Blizzard Sues Starcraft II Cheat Creators

qubezz writes: "TorrentFreak reports that on Monday, Blizzard filed a lawsuit in US District court in California against the programmers behind the popular Starcraft II cheat 'ValiantChaos MapHack.' The complaint seeks relief from 'direct copyright infringement,' 'contributory copyright infringement,' 'vicarious copyright infringement,' 'trafficking in circumvention devices,' etc. The suit seeks the identity of the cheat's programmers, as it fishes for names of John Does 1-10, in addition to an injunction against the software (which remains on sale) and punitive damages. Blizzard claims losses from diminished user experiences, and also that 'when users of the Hacks download, install, and use the Hacks, they directly infringe Blizzard's copyright in StarCraft II, including by creating unauthorized derivative works"."

Comments

Blizzard Shizzard

[Anonymous Coward]

Suing programmers for their creation is a very bad practice. As code is a form of speech, denying someone a freedom of it is against a democratic constitution.

I'd like to see Blizzy sued to bankruptcy for this stupidity. But alas, pigs don't fly now do they?

Re:Blizzard Shizzard

[gl4ss]

they're just suing since despite tying their game to their servers they still haven't figured out the shit enough to not transmit troop positions or map pieces to the client the client shouldn't know about - and they pretend to be serious about competitive online play.

(how come the suit is not for people who actually cracked the copy protection??)

(in other news this would make "unauthorized mods" illegal)

Re:Blizzard Shizzard

[Adriax]

Last I checked WoW had a system that effectively merged servers by adding automatic cross-server gameplay to low pop servers. So your character from low pop server #1 would actually be playing on low pop server #2 in some or all zones so you would have other people to play with.
They decided on this because the idea of them actually merging servers to reduce host footprint would spark a massive panic as The One True MMO all others aspire to replace would be in perceived death spiral.

Personally I expect there is a little more to the cross server feature than they're letting on, and eventually the part that differentiated players by their server ( in chat) will be set to fake that info and many servers will actually be fully merged at that point.
All it would take is an extra field in the server database to denote which fake server their character is a member of and adding a check to the "server first" achievements to respect those groups.
Not only would that let them avoid the whole "OMG WoW is dying!!!" panic from the fanboys while actually cutting underused hardware, but paid server moves become even more of a cash grab as in many cases it would be a quick field switch in a single server's database.

Re:Blizzard Shizzard

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about latency and responsiveness, and client side prediction, and the fact that both clients have to be in perfect sync. It has nothing to do with computational complexity. Consider the Terran ability to scan any part of the map to reveal units. That information has to be almost instantly available to the scanning player regardless of the number of units revealed. If the other player had their entire army in that location along with some buildings, it would take a long time to transmit all of that data to the other player. If you've watch professional SC1/SC2 players play, you'd realize that any responsiveness delay longer than something like 50ms would be considered glacially slow. Sending the position and full state of over 200 units and a dozen buildings would just not be possible in time.

Also, to minimize network latency and bandwidth usage, the game currently never sends a full state to either player. It always only sends state changes/updates. It was designed *specifically* to avoid having to do something like a full state dump that would be required if clients only had the information regarding revealed or visible units from the opponent. This also helps minimize or reduce desyncs because it's easier to do rollbacks.

They could design a totally different game from the ground up. One where it's assumed both sides have perfect information, like chess, or one where a reveal of hidden information would not be subject to lag or bandwidth (e.g. a game with very limited numbers of units, or a set of known possible unit configurations, again like chess with a fog of war added), but at that point you've designed a completely different game, and that game is not StarCraft.

Re:Blizzard Shizzard

[gl4ss]

they certainly have the money to run it on server(and still be on profit about the game).

it's just something that would need in the development phase a totally different attitude to creating the product instead of going about it like it was 1995. it would also save bandwidth for them to do it properly - and may I remind you this is the company that still pretends being tied to playing Diablo 3 only when connected to the servers is essential for making the "complex" gameplay _possible_ and was not done for the sole reason of fighting piracy(which it was, the game was intentionally made to depend on the servers just for sake of generating drops for the pay-real-money-to-feel-like-a-winner auction house).

I mean seriously, the game logic part of the game is not that complex. it's essentially the same game as warcraft 2 when it comes to troop amounts and how complex the troop rules are - it certainly would not have been too complex for their budget to include a mode where data irrelevant to the client would not have been transferred from the server to the client thus making it impossible to build a map cheat or traffic analyzers to show where the troops are for sake of cheating on online playing.

*(and who the fuck would pay for offline single player cheat?)

blizzard have always been fucks about this and you can go to slashdot archives going back way more than a decade to find shit about them suing people for making software other devs would praise for having been created...(bnet sue days. but those were also sued because they were already positioning battle.net as an antipiracy device to take away value from paid customers)

Re:Blizzard Shizzard

[darkwing_bmf]

Diablo 3 is better now. Or so I've heard. I was gifted it and its expansion not long ago and it's just as fun as the first two but with better graphics and sound.

