I sympathize completetely with your plight. You put a lot of work into those characters and it must hurt like hell to lose them. Trust me, I know that all too well. I, too, no longer play the character I put a lot of work into - nor do I play WoW at all.
However, it was still your own fault. You perform repeated identical actions for a long time, they try to verify your presence at the PC, you don't respond, they file it as a violation, you claim you 'Just wasn't paying attention'. How often do you think they hear that? They responded the only way they could. It's not evil, it's not mistreatment, it's the only way they can act. You did something stupid, you suffered for it. Live and learn, and move on.
Your actions afterwards, however understandable, have all been very misguided though. You're not getting your account back. It's your word against sizable evidence.
No, "They virtually all need MS.Net framework - in other words, botting software doesnt work on WINE." isn't an argument with any merit at all. First of all you've just proven yourself seemingly knowledgable about botting programs. That does not help you appear innocent, though I'm sure it makes no difference in this case. Secondly I believe it's perfectly possible to simulate keystrokes on Linux just as well as it is on Windows - with/without.NET (do the botting programs run on Mono I wonder?) and I'm sure there's also plenty of programs that make botting possible that don't show up on google. You could very well have been cheating. Everything points towards it.
I believe you didn't intend to cheat. So do a lot of the people at Blizzard you dealt with I'm sure. But with all this evidence? It doesn't matter what anyone believes, there's only logical response, and that is what they did.
Now, you're posting your story and expecting sympathy. You get it from me. But only for the pain you feel, not for the actions around it. What was the purpose with this story? Was it to warn people of not doing like you? Despite your conclusion it doesn't really seem like it. It looks like it was either an attempt to get your account back (not likely to happen, see above) or it was an attempt to blame Blizzard for it, and hurt them. Hurt them? If ten people who'd otherwise play very WoW don't start because of hearing about you, they'll not even notice. And yet you'll still manage to have hurt them for your mistake. Hurting others isn't going to take any of your pain away. Don't make a habit of it.
Move on. If you miss your friends in WoW, start over. If that's not an option, put the whole thing behind you. The sooner you stop preaching your story the sooner you can stop thinking about the lost characters.
I left WoW in October, when I could no longer play the warrior I loved. I put a lot of work into that character, most likely more than you or any other sensible person - 115 days since WoW EU release last spring. I miss the game and I miss the friends I left behind. I haven't started anew. It'd hurt too much. I moved on, I stopped thinking about it, after a painful period of thinking about it far too much.
Long post, I know. Here's a more/.esque version: You made a mistake, deal with it and move on. In Soviet Russia on a beowulf cluster of elderly koreans that run Linux you insensitive clod.
As long as someone is in front of the PC, he shouldn't be banned for botting. A bot is something which plays the game WHEN YOU'RE NOT PRESENT.
And since he wasn't responding to any messages, there's only his word to prove he was present. That's not Blizzard being evil, that's Blizzard doing the only thing they could do. After playing cheater-infested games, this makes starting WoW look like a good choice to me. Oh sorry, did I just negate your ridiculous threat of one less customer?
I invite you to read your own post and see how childish you sound. The difference between automating actions using a macro keyboard while watching a movie and clicking to go on a gryphon ride is obvious.
As for your questions, if a person marked as a GM PMs you to check if you're at the PC... well, you don't have to answer but it's your fault then, not theirs. And if you're playing a complex English game with heavy emphasis on communcation but don't understand basic conversation, expect to run into problems. And yes, 'Je ne parle pas anglais' is also an answer.
IANAL. But neither are you, and it shows. He doesn't own his characters, not the slightest bit of them. Blizzard does. He pays for access to them. Blizzard has deemed him abusing that access (his own fault for idiocy) and died it.
WoW has 6 million customers. There's quite a few stories of their customer support mistreating people. But what percentage is that? Beside being only a tiny fraction of their customers, it's also only a small part of the people who have to deal with customer support. But the people who had good encounters with helpful CSRs that solved their problem fast (even if it was, like now, their own fault) don't get Slashdot posts or big forum threads.
For the record, I don't play WoW, nor any other Blizzard game. I do have friends that do though. One of them deleted his character in a fit of emo, after deleting most of his items manually and sending the rest to someone else. He had it all restored when he asked. Two weeks later.
But this - that it's the publisher's choice, not the developer's, could be said for at least 90% of games. I'm not saying iD are evil evil - but they're not an exception, they're just like everyone else.
