Blizzard Officially Files Against WoW Glider

Marcus Eikenberry writes "Blizzard and Vivendi today filed against MDY Industries, the makers of the 'WoW Glider' software. Glider allows World of Warcraft players to 'play' while away from the keyboard; the software moves the player's avatar along a set path, following a complex set of instructions dictated in advance. Blizzard is seeking injunctive relief and money damages against MDY. What that means is they want him to stop the production of WoW Glider and they want him to pay them damages. Blizzard believes that Glider infringes on their intellectual property. They believe Glider allows players to cheat, giving them an unfair advantage and that they believe Glider encourages Blizzard customers to breach their contracts for playing the game. Last they claim that Glider is designed to circumvent copyright protections."

Circumventing Copyright is a bit of a stretch

[fotbr]

I'm not a lawyer, but to me it seems like a tacked on item "because they can".

As for the rest of their claims...I guess I can see the point, but if you look at the glider forums it would appear that Blizzard is being fairly strict on banning accounts. If Blizzard is able to utilize the ban-hammer effectivly enough, the problem will solve itself. And then people will move on to the next bot.

The ONLY way for blizzard to make the problem go away is to remove the requirement to grind every character up to lvl 60 or 70. My suggestion would be to give people the ability to create alternate characters starting at any level UP TO the level of their highest character. So if you've got a level 52 mage and you've decided mages suck and want to play a warrior, you could create a new warrior character at any level between 1 and 52.

Re:Circumventing Copyright is a bit of a stretch

[rob1980]

Mythic did this with Dark Age Of Camelot, giving you the option to start at level 20 and implementing NPCs to give you starter equipment, etc.. However hindsight being 20/20, they stated that starting a character at level 20 did more harm than good [camelotherald.com] due to it killing the 1-20 crowd. The bottom line is, the easiest thing you can do to kill your incoming customer base is to give them nobody to play with.

Re:Circumventing Copyright is a bit of a stretch

[profplump]

You'd get the standard level-1 equipment and gold. If you want the stuff that comes from level 1-50 you have to go get it. You'd get talent points to match your level with none of them spent, so you can choose whatever skillset you want. And you'd learn to use the character by, um, playing, just like you would if you started at level 1 -- if you've already got a level 50 character you can probably skip a lot of the "learning" parts, as you only need to learn how the new character is different, not all the mechanics of the game.

I'm not sure it's a great idea to let new characters start at any level, since it is a game and grinding is part of that game, but I also don't see huge problems with the plan. A useful compromise might be something like (at user choice) double-experience point awards to new characters in accounts that already have a top-level character; accelerated leveling would make it easier to start new characters but would still force players though the entire skill tree, if you think that's important.

Why do people keep hosting this stuff in the US?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not like its hard to get hosting and domain registration in Canada or Europe. Why do it in the US when you know Vivendi Universal are scum sucking buttwipes who will try to use their money to push you around in the US court system? I'm suprised Vivendi hasn't asked Godaddy to shut down their domain already, since Godaddy seems to have no issues with doing that for big companies.

Anyone have a link to Vivendi's filing?

[Kaikopere]

The only articles I've been able to find about this aren't exactly objective and haven't provided the actual text of the claims being made by Vivendi. While it's easy to hate the big conglomerate, I've had a number of games ruined for me because of bots/farmers (indirectly and directly) and tend to support action being taken to squash gold and item farming. I'm not sure that I would support action against the third party software providers (since they haven't agreed to the TOS) and I'm interested to see the exact nature of the claims Vivendi is making, uncolored by the bias of supporters of the folks being sued.

Re:Strength of their argument

[arkanes]

I don't think you really got the point.

A) Use of Glider is a violation of the TOS.
B) The creators of Glider actively promote it's use (by selling and marketing it). C) People who use Glider have their accounts banned for TOS violation, which harms blizzard financially.

That looks like enough to get the case into court to me. Your arguments are a combination of "it's the users choice", which ignores the very existence of this category of law, and "another one will pop up anyway", which misses the point entirely - suing bot creators is how Blizzard is attempting to keep these bots down to a minimal level.

Re:Strength of their argument

[Planesdragon]

However, all glider did was provide a way for people to cheat

And that's a tort against the game company. ("tort" is "something that you can be sued over." Not necessarily a crime, but still something that's a bad idea.)

It's almost the exact same tort as, oh, a P2P company that encourages sharing of copyrighted music. And it's the same legal principle that applies to, oh, hiring someone else to kill your mother.

One valid reason for it to exist

[UnknownSoldier]

After you've leveled up a few toons to 60, sorry 70 now, its a PITA to level up the rest of your toons. Same thing happened in D2, where it was a MAJOR PITA to level up to 99 -- Blizzard tried banning a few people, but the bots kept coming, and eventually they gave up.

If the author really wanted to keep WoWGlider going, he would of open-sourced it before got the big take down. I seriously doubt he has the money to win the legal case.

Didn't bnetd teach us anything??