Blizzard Tries To Forbid Open Sourcing Glider 638
ruphus13 notes a new development in Blizzard's case against MDY, which we discussed last week. Blizzard, the maker of World of Warcraft, has now requested another injunction — to prevent the open sourcing of Glider code. Quoting: "Blizzard has asked the court for a relatively unconventional order prohibiting MDY from making the source code for its MMO Glider software available to the public, and prohibiting MDY from helping people develop other World of Warcraft automation software. Blizzard had previously asked the court to shut down MDY's WoW operations in its motion for summary judgment, but the court's summary judgment order did not address Blizzard's request. Blizzard's requests to prohibit open-source release of MDY's software and prohibit MDY's assistance in development of independent WoW bots are new to this motion — and seem likely to raise eyebrows in the open source and digital rights advocacy camps."
Amusing (Score:2, Interesting)
Blizzard Open Source Cheats/Trainers not a Novelty (Score:5, Interesting)
As I've delved into Diablo 2 once again (after watching the imho downright fantastic gameplay video of Diablo 3) over the last few days, I've seen with some amazement that some of the most widely used Battle.net cheats are actually licensed under the GNU GPL - there's even some kind of application framework for interacting with the game programmatically floating around on the web... :)
It's really interesting to see such development, because back in the days when I really was into all that gaming stuff, there was hardly ever a way to take a look how some trainer's/cheat's author does thing XY. Cool, in a way.
That said, I really, really despise cheating in multiplayer games.
Re:"illegal" open source software (Score:5, Interesting)
I presume you do realize Blizzard's banning abilities only extend to WoW and that they can't actually ban you from real life?
The software was found not to violate any copyrights. It's not illegal. It only violates Blizzard's terms of service. They're free to ban your account for using the bot, but that's all.
Re:"illegal" open source software (Score:5, Interesting)
Yay... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I have a solution.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not a *fix*, it's a design flaw.
From my experience as a MMO designer, battling automated play is actually a huge design problem. In many cases you don't want to do it by changing the code because the time and effort spent to do that are much better spent developing real game features. So in many games people take the easiest route and just outlaw automated gameplay instead of changing the design to make sure it is not possible to benefit much from it. Can't really blame anyone for that.
Still it doesn't change this Blizzard's request being utterly ridiculous. With all my genuine respect to the company, someone must have had a brainfart in this case.
Re:Do it (Score:2, Interesting)
This is a terrible analogy (another /. tradition of complaining about bad analogies).
What they did was slap rockets on their own car, and put it on a communcal network of highways. This is what annoyed everyone.
Then Blizzard put a stop to it with a cop with a radar gun.
So then MDY built a little transparent-ish wall around the cop that was stationed on their part of the communal network , and this is what the lawsuit is about. The radar gun only reads 0, not registering an offense, no matter how fast the rockets are going at any given time.
Still a terrible analogy, but closer than yours.
One Can't License Stuff One Does Not Own (Score:3, Interesting)
Blizzard is stance on that Glider contains copyrighted and protected property. One can't declare something open source if one doesn't own it to begin with.
Of course all of this maneuvering hinges on whether or not Glider did their work cleanly. I personally don't favor this approach where it seems to be easier just to continually combat the thing better technology.
Re:You cannot outlaw bots (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think you understand game psychology. There is a crossover between a smooth, slow progression and long-term enjoyability.
If a game had no grind, players would lose interest quickly--the rewards need to be spaced out and not constant. In order for a good experience to stand out from the grind, there has to be a grind.
If you give people "what they want to play", they will not enjoy it at all. I can give you a game that you win at the push of a button--no grind at all. Would that make you happy?
When I used to find myself spending too much time on any game, a truly reliable way to make me sick of it is to cheat--to get everything I want as fast as I want. End of all my interest in the game within a couple days to a week. (this is how I broke my original addictions to Diablo and Diablo years ago)
Sure you think you want to be handed all these things you cheat for, but if that was really all you wanted, why not play single player? There are massive, undetectable cheats for that.
The only reason to cheat on b.net is to compare yourself to people who don't--to somehow give yourself an edge up against those who don't because, hmm, because it makes you feel better about yourself maybe? That's just pathetic.
Think about it for a while. Analyze what you play and why you play it. From your statement you obviously play a lot, but do you ever really think about what you enjoy about gaming? What you really want? Again, from your email, I have to guess no...
farming really an issue? (Score:2, Interesting)
Farming may have been an issue initially with the game, and people profiting from the game, without Blizzard getting their share of it. However, since Burning Crusades, people who play at 70 can "grind" up gold easily...