Wish the tool in question actually worked:) As just mentioned Starforce isn't too fussed about whether you use a virtual drive or not but if there's an optical IDE drive in the system at all it refuses to read from the virtual drive. It's really well written by people who have no moral qualms at all.
In some ways though it's an improvement from Safedisc's forced read errors that made my previous DVD drive go haywire. I can't believe I just called Starforce an improvement...
I have no complaints about SecuROM though, it's a quite benevolent copy protection and I wish companies would stick to it so I can stop boycotting games.
Raven made the game under iD supervision. Just because it doesn't fit your vision doesn't make it cease existing. When Quake 3 was made, CD-based copy protections were just starting to come into fashion with Microsoft Games and EA using the at the time #1 name, Safedisc, but a lot of gamse had, like Quake 3, merely a basic CD check. It was nothing special at the time. If they release a game now with no real protection, all respect to that. But 1999?
By the way, the 2000 Quake 3: Team Arena expansion, in-house iD developed, used a commercial copy protection.
Disclaimer: Even though I'm going to correct your facts I agree with your post. Also these things were true at the end of last year but I'm not 100% sure about the present state.
Firstly, I'm not sure what you were making it out to be, but SecuROM is a competing copy protection. EA, LucasArts and several other major publishers use it. On to Starforce.
Starforce is an in some ways really effective copy protection. First of all making a 'cracked exe' is a lot more work than just stripping the copy protection, as the Starforce protection produces heavily modified and obfuscated binaries, this is why you practically don't see backup CD cracks or 'NoCDs' for Starforce protected discs.
Additionally, Starforce refuses to load the CD from a SCSI drive if an IDE CD/DVD drive is present in the system. That includes the popular virtual CD programs, as they emulate SCSI drives (there's the not-released-yet Daemon Tools IDE version which apparently shares release date of Duke Nukem Forever). Older Starforce versions required you to disable the IDE controller in Windows to use a virtual drive for a Starforce game. Recent versions go to the level of requiring you to physically unplug the drive. However, anything that prevents the PC from having a standard IDE drive will, currently, let virtual drives run Starforce-protected games. This includes PCI raid controllers and USB CD drives. As such it's a fairly easily beatable protection but requires different hardware.
However, the really funny thing here is that most burners can burn working copies of Starforce games given a proper source image. So it fails at the most base level of preventing copying of the CDs. However, copying fails if the Starforce protection drivers are present in the system doing the burning. Yes, the Starforce drivers monitor all the CD drive access. Luckily, there's an offical tool to remove the protection drivers.
It's not just this check that's encrypted, it's large parts of the binary. There's a research paper studying Skype's binary around somewhere, from before this check was added. Both the protocol and the exe are intentionally heavily encrypted and obfuscated.
There is no lawsuit vs Skype. AMD has an ongoing anti-trust lawsuit vs Intel, and they subpoenaed Skype to find evidence that Intel had Skype put in the pointless restriction. Many other companies have already been similarly subpoenaed including most major PC manufacturers.
I used to be like that, for years in fact. It wasn't the fault of the mmorpgs I played (Dark Age of Camelot and WoW) though. It was the rest of my life. During the process, I went through mental institutions and a lot of doctor visits and wound up with an Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis. That only made me want to escape my life more into a life where I was successful and popular, away from being a basement dweller who'd barely touched a girl. All the while I knew exactly who stupid I was being but actually turning my life the right side up was too big a mouthful, and being an Aspie makes things like that even harder.
What finally got me out was a traumatic experience with my friends in WoW. I lost all will to play WoW or anything else, and for a month or two I just did nothing at all.
Now, however, I've passed my exams with good marks, I have a sweet girlfriend (who's just as geeky as me), and I take care of my own life.
I'm 24. If someone had told me a year ago I'd be happy about my life now, I'd have told them to stop letting light into my room.
I play space sims with mouse, X-Wing/TIE Fighter through Freespace 1/2 to Freelancer and countless less famous ones. Wouldn't switch to joystick except when forced to by Lucas.
Sacrifice is one game any aspiring game designer should play. It has its flaws, but it also has a wholeness, an overall perception of having been nurtured for by its makers.
Slashdot Mirror
I sympathize completetely with your plight. You put a lot of work into those characters and it must hurt like hell to lose them. Trust me, I know that all too well. I, too, no longer play the character I put a lot of work into - nor do I play WoW at all.
However, it was still your own fault. You perform repeated identical actions for a long time, they try to verify your presence at the PC, you don't respond, they file it as a violation, you claim you 'Just wasn't paying attention'. How often do you think they hear that? They responded the only way they could. It's not evil, it's not mistreatment, it's the only way they can act. You did something stupid, you suffered for it. Live and learn, and move on.
