From time to time, I consider whether we should start building our own wireless mesh intranets. If we pool our resources and create a filesharing network, it would be just like the internet, but with the/freedom/. Out here in the desert with no broadband, even a small one would be an incredible resource. Heck, it is suprising that I can see the neighbor's access point 500 feet away.
Arena.net, the makers of Guild Wars, was started by the three main programmers of Blizzard South. They did not originate from Blizzard North. Now they may have hired some Ex-Blizz North guys after they were dissolved, I don't know.
You totally missed the point. I said that a tunnel is all that is required to play some of the blizzard games over the internet. If there is no "challenge" to use this sort of "lan" then playing multiplayer is no challenge at all. Battle.net was not meant to be a form of copy protection regardless of their ability to blacklist keys. If it were that easy to just set up a tunnel, (which Kali, zone, and friends all did legally by the way) then bnetd was useless. The only thing the bnetd authors wanted was the interface.
I found this same idea on Usenet under the Babylon 5 newsgroup "The Buttered Cat Principle" in 1996. So it must be true. Unfortunately I don't think you can patent it now.
Second, as it is installed it in no way would assist in cheating in WoW. A third party can take advantage of what it does do. In other words Sony is not shipping this DRM software with the primary intent to enable cheating in WoW.
While we are talking about blizzard, lets go back to similar incident in blizzard's past. Bnetd, as written, did not support the Warcraft III beta. The authors of bnetd did not want to support the beta and the intent of bnetd was not to support pirating. Some third party (warforge) took the bnetd source, extended for the Warcraft III beta, and it enabled playing of the pirate copy of the beta that was going around. By your logic, the third party that enabled Sony's rootkit to be used to hide the cheats should be sued. By blizzard's logic, bnetd was sued, not the warforge people. Blizzard sued the people who created the original tool that had no bad intentions. If blizzard sticks to their priniciples, they will sue Sony.
But I don't believe blizzard has any morals in regard to their decision to sue bnetd, therefore, they won't sue Sony. And the cheating and pirating continues...
Re:Why is Vivendi/Blizzard worthy of Slashdot?
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Blizzcon Writeup
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They didn't shut down freecraft. The lead maintainer left and others picked up the project. It's now named stratagus.
I remember the lead developer of Bnetd saying the same thing as the freecraft maintainer, he was done with supporting blizzard products. So the lawsuit was meant nothing, more like a facade over suing the ISP of bnetd. Of course fair use rights are gone. But the same thing that happened with freecraft a year later happen with bnetd earlier, somebody else picked it up. Bnetd still exists.
So all around, these threats and lawsuits have meant nothing but one thing. Why are these developers up forgetting about blizzard? It's the community -- something about 12 year olds up and all whining to blizzard, discovering *some* people playing online with pirated games and *some* people playing a game that looks like War2. Nothing to do with having an alternative server that actually works, and having an engine that works on an alternative OS. So it's all about being backstabbed by twelve year olds who think they should be proactive and over protective of a company they idolize, and the rest of us are doing it for fun, but suddenly there is no fun it it. *That* is why these developers gave up. That is *why* there is a boycott. It's a matter of prinicple -- it's just a game and it doesn't matter.
(PS Bnetd is not a mechanism to playing pirated games. You can play online all you want using a tunnel (which zone, heat, kali, won, all used, legally), which is much simpler and requires no reverse engineering. All the bnetd people wanted was an alternative to/battle.net/ when it was always laggy *and* have the same match-making services. The copy protection is already broken anyway when some one can run the game, so bnetd broke no protection. CD-KEYs are a joke, and installers fail to be strict about them anyways. You could argue that it was against EULA, but really think, if you had the game, does it matter? It doesn't!)
By that logic, you could call blizzard's own installer a method at circumvention. With it's loose checking and a generator, you can get the program to install the game without any fuss. Now that's the DMCA violation your looking for. Now the copyright infringer can go on and play online using a tunnel a simulate a LAN where is doesn't and cannot ever check the CD-KEY. I don't see where bnetd is a problem here, but the game itself allows it.
(Hint: there is no such thing as copy protection, only lame attempts. The only thing that exists is the EULA and goodwill of the user. True, bnetd is against the EULA, but you cannot argue it as a violation of the DMCA when the system was already broken. The only thing we have therefore is goodwill of the people and blizzard has made millions from it to show.)
