Blizzard Lawyers Visit Creator of WoW Glider 229
Rick Hamell writes "On October 25th, Blizzard/Vivendi payed a personal visit to Michael Donnelly, creator of WoW Glider and accused him of violating the DMCA. Their demands were unclear, but come in the wake of recent player bannings for using bots in the popular MMORPG. It looks like he's going to fight it, but I think it'll be an interesting case if it ever reaches the courts." From the post: "The visitors from Vivendi / Blizzard made demands of Michael and stated that if the demands were not met that they would file a complaint in court if he did not meet them. I asked Michael what the demands were. He was unable to comment at the time to the exact details. But I do know they handed him a copy to very briefly 'Look at'. He was not given a copy. I think I could make a good guess and say that they asked for Glider to be shut down and if they feel that they have been harmed they may have asked for a financial settlement."
Taking the bull by the horns, so to speak- (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, it's an independent software developer, who cares? He's charging money for a program that explicitly violates the TOS that a user agrees to when signing up for World of Warcraft.
It's just one bot program out of many, but maybe the others will get the picture and GTFO also. I'm tired of trying to play legitimately, having bots always stealing my kills.
Re:Taking the bull by the horns, so to speak- (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm all for shutting this guy down (I play WoW and hate bots, too), but I don't want shutting him down to clog our already congested legal system.
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The TOS is a contract. It's strength or weakness is for a judge to decide. But protecting the integrity of a service with 7.5 million paying subscribers sounds to me like a perfectly good reason for going to court.
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Not nessecarilly, that does not mean your acknowledgement has reached or come to the party that made the offer. It needs, as it certainly do in WoW, also be sent or otherwise notified to the one making the offer of a contract. In addition, for most countries there is further rules on how you might tie that acceptance to other ativities. You can't make a proposal and claim that if the pther person (for example) leave his hous, it shows acceptance.
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I propose a new catchphrase: "Think of the already congested legal system! Won't somebody please think of the already congested legal system?!"
Some games have that licked. (Score:2)
Gold farming would also be taken care of, just in case they needed another reason.
Re:Taking the bull by the horns, so to speak- (Score:5, Insightful)
Selling a program that has no use other than violating the TOS may be actionable as tortious interference with a contract or something along those lines, but I fail to see how copyright is involved here. What copyrighted work is copied by the bot? Similarly, I don't see how it violates the DMCA.
Re:Taking the bull by the horns, so to speak- (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Taking the bull by the horns, so to speak- (Score:4, Interesting)
adhesion contract
A class as large as the WoW player-base could roll that contract aside and claim damages (actual and punative) for loss of in game wealth and resources including their characters. Oh.. did I mention that Blizzard tends not to return your cash when they ban you half-way through a six-month subscription? This suit is almost inevitable.. once some lawyer gets banned and desides to form the class (on a health 10-30% commission of course).
-GiH
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Re:Taking the bull by the horns, so to speak- (Score:4, Funny)
It clearly states, that by allowing their software to be installed on this computer, that they agree to the following terms.
#1 All EULAs are null and void.
#2 They WILL be held accountable if their software causes a problem.
#3 I can do whatever the hell I want with their software once it's installed on MY computer.
#4 They can NOT install anything *extra* without my explicit permission.
4a) Any attempts to do so will result in fines no less than 1 Million USD, and no more than (whatever they have in liquid assets)
#5 Any updates or changes to the software's EULA must be approved by me before they can be sent out to anyone else.
I'm currently sitting at around 4.5 billion in fines. I'm waiting until I hit the "Trillion Dollar" mark, before I move forward with my lawsuits for SPIA violations.
Something Similar in City of Heroes. (Score:2)
Re:Taking the bull by the horns, so to speak- (Score:4, Funny)
If he has tortious interference, he should probably go see a Doctor ASAP, not a lawyer. That shit is itchy as hell.
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I agree that a suit for tortious interference isn't likely to make much money, but it seems like a better legal theory than copyright. I'm not sure that the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions are applicable here. The DMCA only forbids circumvention of measures taken to protect copyrighted material. Even if the bot bypasses security measures, it isn't doing so for the purpose of violating copyright. The bot does not, for example, extract the images from the game. Furthermore, the DMCA expressly permits reve
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Re:Taking the bull by the horns, so to speak- (Score:4, Interesting)
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You mean "If a bot can play their game"?