Your actions afterwards, however understandable, have all been very misguided though. You're not getting your account back. It's your word against sizable evidence.
No, "They virtually all need MS .Net framework - in other words, botting software doesnt work on WINE." isn't an argument with any merit at all. First of all you've just proven yourself seemingly knowledgable about botting programs. That does not help you appear innocent, though I'm sure it makes no difference in this case. Secondly I believe it's perfectly possible to simulate keystrokes on Linux just as well as it is on Windows - with/without .NET (do the botting programs run on Mono I wonder?) and I'm sure there's also plenty of programs that make botting possible that don't show up on google. You could very well have been cheating. Everything points towards it.
I believe you didn't intend to cheat. So do a lot of the people at Blizzard you dealt with I'm sure. But with all this evidence? It doesn't matter what anyone believes, there's only logical response, and that is what they did.
Now, you're posting your story and expecting sympathy. You get it from me. But only for the pain you feel, not for the actions around it. What was the purpose with this story? Was it to warn people of not doing like you? Despite your conclusion it doesn't really seem like it. It looks like it was either an attempt to get your account back (not likely to happen, see above) or it was an attempt to blame Blizzard for it, and hurt them. Hurt them? If ten people who'd otherwise play very WoW don't start because of hearing about you, they'll not even notice. And yet you'll still manage to have hurt them for your mistake. Hurting others isn't going to take any of your pain away. Don't make a habit of it.
Move on. If you miss your friends in WoW, start over. If that's not an option, put the whole thing behind you. The sooner you stop preaching your story the sooner you can stop thinking about the lost characters.
I left WoW in October, when I could no longer play the warrior I loved. I put a lot of work into that character, most likely more than you or any other sensible person - 115 days since WoW EU release last spring. I miss the game and I miss the friends I left behind. I haven't started anew. It'd hurt too much. I moved on, I stopped thinking about it, after a painful period of thinking about it far too much.
Long post, I know. Here's a more /.esque version: You made a mistake, deal with it and move on. In Soviet Russia on a beowulf cluster of elderly koreans that run Linux you insensitive clod.
As long as someone is in front of the PC, he shouldn't be banned for botting. A bot is something which plays the game WHEN YOU'RE NOT PRESENT.
And since he wasn't responding to any messages, there's only his word to prove he was present. That's not Blizzard being evil, that's Blizzard doing the only thing they could do. After playing cheater-infested games, this makes starting WoW look like a good choice to me. Oh sorry, did I just negate your ridiculous threat of one less customer?
I invite you to read your own post and see how childish you sound. The difference between automating actions using a macro keyboard while watching a movie and clicking to go on a gryphon ride is obvious.
As for your questions, if a person marked as a GM PMs you to check if you're at the PC... well, you don't have to answer but it's your fault then, not theirs. And if you're playing a complex English game with heavy emphasis on communcation but don't understand basic conversation, expect to run into problems. And yes, 'Je ne parle pas anglais' is also an answer.
IANAL. But neither are you, and it shows. He doesn't own his characters, not the slightest bit of them. Blizzard does. He pays for access to them. Blizzard has deemed him abusing that access (his own fault for idiocy) and died it.
WoW has 6 million customers. There's quite a few stories of their customer support mistreating people. But what percentage is that? Beside being only a tiny fraction of their customers, it's also only a small part of the people who have to deal with customer support. But the people who had good encounters with helpful CSRs that solved their problem fast (even if it was, like now, their own fault) don't get Slashdot posts or big forum threads.
For the record, I don't play WoW, nor any other Blizzard game. I do have friends that do though. One of them deleted his character in a fit of emo, after deleting most of his items manually and sending the rest to someone else. He had it all restored when he asked. Two weeks later.
But this - that it's the publisher's choice, not the developer's, could be said for at least 90% of games. I'm not saying iD are evil evil - but they're not an exception, they're just like everyone else.
Wish the tool in question actually worked :) As just mentioned Starforce isn't too fussed about whether you use a virtual drive or not but if there's an optical IDE drive in the system at all it refuses to read from the virtual drive. It's really well written by people who have no moral qualms at all.
In some ways though it's an improvement from Safedisc's forced read errors that made my previous DVD drive go haywire. I can't believe I just called Starforce an improvement...
I have no complaints about SecuROM though, it's a quite benevolent copy protection and I wish companies would stick to it so I can stop boycotting games.