You don't know what a copy protection scheme is if you think Battle.net was one.
All battle.net was, was a game match-making service. It only came out after the lawsuit that they said it was any different. But in reality there are only two types of copy protection.
1) CD-KEY 2) A very convuluted method of checking if the disk is in the drive.
To pirate a copy of the game all you need to do is 1) Copy the game 2) Obtian a sufficiently working key 3) Apply a no cd crack
That's it. You can play multiplayer, single player all you want. YOU DON'T NEED BNETD, YOU NEVER DID. It's a lie that bnetd enabled pirating.
All battle.net did was check to make sure you weren't logged in twice, that doesn't constitute any towards a protection--although back when bnetd was written, battle.net allowed more than one connection because how buggy it was. Battle.net could check for modified executables, but that can by bypassed by more crafty methods, but that's besides the point because you don't need to connect to battle.net or bnetd to play the game.
If all people cared about was playing online, then all is required is a/tunnel/. Yes, it is simpler than you could even think. That was what zone.com, heat.net, and kali used (last of which got some people jobs at blizzard). Then why go through all the work of reverse engineering the battle.net prototcol if the ability to play online is already there? Question two, how do I play online if battle.net doesn't work? Question three, how can I form a community of players? It's because the bnetd authors got the idea, why not use the existing facilities of battle.net and provide alternate servers. That how we can use the match-making capabilities and provide a server that works when blizzard's doesn't. That would make reverse engineering the protocol worthwhile. The bnetd authors weren't in it for pirating, they were doing it because they wanted to play online.
You could argue that the EULA prevents it, but you must consider once again, they weren't pirating the game and they weren't a mechanism for pirating the game. So all we have here is an obscure contract fight that accomplished nothing except destroyed our rights at the point of sale. Point proven is that there are still people pirating the games anyways, bnetd and several derivatives still exist (after all, bnetd never worked with Warcraft 3). But there are a few less blizzard customers.
Even though I support wine, I think you've chosen the right route. I think there is no point of buying a "linux port" that is technichally no different the the windows version. Therefore, since I use linux, I prefer a real linux port. Hope for much success for you guys. =)
True, old blizzard games had accessible offline content, but those were released before DRM and activation. And true WoW, fits the model of it's genre. However, future games blizzard will release will most undoubtably require some type of online activation to access it's offline content -- a la steam.
Wrong. The GPL is not a use license. You may reject the GPL and still use the software in standard copyright fashion. The only thing the GPL gives you is a right to redistribute. Copyright law gives the right to control redistribution only to the copyright owner.
When you buy a linux CD, you own the linux CD, you own the bits on the CD, but you cannot redistribute because the software is copyrighted only unless you make an agreement with the copyright owner -- that is the GPL. When you don't agree to the GPL, you don't lose your right to access it; only the right to redistribute -- which is clearly stated by law.
Guild Wars was written by Arena.NET, which was started by the three main blizzard south programmers, who did Warcraft II and Starcraft. They are also largely responsible for Warcraft III, and the client for WoW -- they wrote the 3D engine.
Diablo is from Blizzard North, I believe some credit goes to Bill Roper for its success.
Media players are just fine in linux, it's just that none of the big distros are brave enough to include one with a working configuration. I suggest you try slackware with maybe Xine. I don't think Pat would cripple a package like other distros. I don't use Xine but MPlayer so I don't know how it works. Compiling MPlayer with GUI support is easy. Last time I checked MPlayer requires GTK1, not GTK2 -- there's a difference.
This is just confusing -- the article briefly mentions the same thing: "Now the Bush administration must decide whether to order the National Weather Service to make taxpayer-funded weather readings freely available on the Net, ignoring complaints from an industry trade group that doing so violates pre-Internet era agreements."
Eh? Isn't the information already free? Go to the NWS website. Everything is all there -- I visit it all the time. Seems like the decision has already been made, and the trade groups are arguing after the fact. Who cares if violates an agreement -- it's their right to change it? What does the Bush Administration have anything to do with this when the decision has already been made?
Instability of the servers at Starcraft's release?
Yes. I take it you weren't there then.
Isn't bnet just used as a way to arrange games? Aren't the games of *craft hosted on one of the players box?
