had to be put down as well. At the end they state "Engaging in or associating with exploitative activity violates the World of Warcraft Terms of Use." which means they can and will ban people who simply buy things from bots. I guess I just bought enough herbs from one that finally tripped Blizzard's threshold on my reasonable disbelief that the person wasn't a botter.

      Whatever the case, I no longer have an account I had for 9 years and have spent a great deal of money on the service and supplemental services. If they didn't care about losing my business, I really doubt they care about losing others.

  2. ALl you need to do by geekoid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    is label it an aid for disabled players. Get ADA, Blizzard won't stand a chance.

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  3. Re:Bottable == boring IMO by kwiecmmm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If the gameplay is so simplistic that its bottable, then it's pretty boring to me. Studies have shown NP-hard problems are more fun, because they benefit from our natural ability to quickly choose a good path even if it isn't the absolute best. These kinds of challenges are harder to write bots for. So stop make your games less mindlessly boring and it's a win win for everyone.

    As someone who used to play WoW. I can say that WoW, as most MMORPG's, has many difficult problems to solve in the game. Bots do simple mindless farming, they do not play every aspect of the game or compete against other players in PvP. I ran across a few bots while playing and I can say that they were easy to screw with. You could kill them or you could just kill what they were going to kill, and confuse the software a quite bit.

  4. Re:Bottable == boring IMO by dunezone · · Score: 5, Interesting
    To be fair most of these bots don't do much. Most bots won't go on quests, have conversations with actual people, go on raids, etc, etc. If they did fall into one of those areas the bot would quickly fail.

    If the gameplay is so simplistic that its bottable, then it's pretty boring to me.

    Ever played Fallout, Morrowind, or Skyrim on Xbox/PS3? You level up the sneak attribute by sneaking around which is basically crouching around and walking. People exploited this by putting rubber bands around the controller so the character would continuously crouch walk into a corner. That gameplay mechanic is pretty simplistic yet those games are amazing to play.

  5. Re:Bottable == boring IMO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Actually this isn't true of a good many private bots, I've seen PVP, BG, Coordinated Raids, Raid Assist, Chat AI integration, Shopping, Loot Management, Auction House Automation, and REALLY good nav built from reverse engineering the world geometry + applying dynamic pathing for Dynamic Game Objects (like boats). The ubiquitous high profile bots sucked in general, the really good ones people horde the source and binaries to.

    - Source: Former WoW bot developer from the Pre-WotLK days leveraging the now-defunct ISXWOW innerspace extensions.