Raven made the game under iD supervision. Just because it doesn't fit your vision doesn't make it cease existing. When Quake 3 was made, CD-based copy protections were just starting to come into fashion with Microsoft Games and EA using the at the time #1 name, Safedisc, but a lot of gamse had, like Quake 3, merely a basic CD check. It was nothing special at the time. If they release a game now with no real protection, all respect to that. But 1999?
By the way, the 2000 Quake 3: Team Arena expansion, in-house iD developed, used a commercial copy protection.
Quake 4 is in fact heavily copy protected. Admittedly it's not Starforce.
Disclaimer: Even though I'm going to correct your facts I agree with your post. Also these things were true at the end of last year but I'm not 100% sure about the present state.
Firstly, I'm not sure what you were making it out to be, but SecuROM is a competing copy protection. EA, LucasArts and several other major publishers use it. On to Starforce.
Starforce is an in some ways really effective copy protection. First of all making a 'cracked exe' is a lot more work than just stripping the copy protection, as the Starforce protection produces heavily modified and obfuscated binaries, this is why you practically don't see backup CD cracks or 'NoCDs' for Starforce protected discs.
Additionally, Starforce refuses to load the CD from a SCSI drive if an IDE CD/DVD drive is present in the system. That includes the popular virtual CD programs, as they emulate SCSI drives (there's the not-released-yet Daemon Tools IDE version which apparently shares release date of Duke Nukem Forever). Older Starforce versions required you to disable the IDE controller in Windows to use a virtual drive for a Starforce game. Recent versions go to the level of requiring you to physically unplug the drive. However, anything that prevents the PC from having a standard IDE drive will, currently, let virtual drives run Starforce-protected games. This includes PCI raid controllers and USB CD drives. As such it's a fairly easily beatable protection but requires different hardware.
However, the really funny thing here is that most burners can burn working copies of Starforce games given a proper source image. So it fails at the most base level of preventing copying of the CDs. However, copying fails if the Starforce protection drivers are present in the system doing the burning. Yes, the Starforce drivers monitor all the CD drive access. Luckily, there's an offical tool to remove the protection drivers.
It's not just this check that's encrypted, it's large parts of the binary. There's a research paper studying Skype's binary around somewhere, from before this check was added. Both the protocol and the exe are intentionally heavily encrypted and obfuscated.
There is no lawsuit vs Skype. AMD has an ongoing anti-trust lawsuit vs Intel, and they subpoenaed Skype to find evidence that Intel had Skype put in the pointless restriction. Many other companies have already been similarly subpoenaed including most major PC manufacturers.
...which runs on 64-bit Intels because it only checks for the existence of AMD64.
Didn't Ultima 7 do this well over a decade ago?
I used to be like that, for years in fact. It wasn't the fault of the mmorpgs I played (Dark Age of Camelot and WoW) though. It was the rest of my life. During the process, I went through mental institutions and a lot of doctor visits and wound up with an Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis. That only made me want to escape my life more into a life where I was successful and popular, away from being a basement dweller who'd barely touched a girl. All the while I knew exactly who stupid I was being but actually turning my life the right side up was too big a mouthful, and being an Aspie makes things like that even harder.
What finally got me out was a traumatic experience with my friends in WoW. I lost all will to play WoW or anything else, and for a month or two I just did nothing at all.
Now, however, I've passed my exams with good marks, I have a sweet girlfriend (who's just as geeky as me), and I take care of my own life.
I'm 24. If someone had told me a year ago I'd be happy about my life now, I'd have told them to stop letting light into my room.
I play space sims with mouse, X-Wing/TIE Fighter through Freespace 1/2 to Freelancer and countless less famous ones. Wouldn't switch to joystick except when forced to by Lucas.
I even had time to construct a sentence.
Seems an extremely exaggerated lawsuit, more than usual.
My girlfriend (who's at uni) and I play together, along with her mum.
Talk about awkward.
On the plus side, her mum likes me without having met me. Boy is she in for a surprise.
On a side note, one of my guildmates started playing together with his son. The son's moved on, the father hasn't.
The press release is dated July 13th 2005...
The actual minigame showed less skin than Pokémon.
Sounds like my story all over. Ocarina of Time pulled some amazing things out of that fairly weak console.
Heroes of Might and Magic 5, and that was because the multiplayer beta was near-unplayable.
Add Nox and Giants: Citizen Kabuto to that list, funnily enough all games that came out near eachother.
Sacrifice is one game any aspiring game designer should play. It has its flaws, but it also has a wholeness, an overall perception of having been nurtured for by its makers.
And that wasn't even from WoW.