Yes and no. I'll briefly describe the evolution of battle.net. First off, let's be clear that both Diablo and Starcraft network games are hosted from someone's machine. The only way to initiate a match was to connect through battle.net, or over IPX. The games don't allow entering addresses. Diablo 2 does allow IP connections, but I don't expect that to occur in future as they think their product's copy protection depends on battle.net. In Diablo 2, there was what was a called a closed realm. The games are actually hosted on battle.net, and characters are saved there too. The open games can be played over battle.net or straight IP. Blizzard must have thought that closed would be what most people would play anyways, because it prevented easy cheating. Actually, I do think most people did play some of closed. Though there was alot of cheating on closed anyway, despite blizzard's hope.
Diablo was released in 1997. There was internet gaming already going on, but for whatever reason it wasn't too common. I'm pretty sure initial predictions on server requirements were underestimated. 7,000 people on a typical day was pretty phenomenal. And you have to take into consideration this was blizzard's first attempt into hosting a match-making themselves. The servers were without doubt laggy throught the first year.
Starcraft was released in 1998. In preperation for the release, blizzard expanded battle.net and ran a battle.net beta. However, when the game hit the stores, they sorely underestimated their success. In the first few days, 30k, then the first few months, 70k, 80k people. By then end of the year, 250k, and in '99 the average was well over 300k. This is stark in contrast with Diablo, which probably didn't do as well as it could have if it wasn't for the cheating.
In preparation of Diablo 2, alot more was done. Diablo 2 really meant they would do alot of the game hosting. They decided to split battle.net into regions "realms" around the world. Before, 300k people would be connected basically to the same network. They had servers already in other countries, but they communicated back and forth, sharing data. With those high numbers, and the problem with intercontinental communications, 300k is killer ever today. After splitting battle.net into realms, they performed a 100k stress beta test on a sample realm to make sure everything is ok at the initial release. Well, when the game hit stores, they exceed 100k in a weeks time for a single realm. They soon hit 200k, and 300k, for each realm!! And what happened isn't too suprising: They sold about 1 million copies and everyone of them were logging onto battle.net to play their closed characters. Sure they greatly expanded capacity, but the gamers filled it right up again. It seems they underestimated the numbers. What made it worse, is when one realm was brought down, everyone would jump on another realm bringing that one down too. So Diablo 2 was wrought with constant downtime too.
Warcraft 3 was a bit different. It's release did not make a terribly big splash in numbers of sales, comparing to before. And many starcraft players did not buy the game. But the ones that did, *stopped* playing starcraft to play War3. So in a sense, Starcraft players turned into War3 players on battle.net For the most part, blizzard was able to handle essentially the same amount of capacity. Also, War3 hit big with Warforge... (er because of the beta), and there were many legitimate game owners even playing on it just because there were already lots of people there. Many stuck with the alternative servers, well, many reasons!
WoW is no different because blizzard pretty much beat even the best expectations for an MMO at this time. Maybe, they will get it sorted out, but this time they will know through paying, or not paying, customers.
Remember Starcraft? The instability of the servers at Starcraft's release prompted the development of bnetd. Yet, there are now thousands of fanboys saying that bnetd was only for stealing. Maybe now some of them actually see the pain. I spent hours just trying to connect with Diablo.
At the time these games came out, the only way blizzard offered a way to play on the internet with these games was battle.net. Kind of defeated the point of buying the game for multiplayer. Of course there was modem, which some War2 veterans did in the ancient days (with people in the neighborhood huh!), but that's only 2 player. Then there was kali, which provided a type of IPX tunnel. Which, I might mention, kali got a few kids jobs at blizzard. Of course something like Kali would be against the TOS today, despite it was *OK* by blizzard back in the day.
So with the shutdown of bnetd, I only despise companies like blizzard. It did nothing. Only put out the talented people that created it.
I also think that it is still ironic that people are actually paying for WoW, yet they are still having server trouble. Although it's not terrible, but I have still heard there have been problems with the servers from friends. Taking the game off the shelf is a way to slow this problem, but I think it will continue until this MMO loses interest, which will ultimately happen.
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Some of us use DRI from dri.sourceforge.net. It will work fine with Xgl.
From time to time, I consider whether we should start building our own wireless mesh intranets. If we pool our resources and create a filesharing network, it would be just like the internet, but with the /freedom/. Out here in the desert with no broadband, even a small one would be an incredible resource. Heck, it is suprising that I can see the neighbor's access point 500 feet away.
Arena.net, the makers of Guild Wars, was started by the three main programmers of Blizzard South. They did not originate from Blizzard North. Now they may have hired some Ex-Blizz North guys after they were dissolved, I don't know.