Re: Blizzard Shizzard

[Charliemopps]

It's cheating, whether it's in the form of software, or a cash bribe to the refs. I think cheating is worth very little in terms of free speech value.

Lucky for us, you don't get to decide what is free speech. I hate cheating, and blizzard should definitely do something about it. But trying to control what other people do? No... this is a game. It's not worth harming my constitutional freedoms just so you can be less annoyed.

Blizzard should handle this in the code. It's not that hard. 10 years ago I remember hearing at a conference about on-line gaming "If their client has the data, they have the data. You cannot trust the client, ever." It's as true now as it was then.

Re:Blizzard Shizzard

[sexconker]

Too expensive to transmit the entire state of the game at every time step. Here's an interesting MSc thesis on the exact problem where he tries to use movement prediction and compression in RTS network play:

https://skatgame.net/mburo/ps/thesis_orsten_2011.pdf

You don't transmit the entire state of the game.
You transmit only the state of each entity that is newly visible, per client, and any visible actions taken on visible entities by other clients.

For each client x. do {
For each entity y, do {

set visible = VisibilityCheck(x,y)
if visible == 1 && y.lastVisible[x] == 0
    sendEntityToClient(y,x)
else if visible == 0 && y.lastVisible[x] == 1
    hideEntityFromClient(y,x)
y.lastVisible[x] = visible

}
}

Note that hiding an entity from the client just makes sure a properly-behaving client knows to make the unit disappear gracefully - a badly behaving client will simply receive no updates to it, and all actions will be thrown out by the servers, (targeting, etc.) during validation. So you don't need to spend any effort on it - just have the server keep track of the last visibility per entity per client and send a "hide entities {y1,y2,y3,y4}" message to each client, as appropriate. A misbehaving client that chooses to ignore that message gains no advantage.

Showing the entity involves sending its entire state - position, heading, action, health, whatever. But note that you only need to send the full state for entities that are NEWLY visible - the client can calculate the new state for all visible entities (that were also visible on the last frame) on its own. It just needs to know any visible actions taken on the target by another player.

The only "hard" part here is the VisibilityCheck function that determines if a given entity is visible to a given client. You just compute the vision map for a given client and then check each entity against it. The more entities and clients there are, the more work this is. But in a game like SC2 where you have unit caps, small maps, and a low game fps, it's not an issue. There's tons of optimization you can do like checking entities in an intelligent order, lowering the resolution of the fog of war vs the map's full resolution, gridding the map and skipping all entities in a given grid for a client if that client has no vision of that grid, etc.

Plenty of games handle it properly.

Re:Blizzard Shizzard

[jonwil]

I used to be an avid Diablo 2 player and LOVED that game.

The problem with Diablo 3 (in addition to the always-on DRM and various general bad things Activision Blizzard have done) was that they took too many of the good things out and kept too many of the bad things in (e.g. the way they changed how potions and healing and such worked so that you couldn't just go into town and buy 50 healing potions before tackling the next big monster)

I ended up switching to The Elder Scrolls and have found Oblivion to be a better game than anything Blizzard ever made.
Plus, Bethesda (even counting the Occulus Rift lawsuit) has a long way to go before they are as evil and bad as Activision Blizzard.

Re:Blizzard Shizzard

[BilI_the_Engineer]

It's not reductive; it's the truth. The player isn't accessing confidential information on someone else's computer, or doing anything of the sort. They're merely handling information the server voluntarily sends to them in a different way than most clients do so they can have an advantage over others. It's absurd to sue someone over this, let alone the person who merely made the software.

If we want to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave," Blizzard better get told to fuck right off.

Re:Blizzard Shizzard

[Anonymous Coward]

Go the extreme and call it 2048 entities * 8 players * 32 bytes per entity. 512 KB to each client. Assuming no compression. It's not a problem.

Bandwidth wise it is not a problem until you consider latency. To transmit that 512kb to a player in 1s, that player requires a connection speed of 512kb/s or ~8.5-9mbit/s. 1s of latency is horrible, especially in a rts where you can lose vital units/buildings in that time. So we want to get it as quick as possible, 80mbit/s to get that 512kb of data within 50ms.
Compression could help, you should be able to get that 512kb of data down to less then half its size which would reduce the required bandwidth to 40mbit/s but that is still much higher then the average person's net speed.
TL;DR;
512kb of data may not seem like much but to transmit it quick enough to useful ( 50ms) you need a connection speed of over 80mbit per second (quite reasonable to assume in South Korea). Using compression would help but then you may run into problems with overloading the server.

Re:Blizzard Shizzard

[Imrik]

Something seriously wrong with your math there; 150 APM is about 2.5 actions per second or one action per 400ms.