Damn right, and if Blizzard wasn't already on my boycott list, this would be a warning against buying WOW by itself.
I've recently beta-tested a game that might be playable by a bot as well:
Rappelz(http://rappelz.gpotato.com/ [gpotato.com]). Nice graphics, but after two weeks I can't bring myself to log in anymore. It's just too boring.
I was wondering why anyone cared... (Score:2)
I was wondering why anyone cared before I read that line. It seems to me that a tool that gets you out of the grind so that you can focus on the fun parts of a game is just adding value, but if the bots are engaging in actively anti-social behavior, then that's another thing entirely.
Won't someone please think of the bots? (Score:5, Funny)
Or are you too afraid you'll be replaced? Too afraid you might have to try a little harder playing against someone a little bit better than you?
Fight for machine rights!
Bots (Score:5, Insightful)
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Name me just 1 popular game, where its impossible to make a bot play it reasonably well!?
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Seriously though.. Bots do a BAD job of playing in these enviroments. That's why they don't workin in games like City of Heroes that have a death peanlty. The operative term in wow for leveling is "grind." I ground my way to 60 with a druid.. and a rogue.. and a mage.. and then I stopped one day when my butt hurt and I had nothing to show for all my hours and realized I was performi
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I've yet to see a RTS where the AI can manage being even moderately difficult without resorting to cheating. The Starcraft AI for example, cheats badly by getting periodic resource injections. From what I heard, Civilization also cheats.
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This is why the bots only focus on the mobs that have little or no scripting, no special abilities, and generally are vulnerable to any sort of attack.
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Exactly, WoW bot programs, and Glider is the only one that I've even looked into before out of curiosity (A friend of mine was using it for a very short time to grind overnight while sleeping, stopped after a couple days because he decided it wasn't worth losing his account over), do nothing complicated. From what I remember reading before about Glider specifically, you set up an area to be patrolled with your character and outline basic actions that your character is to take as it does its patrols. These b
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Why is there so much "grunt work" in what is ostensibly a game?
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I didn't realize that every game was supposed to be as instantly gratifying as, say, Duck Hunt. You're looking for the wrong thing in a game if you dislike it because of "grunt work" that you have to do. Would you rather that reagents and tradeskill items were simply rationed out to people? Or that every mob in the game dropped, to use an EQ term, phat lewtz? There's grunt work in everything, and depending on my mood I could turn the question around and ask it of real life.
In any case, anyone who's played
Choice of the Players (Score:2, Informative)
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And don't say I shouldn't have done
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It's very possible to enjoy every aspect of the game, from PvP combat to end-game raiding, with very little "grinding" or "farming." Those who do grind or farm a lot are usually after marginal benefits or "prestige" items with no major functional advantage. Even in the most "endgame" raid guilds, those basement-nerd collectives you've heard about filled with people who play 30+ hours a week, most of those people only
I think it says a lot about WoW (Score:4, Insightful)
Description? (Score:4, Informative)
Some of us here (me included) are interested in legal issues but don't play WoW. A better summary would have included a description of the program, so that those of us who don't keep up with this niche have to fish around through links.
From the (admittedly linked) WoW Glider Homepage. "WoW Glider is a tool that plays your World of Warcraft character for you, the way you want it. It grinds, it loots, it skins, it heals, it even farms soul shards... without you."
I don't need the karma, but Glider FAQ [wowglider.com]
-T
Here is how it works. (Score:2)
You generate your WoW character. You then fire up Glider, and enter the game.
You then set waypoints and alter variables that will determine how your character will respond to threats, bad guys, etc. How far it will pull a target in from, how often it will heal, will it skin corpses, so on and so forth.