Win95 Release A could run on 4 MB + swap, and did not have IE. IE did exist in '95 but was excluded from Win95's release.
Win95 Release B ('96) did include IE 3.0, so it ran with 8 MB + swap.
Win95 Release C ('97) is basically B + IE 4.0. So you really needed 16 MB + swap.
And what I mean with ram + swap minimums, it ran, but it would have been slow because it will need to use the swap.
Bnetd never worked with Warcraft III. You're talking about Warforge which was strangly the ones not sued.
You totally missed the point. I said that a tunnel is all that is required to play some of the blizzard games over the internet. If there is no "challenge" to use this sort of "lan" then playing multiplayer is no challenge at all. Battle.net was not meant to be a form of copy protection regardless of their ability to blacklist keys. If it were that easy to just set up a tunnel, (which Kali, zone, and friends all did legally by the way) then bnetd was useless. The only thing the bnetd authors wanted was the interface.
Prior art!
I found this same idea on Usenet under the Babylon 5 newsgroup "The Buttered Cat Principle" in 1996. So it must be true. Unfortunately I don't think you can patent it now.
Second, as it is installed it in no way would assist in cheating in WoW. A third party can take advantage of what it does do. In other words Sony is not shipping this DRM software with the primary intent to enable cheating in WoW.
While we are talking about blizzard, lets go back to similar incident in blizzard's past. Bnetd, as written, did not support the Warcraft III beta. The authors of bnetd did not want to support the beta and the intent of bnetd was not to support pirating. Some third party (warforge) took the bnetd source, extended for the Warcraft III beta, and it enabled playing of the pirate copy of the beta that was going around. By your logic, the third party that enabled Sony's rootkit to be used to hide the cheats should be sued. By blizzard's logic, bnetd was sued, not the warforge people. Blizzard sued the people who created the original tool that had no bad intentions. If blizzard sticks to their priniciples, they will sue Sony.
But I don't believe blizzard has any morals in regard to their decision to sue bnetd, therefore, they won't sue Sony. And the cheating and pirating continues...
They didn't shut down freecraft. The lead maintainer left and others picked up the project. It's now named stratagus.
/battle.net/ when it was always laggy *and* have the same match-making services. The copy protection is already broken anyway when some one can run the game, so bnetd broke no protection. CD-KEYs are a joke, and installers fail to be strict about them anyways. You could argue that it was against EULA, but really think, if you had the game, does it matter? It doesn't!)
I remember the lead developer of Bnetd saying the same thing as the freecraft maintainer, he was done with supporting blizzard products. So the lawsuit was meant nothing, more like a facade over suing the ISP of bnetd. Of course fair use rights are gone. But the same thing that happened with freecraft a year later happen with bnetd earlier, somebody else picked it up. Bnetd still exists.
So all around, these threats and lawsuits have meant nothing but one thing. Why are these developers up forgetting about blizzard? It's the community -- something about 12 year olds up and all whining to blizzard, discovering *some* people playing online with pirated games and *some* people playing a game that looks like War2. Nothing to do with having an alternative server that actually works, and having an engine that works on an alternative OS. So it's all about being backstabbed by twelve year olds who think they should be proactive and over protective of a company they idolize, and the rest of us are doing it for fun, but suddenly there is no fun it it. *That* is why these developers gave up. That is *why* there is a boycott. It's a matter of prinicple -- it's just a game and it doesn't matter.
(PS Bnetd is not a mechanism to playing pirated games. You can play online all you want using a tunnel (which zone, heat, kali, won, all used, legally), which is much simpler and requires no reverse engineering. All the bnetd people wanted was an alternative to
By that logic, you could call blizzard's own installer a method at circumvention. With it's loose checking and a generator, you can get the program to install the game without any fuss. Now that's the DMCA violation your looking for. Now the copyright infringer can go on and play online using a tunnel a simulate a LAN where is doesn't and cannot ever check the CD-KEY. I don't see where bnetd is a problem here, but the game itself allows it.
(Hint: there is no such thing as copy protection, only lame attempts. The only thing that exists is the EULA and goodwill of the user. True, bnetd is against the EULA, but you cannot argue it as a violation of the DMCA when the system was already broken. The only thing we have therefore is goodwill of the people and blizzard has made millions from it to show.)