Re:Blizzard Shizzard

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing of concern is your ping. Pros will be on a LAN anyway and the rest of us don't even notice the ping.

You missed the shitstorm when the pros realized that Blizzard didn't add LAN support to SC2 because they wanted to lock in people to Battlenet.

Reverse engineering is legal

[Anonymous Coward]

The maphack creators almost assuredly have to reverse engineer some SC2 code and implement it them selves. They are then selling it, they deserve to be sued by Blizzard.

You appear not to know that reverse engineering is legal.

As long as they're not selling Blizzard's own code, there is no copyright issue in writing something that interacts with that code using knowledge gained from reverse-engineering.

It's precisely to allow such interoperation that reverse engineering is a protected activity.

Blizzard claims losses from diminished user exp

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Blizzard did plenty on their own to diminish user experience on many of their new games.

Just inept program design by Blizzard

[Anonymous Coward]

This can be explained very simply even to people with no technical knowledge ... lawyers for example.

The memory in your computer belongs to you. If Blizzard's game writes troop positions into your computer's memory, reading those positions is your right as the owner of this equipment --- after all, it's a pattern of bits in memory owned by you. No company can disallow you access to the equipment that you own. They don't own it, you do.

Everything else in this case hinges on that fact. The Blizzard programmers created this problem themselves through incompetent design. Information which should not be known by a player should never be stored on the player's machine.

Re:Am i the onyl one who hates cheaters ingame?

[Oligonicella]

No. I think banning is sufficient, but otherwise I share your sentiments. Cheaters are lazy, incompetent players, pure and simple.

Re:Am i the onyl one who hates cheaters ingame?

[mwvdlee]

Cheaters may be dicks, but are they copyright infringers?

Re: Game fairness

[mwvdlee]

What are you illegally copying by applying a cheat?

Re: Game fairness

[MartinSchou]

When you apply a cheat like this, you are altering the game into game+cheat. This game+cheat is a derivative work of the original game.

Making derivative works without permission from the copyright holder is a violation of most copyright laws, and you won't get permission from Blizzard to make this kind of derivative work.

That seems to be the legal argument.

Doesn't suprise me.

[Vermifax]

Doesn't surprise me at all, they already won this same type of lawsuit against cheat programmers for World of Warcraft.

Re:Game fairness

[Isaac Remuant]

the amount of gamers who are willing to forget the law and their best interests (and specially in a supposedly hacker friendly community like slashdot) for the sake of "punishing those cheaters that ruin my fun" is staggering.

With people like this, who don't know what's best for all of us, it's no wonder we fucked again and again by politicians.

open battlenet

[SumDog]

Anyone remember open battlenet? Idiot judge in that case shut down the totally open-source, non-commerical open battle net server which allowed people to run their own private Startcraft/Warcraft servers on their own private networks. Sure it could allow people to play others without a valid serial number, but it opened up another very interesting legal question: can certain software be considered illegal?

Fuck Blizzard.

It's not cheaters killing SC2...

[HockeyPuck]

...It's Blizzard and their lack of willingness to properly balance the game.

Protoss has no repercussions for doing any of a dozen types of proxy or "all-in" openings.

Bad analogy

[Camael]

The memory in your computer belongs to you. If Blizzard's game writes troop positions into your computer's memory, reading those positions is your right as the owner of this equipment --- after all, it's a pattern of bits in memory owned by you. No company can disallow you access to the equipment that you own. They don't own it, you do.

Not true. Let me illustrate this with another analogy.

This gun you bought legally belongs to you. Firing your gun is your right as the owner of this equipment --- after all, the gun is owned by you. No one can disallow you the use of equipment that you own. They don't own it, you do.
To test that belief, bring that gun to the nearest supermarket, fire it and see what happens.

My point is that ownership rights are, unfortunately, not absolute. For example, note the DMCA restrictions and how they affect products that belong to you.

Re:Bad analogy

[bytestorm]

Despite being in the running for the worst analogy ever, let's go with this.

You own the gun. Blizzard mails you bullets and invites you to their shooting range. You take the bullets and gun to the range and shoot them however you please as long as you follow the range rules. You bring sandbags and a bench to shoot straighter in competition without telling Blizzard. Blizzard sues the sandbag and bench makers because you cheated.

Re: Game fairness

[goose-incarnated]

When you apply a cheat like this, you are altering the game into game+cheat. This game+cheat is a derivative work of the original game.

Making derivative works without permission from the copyright holder is a violation of most copyright laws, and you won't get permission from Blizzard to make this kind of derivative work.

That seems to be the legal argument.

While it is indeed a derivative work it doesn't become a copyright violation until you redistribute the derivative work. Big distinction there. You can modify copyrighted works all you want, you just aren't allowed to redistribute without a license. I'd be interested in seeing how this turns out considering that the lawyers for the defence is almost certainly going to ask "Where's the redistribution happening?"