Once the characterics are set, and the waypoints are all selected, you kick it off and the character will wander between your waypoints, killing enemies in the manner you suggested
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What's illegal about cheating in a game? (Score:2)
Selling tools that interact with other software is not illegal. You can sell software that automates eBay auctions, for example. As long as it doesn't act as a denial of service attack or contain material copyrighted by someone else (sh
Not illegal to read RAM + control mouse/keyboard (Score:4, Informative)
Nothing. But then Blizzard/Vivendi wouldn't be so utterly stupid to try to sue him for cheating in a video game. The worst they could do is ban him from it, which I'm sure they've already done.
However, they might try to sue him for interfering in some way with their software. That would be incredibly hard to do though, since he does not modify anything nor copy anything over which Blizzard have copyright. (Copyright is a protection on works, and not on dynamically created in-core data, under any circumstances.) And he has not stolen any commercial secrets either, as long as he didn't go dumpster diving around the back of Blizzard labs. Reverse engineering for interoperability is certainly perfectly legal, and that's what Glider does, interoperate with WoW.
What's more, he has not circumvented any DMCA protection device either, since he is merely reading system memory which is not protected but in the clear. And it's his own machine's (or user's machine's) memory, so clearly he (or the user) has every right to read it.
Finally, he uses that information to drive the user's keyboard and mouse. Well, I'd like to see anyone challange his right to do that.
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If you see a hunter with a boar pet, just hang out and watch it for a while. Chances are, it's probably a bot.
Once you know what to look for, you start seeing them EVERYWHERE. I even saw one in Westfall the other day.
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The bot gave itself away.. (Score:4, Funny)
DMCA? (Score:2)
In what way can they actually sue him for simply developing software?
Don't get me wrong, I'd very much like to see him go down, hard, even though I wish Blizzard would bother to make WoW less of a grind. But not using DMCA tactics, not if this means what I think it means. In general, providing the means to do something illegal should not, by itself, b
That bad of a game, eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Sure (Score:2)
Given how popular bots are... (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't play MMO's as I don't have time, and I can't really see the point in paying money to Blizzard so my bot can play (It's bad enough having to support my brother), but I think it would be pretty cool to have a game where I can write a bot in perl (or your favourite scripting language) and have it compete against other bots to master the game. The server would need to enforce state, as it seems to be the big problem with a lot of these MMO's that they trust the client. The client says hey, I've just picked up this uber item and moved to the top of this dungeon instantly, and the server says, ok, here you are.
The game would need to have complex economics, and somewhat complex combat/raiding/whatever in order to make ai difficult enough that it was a challenge.
It would probably best suit the space genre as it is more plausible that a space craft/robot/??? operates autonomously, than a Paladin/Wizard/Grue.
Also it would be great for people like me who can't be bothered sitting in front of a computer for hours on end playing MMO, when there's better things to do (like sitting in front of a computer for hours on end playing FPS).
Meh, maybe I'll make something, can't be that hard anyway...
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Second Life?
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But, see... Most people don't want to MAKE bots, they just want to USE them. To that end, I suggest a game that pre-includes everything necessary to fire-and-forget:
http://www.progressquest.com/ [progressquest.com]
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There is a rather number of games tracing back at least as far as 1961 [wikipedia.org] where the entire game itself is to program bots. The most famous is almost certainly Core Wars. [wikipedia.org] Those two are more "pure programming" than "bot", but some later games did move to a bot style with a multitude of competing bots in a single arena such as the 1989 multi-platform Omega. [wikipedia.org]
I'm not sure what the latest-greatest games would be in
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"God games" are a limited form of this, and are a fairly limited niche. Actually scripting or coding the game would be even more limited in appeal.
I've never seen an MMO take either approach and can't really imagine it being commercially successful, MMOs cost a lot of money to develop and publishers have come to consider anything that doesn't make WoW numbers to be a failure.
The roguelike games tend to develop a botting meta-game, but they rely on community norms and honor to keep participants honest, q
Bots r fun (Score:2)
the past tense of pay is paid (Score:2, Troll)
This is pretty straightforward. It's bullshit. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see any other way to interpret their behavoir. Their complaints wouldn't stand up to scrutiny, so they don't let him scrutinize it.
That being said, there are two reasons people grind: to level a toon they want to actually play, and to gather cash so that they don't have to grind for it to support their raiding habits.
They could eliminate the former reason by giving new characters on an account with one or two max level characters perma double xp, or triple or something along those lines.