Blizzard has to address the real underlining issue, keeping the game interesting and challenging. The reason you would use glide is because you are tired of "grinding and questing" the same things over and over, killing the same mobs over and over, either for a new character or for a glimpse of some "better gear" (which is the biggest farce of the game). The user has already done it once why make it the same painful process over and over, it's an absolute turn off...
Right distinction, wrong point though. (Score:5, Interesting)
Blizzard absolutely have a right to control what happens on their servers. Notice though that this injunction is not about their servers. It's about what code is released on the internet - which Blizzard doesn't own.
It's within their right to say "you can't use that code on our servers" - and they have a right to enforce that rule however they please (delete violating accounts or whatever). However, it's clearly not within their right to say "you can't use that code anywhere, or even have it, or even look at it."
Re:apparently lawyers are running blizzard now (Score:5, Interesting)
WoW is not all that repetitive, especially considering that the idea is to spend many months playing it between content updates.
There are LOTS of things Blizzard does to make WoW a lot less of a grind, big one being daily quests, if you don't know why daily quests prevent the grind, then you don't know WoW well enough to be commenting.
Blizzard also does lots of other things to prevent the grind:
- Rested XP, while you are logged out, you earn "rest", when you log back in, you earn double XP per mob kill until your rest runs out.
- When Blizzard introduced Arenas (a competive PvP system), they made it so that consumables such as potions or elixirs cannot be used at all. While this is partly due to balancing issues, it also means that people don't end up farming gold/mats for these potions, because while they can be a huge competitive advantage, they are also a huge money/materials sink when you are using a lot of them.
- In their upcoming expansion, they are limiting the amount of consumables that can be used by players in certain conditions. For example, you will only be able to use 1 single potion for a boss fight, this will mean that people wont end up blowing lots of potions on a single boss fight. Another example being that you won't be affected by more than one set of Drums at a time, this is also good as right now the top raiding guilds had lots of their members abandon a profession and take up Leatherworking instead. And all this just to get the most possible "power" for their raid group. When you aren't levelling at the same time, getting a profession from 0 to max is exceptionally time and/or money intensive.
Personally, what I get most out of WoW is the social connection, I tend to use VoIP a lot with my family and friends who also play. WoW is just a place we hang out, it's like a sports bar or something. WoW for me is something I can do to pass the time between work, going out or sleeping. When I am at home and not playing WoW or sleeping, I do other things like read, watch TV, program.
Re:apparently lawyers are running blizzard now (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen macroing from the Ultima Online days and I've seen Glider use from the more modern World of Warcraft. They are nowhere near the same thing nor are they anywhere near the same realm of ease of use. You really are sounding like you've never seen just how easy Glider makes it to play your character without ever actually playing your character. Take a look [youtube.com] at how things work.
Re:I have a solution.... (Score:3, Interesting)
If I were Blizzard and he claimed the code was leaked because he was hacked, I'd probably accuse him of negligence, at the least. He won't be able to say that he got hacked because he is sofa king we todd did and thus avoid all accountability. Lawyers aren't stupid. Generally speaking.
But it's still a ridiculous lawsuit and I hope Blizzard is not able to prevail.
Re:I have a solution.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why don't they implement a challenge-response system in-game like a CAPTCHA? Ask the player some specifically worded question about some game event. You don't have to ban people outright for getting it wrong, but you definitely could do that enough that you could build a statistical profile that indicated a player was cheating. Then ban them.
Re:I have a solution.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Except, it's not legal if MDY claims this happens in court, when in reality the story is a bit fabricated.
Also, doing so before the court has a chance to accept or deny Blizzard's request may not help MDY's case at all, and end up costing them.
as if this hasn't stopped the MAFIAA from engaging in en masse RICO violations using the same tactics.
It's very hard to prove intent.
Select a "fall guy" to "leak" the code to pirate bay, let him get his finances in (legally unassailable) order, and away you go.
Re:"illegal" open source software (Score:1, Interesting)
That's all well and good, but is a EULA or sign-on click-through agreement an enforceable "contract"?
Re:I have a solution.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Better yet, make it some sort of puzzle mini-game!
Re:I have a solution.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly. Now, Microsoft can say, "You may only install Windows on this computer if you never install OpenOffice on this computer." If you install OpenOffice, your Windows license becomes invalid. Tough luck.