You don't know what a copy protection scheme is if you think Battle.net was one.
/tunnel/. Yes, it is simpler than you could even think. That was what zone.com, heat.net, and kali used (last of which got some people jobs at blizzard). Then why go through all the work of reverse engineering the battle.net prototcol if the ability to play online is already there? Question two, how do I play online if battle.net doesn't work? Question three, how can I form a community of players? It's because the bnetd authors got the idea, why not use the existing facilities of battle.net and provide alternate servers. That how we can use the match-making capabilities and provide a server that works when blizzard's doesn't. That would make reverse engineering the protocol worthwhile. The bnetd authors weren't in it for pirating, they were doing it because they wanted to play online.
All battle.net was, was a game match-making service. It only came out after the lawsuit that they said it was any different. But in reality there are only two types of copy protection.
1) CD-KEY
2) A very convuluted method of checking if the disk is in the drive.
To pirate a copy of the game all you need to do is
1) Copy the game
2) Obtian a sufficiently working key
3) Apply a no cd crack
That's it. You can play multiplayer, single player all you want. YOU DON'T NEED BNETD, YOU NEVER DID. It's a lie that bnetd enabled pirating.
All battle.net did was check to make sure you weren't logged in twice, that doesn't constitute any towards a protection--although back when bnetd was written, battle.net allowed more than one connection because how buggy it was. Battle.net could check for modified executables, but that can by bypassed by more crafty methods, but that's besides the point because you don't need to connect to battle.net or bnetd to play the game.
If all people cared about was playing online, then all is required is a
You could argue that the EULA prevents it, but you must consider once again, they weren't pirating the game and they weren't a mechanism for pirating the game. So all we have here is an obscure contract fight that accomplished nothing except destroyed our rights at the point of sale. Point proven is that there are still people pirating the games anyways, bnetd and several derivatives still exist (after all, bnetd never worked with Warcraft 3). But there are a few less blizzard customers.
Even though I support wine, I think you've chosen the right route. I think there is no point of buying a "linux port" that is technichally no different the the windows version. Therefore, since I use linux, I prefer a real linux port. Hope for much success for you guys. =)
Sadly, for Direct3D, it would be a struggle to port and work right. Don't worry, though, we're working on it. =)
Yeah, you're not the only one with 24Kbit/s... Me too. I want coverage too but it aint gonna happen!
True, old blizzard games had accessible offline content, but those were released before DRM and activation. And true WoW, fits the model of it's genre. However, future games blizzard will release will most undoubtably require some type of online activation to access it's offline content -- a la steam.
Starcraft/Warcraft III supports UDP play. But it doesn't allow you to specify an IP address.
Wrong. The GPL is not a use license. You may reject the GPL and still use the software in standard copyright fashion. The only thing the GPL gives you is a right to redistribute. Copyright law gives the right to control redistribution only to the copyright owner.
When you buy a linux CD, you own the linux CD, you own the bits on the CD, but you cannot redistribute because the software is copyrighted only unless you make an agreement with the copyright owner -- that is the GPL. When you don't agree to the GPL, you don't lose your right to access it; only the right to redistribute -- which is clearly stated by law.
Can you switch the license for free, or do you have to purchase an upgrade or something?
Guild Wars was written by Arena.NET, which was started by the three main blizzard south programmers, who did Warcraft II and Starcraft. They are also largely responsible for Warcraft III, and the client for WoW -- they wrote the 3D engine.
Diablo is from Blizzard North, I believe some credit goes to Bill Roper for its success.
Media players are just fine in linux, it's just that none of the big distros are brave enough to include one with a working configuration. I suggest you try slackware with maybe Xine. I don't think Pat would cripple a package like other distros. I don't use Xine but MPlayer so I don't know how it works. Compiling MPlayer with GUI support is easy. Last time I checked MPlayer requires GTK1, not GTK2 -- there's a difference.
Why don't you try DRI with your radeon mobility. From what I've read, it works...
This is just confusing -- the article briefly mentions the same thing:
"Now the Bush administration must decide whether to order the National Weather Service to make taxpayer-funded weather readings freely available on the Net, ignoring complaints from an industry trade group that doing so violates pre-Internet era agreements."
Eh? Isn't the information already free? Go to the NWS website. Everything is all there -- I visit it all the time. Seems like the decision has already been made, and the trade groups are arguing after the fact. Who cares if violates an agreement -- it's their right to change it? What does the Bush Administration have anything to do with this when the decision has already been made?