Re:I have a solution.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I have a solution.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Online chess servers are all flawed because there are chess computers that can beat anyone. FPS shooters are all flawed because of aiming bots. Really, making a game where aiming is required to become better. How stupid. They should design their games better.
I could go on...
Still it doesn't change this Blizzard's request being utterly ridiculous. With all my genuine respect to the company, someone must have had a brainfart in this case.
Not really. Courtesy of wikipedia (Tortious interference):
Although the specific elements required to prove a claim of tortious interference vary from one jurisdiction to another, they typically include the following:
*The existence of a contractual relationship or beneficial business relationship between two parties.
*Knowledge of that relationship by a third party.
*Intent of the third party to induce a party to the relationship to breach the relationship.
*Lack of any privilege on the part of the third party to induce such a breach.
*Damage to the party against whom the breach occurs.
The intent with Glider is pretty clear as it doesn't have any uses besides being a WoW bot which is clearly against the contract. Damages are easy to prove as Blizzard has both spent money on responding on complaints from people, and they most likely also have a long list of accounts that gave bots as the reason for quitting. If selling the software is tortious interference, then giving it away is probably so also.
I don't like the copyright/eula part of the Blizzard claim though. It is on far shakier grounds in my opinion. Although Blizzard has already have one win in that area with bnetd, the US laws are very unclear and fuzzy in that area, with court decisions having gone in both directions.
Botting cannot be prevented (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a professional programmer, and I would say that it is more than that. I would say that it is fundamentally impossible to prevent botting on remote clients without a client being completely locked down with DRM. And as Microsoft has already discovered, that is a hard sell.
You have the same fundamental problem that media creators do: You have to give people information, but prevent them from using it in ways you don't approve of. This problem will not go away any time soon.
The simpler problem of stopping WoW botting is easy. People bot in WoW because 'the grind' to level or gain faction rep is long and boring. Change the game so that people aren't rewarded for sinking so much time into the game. Problem solved.
Re:Blizzard Open Source Cheats/Trainers not a Nove (Score:3, Interesting)
The MMO Asheron's Call, a contemporary of better-known Everquest, has had a framework like this for years, known as Decal [decaldev.com].
Interestingly, the developers of asheron's call (Turbine) chose to embrace the 3rd party development community. As a result, players have used the framework to extend and improve the game client; many community improvements have eventually been rolled into the official client (e.g., showing the health/mana of your party members in a single panel, and allegiance-wide chat). Turbine even went as far as to hire several of the top decal plugin developers.
This has lead to a fairly unique game, with player-run bots running unattended trades, offering trade-skill services, and help new players with magical enhancements.
Of course, with all the positive contributions that enhance gameplay, there have been negative ones as well. Combat macroing became commonplace, allowing characters to advance without human intervention; at first this was more or less endorsed by Turbine, but a few years ago they finally ruled against running combat macros while away from the keyboard. To enforce this, they started giving basic Turing tests to players that were suspected of violating this rule.
It's been an interesting experiment. I definitely respect Turbine for *not* taking the Blizzard route, and banning players by the tens of thousands, and suing third party developers. Their philosophy that it's the developer's responsibility for creating exploitable bugs, and not the players' fault for exploiting them is certainly player friendly.
But at the end of the day, it's hard to say if it was all for the better, as the game slowly fades into obscurity, with subscription numbers a tenth of what they were at the game's peak [mmogchart.com]. Those of us who played during the game's heyday certainly enjoyed the ride, but blizzard's aggressive anti-cheating stance may be necessary to building a billion-dollar a year revenue stream.
Re:I have a solution.... (Score:1, Interesting)
It seems to me that Blizzard is using every tool at their disposal to try and eliminate automated play. This includes an incredible array of technological, social, and now legal means. You'll note that aren't suing their customers here, they've done what many on Slashdot think the media companies should do, and went after the source.
I agree that it seems wrong that an injunction against the publication of source seems wrong. If the source in and of itself violates Blizzards copyrights, than the portions of the code that do violate copyright should not be legally publishable (the same as any other copyright issue). Anything that is original work should, of course, be okay.
Re:I have a solution.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea behind grinding (and timesinks in general) is that you have a cheap way of keeping your players occupied. Various materials for crafting, gold, etc etc etc. In fact, why bother with creating actual content when you can keep people busy for an hour or two a day by killing the same type of monsters over and over.