Instability of the servers at Starcraft's release?
Yes. I take it you weren't there then.
Isn't bnet just used as a way to arrange games? Aren't the games of *craft hosted on one of the players box?
Yes and no. I'll briefly describe the evolution of battle.net. First off, let's be clear that both Diablo and Starcraft network games are hosted from someone's machine. The only way to initiate a match was to connect through battle.net, or over IPX. The games don't allow entering addresses. Diablo 2 does allow IP connections, but I don't expect that to occur in future as they think their product's copy protection depends on battle.net. In Diablo 2, there was what was a called a closed realm. The games are actually hosted on battle.net, and characters are saved there too. The open games can be played over battle.net or straight IP. Blizzard must have thought that closed would be what most people would play anyways, because it prevented easy cheating. Actually, I do think most people did play some of closed. Though there was alot of cheating on closed anyway, despite blizzard's hope.
Diablo was released in 1997. There was internet gaming already going on, but for whatever reason it wasn't too common. I'm pretty sure initial predictions on server requirements were underestimated. 7,000 people on a typical day was pretty phenomenal. And you have to take into consideration this was blizzard's first attempt into hosting a match-making themselves. The servers were without doubt laggy throught the first year.
Starcraft was released in 1998. In preperation for the release, blizzard expanded battle.net and ran a battle.net beta. However, when the game hit the stores, they sorely underestimated their success. In the first few days, 30k, then the first few months, 70k, 80k people. By then end of the year, 250k, and in '99 the average was well over 300k. This is stark in contrast with Diablo, which probably didn't do as well as it could have if it wasn't for the cheating.
In preparation of Diablo 2, alot more was done. Diablo 2 really meant they would do alot of the game hosting. They decided to split battle.net into regions "realms" around the world. Before, 300k people would be connected basically to the same network. They had servers already in other countries, but they communicated back and forth, sharing data. With those high numbers, and the problem with intercontinental communications, 300k is killer ever today. After splitting battle.net into realms, they performed a 100k stress beta test on a sample realm to make sure everything is ok at the initial release. Well, when the game hit stores, they exceed 100k in a weeks time for a single realm. They soon hit 200k, and 300k, for each realm!! And what happened isn't too suprising: They sold about 1 million copies and everyone of them were logging onto battle.net to play their closed characters. Sure they greatly expanded capacity, but the gamers filled it right up again. It seems they underestimated the numbers. What made it worse, is when one realm was brought down, everyone would jump on another realm bringing that one down too. So Diablo 2 was wrought with constant downtime too.
Warcraft 3 was a bit different. It's release did not make a terribly big splash in numbers of sales, comparing to before. And many starcraft players did not buy the game. But the ones that did, *stopped* playing starcraft to play War3. So in a sense, Starcraft players turned into War3 players on battle.net For the most part, blizzard was able to handle essentially the same amount of capacity. Also, War3 hit big with Warforge... (er because of the beta), and there were many legitimate game owners even playing on it just because there were already lots of people there. Many stuck with the alternative servers, well, many reasons!
WoW is no different because blizzard pretty much beat even the best expectations for an MMO at this time. Maybe, they will get it sorted out, but this time they will know through paying, or not paying, customers.
Remember Starcraft? The instability of the servers at Starcraft's release prompted the development of bnetd. Yet, there are now thousands of fanboys saying that bnetd was only for stealing. Maybe now some of them actually see the pain. I spent hours just trying to connect with Diablo.
At the time these games came out, the only way blizzard offered a way to play on the internet with these games was battle.net. Kind of defeated the point of buying the game for multiplayer. Of course there was modem, which some War2 veterans did in the ancient days (with people in the neighborhood huh!), but that's only 2 player. Then there was kali, which provided a type of IPX tunnel. Which, I might mention, kali got a few kids jobs at blizzard. Of course something like Kali would be against the TOS today, despite it was *OK* by blizzard back in the day.
So with the shutdown of bnetd, I only despise companies like blizzard. It did nothing. Only put out the talented people that created it.
I also think that it is still ironic that people are actually paying for WoW, yet they are still having server trouble. Although it's not terrible, but I have still heard there have been problems with the servers from friends. Taking the game off the shelf is a way to slow this problem, but I think it will continue until this MMO loses interest, which will ultimately happen.
It certainly does not work better. (Read article and follow-up)