Most RPGs suffer from this:
Single player RPGs suffer from it, and with MMOs it's even more obvious because most people play MMOs for months. MMOs don't exactly lend themselves to epic storytelling either, because any large-scale event would affect all players. In a single player RPG you could have a character open the gates of the nine hells and have the world flooded with demons that you have to dispatch, in an MMO you can't really have that happen. "Oh great, player #239483 opened the gates to the nine hells again" "Ugh, another week of demons"
While WoW had some large scale events, such as the opening of AQ, and there was something with the undead or something, the experience is a lot less fun than when YOU are doing something.
I stopped playing WoW on a regular basis when our guild started waltzing through MC. I'd noticed that casual play with friends had started to devolve to getting 40 people organized to be on time, have the correct gear and potions, spend time grinding for gold and materials and generally not having fun.
If you start spending more time preparing to have fun than actually having fun that sort of defeats the purpose of playing a game in my opinion.
I think they did that. A few months ago an old guildmate of mine sent me a mail talking about new questhubs in low level areas (the area where Onyxia is located, I forgot the name). The thing is that there's very little to gain for Blizzard to add new low level quests. Most of their playerbase is maxed out and creates a new character or two to keep themselves occupied while they're waiting on new high level content. I think most players will start going away if there isn't new high level content regularly than low level content.
Re:I have a solution.... (Score:3, Interesting)
OMG yes!
The reputation system has got to be the most miserable part of the game. Even worse than the slot machine system they have for boss drops ("Ok, after 4 hours of running this instance you get...squat! Try again!"). Factions seem to be breeding like mad too. Soon we'll have the Cenarion Coffee Club faction to grind or some other time suck.
Gaining reputation also involves running the same dungeons over, and over...and over again. Two or three times may be fun but by the eigth time it is pretty much sucked dry. Same goes for the battlegounds, same map, same tactics, etc. You can guess how the game is going to end after the first five minutes of play but you stick around to get your token(s) and honor.
Other time sinks include the endless running around (god help the mountless), graveyard runs, cooldowns on everything, 5+ minute flightpaths, patterns that require gobs of rare farmed items, etc.
There is pretty much no puzzle solving outside of tactics and precious few of the quests are in any way fun. I'd have to say the bombing run quest in Hellfire was one of the most enjoyable ones in the game.
If they didn't have these obvious soul killing time wasters in the game most people wouldn't seek out tools like Glider.
Re:I have a solution.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, except that really *is* what Blizzard is trying to do.
Blizzard says, 'Okay, writing code to automate game play is against THE RULES'. That much, I'm okay with. But now they have a lawsuit that says, 'Okay, releasing the source code you wrote or HELPING someone write a bot that breaks THE RULES is illegal'. And they want a court order to prevent the developer(s) of Glider from releasing the code/educating others on how to make a bot.
Automation of tasks performed by humans is something computers can be really good at. And it's something programmers do, simply by the nature of programming. I wrote a program that automates my monthly bill payment routine - it visits the websites of the various companies I owe money to, logs in, scrapes the screen to see what I owe and whether or not my automatic/scheduled payment went through.
Is that a 'bot'?
Well, it opens a web browser, waits for a page to load, enters text into the text boxes, clicks buttons, clicks links....I'd say that's pretty bot like.
What happens when some company releases a web-based RPG and the same web-automation that I do can be used to bot their game? Then they can sue me and say that my source code could lead to people developing bots that are 'against their rules' and now my code is illegal?
I wrote a tutorial on how to make a very simple Guild Wars bot. It used some win32 API calls to read specific pixels from the screen (if the pixel was a particular shade of red, it was your health bar, if it wasn't that shade of red, your health was below X%) - GetPixel and it used Win32 API calls to send key strokes. It would teleport to a new zone, run around randomly attacking things until it's health got too low, then it would try to heal itself. It didn't read any memory addresses or anything....
If the judge rules that Blizzard as a right to legally prevent people from helping others create a WoW Bot...would my crappy website that nobody visited with my tutorial on how to write a bot for GuildWars be illegal?
Could it help someone write a WoW bot...sure. It's not as sophisticated as Glider, not even close, but it certainly uses some of the same principles and could inspire someone to develop a bot further.
WoWSharp is already an open source WoW bot that was written in C# and was widely available on the internet at one point. I'm guessing that too, will be illegal, if the law finds in favor of Blizzard?
This is pretty new territory as far as legal precedents go and I'd certainly hate to wake up and find out I'm a criminal because I've read memory from a process running on my computer; because Blizzard is pissed someone wrote a bot for their game.
Re:Do it (Score:3, Interesting)
What right does Blizzard have?
The right against Tortious Interference [wikipedia.org].