If leveling subsequent characters was much faster a good deal of folks would lose interest in bots. That is an old complaint, to be sure, but it's relevant.
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Re:I Call Shenanigans (Score:5, Informative)
What if a bug ends up in the program that does DDoS a WoW server? What if it DDoS a WoW zone? What if it denies a legitimate user from completing a quest or working on a tradeskill or something because it consumes all the resources as soon as they become available, faster than a player can react? How do you know for sure it isn't keylogging people or copying their account info? How do you know that they haven't found a way to dupe items and are using it to dupe to give the item to one of their own bots so they can sell it?
But since when is creating a "cheat" for a game, againist the law?
I've never played WoW... that said, depending on how Glider works, it could involve intercepting and decrypting an encrypted stream and that could be a violation of the good old DMCA.
dude doesn't charge money for it does he?
Even though he does charge for it, it doesn't really matter. AFAIK, they aren't distributing any Blizzard copyrighted code so its not a fair use case. Further, if I give away free tshirts that I pressed with the Nike swoosh on them and take a loss on it, Nike can still sue me for violating their trademark.
does Major League Baseball punish him and the companies that make those products?
Ben-gay, Tylenol, etc have legal and non-performing enhancing uses and aren't banned in the various substance abuse policies by any sporting group that I know of. Glider serves one purpose, which is to interact with a server, against its terms of service, to enhance the play above what the terms of service allows.
do the major sport companies go after the steroid manufacturers?
See BALCO and Victor Conte for an example.
it's bullshit. I'm sure they'll pull something out of their ass saying his usage of the WoW client to reverse engineer some kind of program has violated their Copyrights yadda yadda yadda but in terms of fair use, assuming he wasn't making profit off of WoW Glider, I think he could get away with it. WoW Players feel free to mod me down , I don't condone cheating in such a manner but at the same time Blizzard has been real asshatery in the last two years abou cheating (Warden, anybody?).
As I said, profit has absolutely nothing to do with it and irregardless, your assumption about not charging for it is false. I hate the DMCA as much as the next guy but its very possible he violated it to create his program. Someone might argue that WoW players may have standing to sue him and his clients (possibly Blizzard depending on if their disclaimer forbids it and stands up) for using a program which interferes with the ability of non-infringing players to enjoy the game. Finally, if you read the article and/or the filing, it is MDY preemptively suing Blizzard to try to seek a judgment that they aren't breaking the law, not Blizzard suing MDY at this point.
Just a tip... before you try to expose something for idiotic, you might want to actually read whats going on first or else you risk exposing yourself. Then again, this is Slashdot.
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And once again, I repeat, Blizzard di
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Funniest are the morons who whine how their other accounts got banned too - stuff like 'I only glided on one (farming) account, they wtfpwned my main account too!!!' (duh, TOS says Blizzard can nuke all your accounts if you violate it)
Anyway, WOWGlider dev is a lowlife who profits from runing the game for those who actually belive in playing by the rul
Re:No, Glider benefits all parties, except demagog (Score:2)
So, it's called 'cheating', and cheaters should be strung up to the lampposts by the street for people to mock for being immature pricks.
Should WoW be a single player game, I Couldn't care less - cheating in a single player game is fine - you are cheating only yourself. In a multiplayer game - especially on
Re:No, Glider benefits all parties, except demagog (Score:2)
So people pay Blizzard a monthly fee to pay a dull game. But in order to avoid a portion of the dullness they also pay this Glider dude, thus allowing them to make the game somewhat less dull. Where do I sign up?
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For those who work for a living, it gets you past the monoteny into the good parts.
It's like getting a VCR to record a film for you, never watching it, but talking to friends afterwards as if you had.
It's more like a TIVO and skipping the commercials to get back to the program sooner.
There are a few things somepeople would like to skip such as killing your 6,243rd monster and collecting the loot.
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Read the article, then follow the link to the lawsuit.
It would be very foolish to file a lawsuit and make a false claim that is easly proven. He was visited. It is part of the complaint in the court document. A false statement here would be disaster at a jury trial.
Re:Pwned (Score:5, Funny)
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The rights taken by the DMCA may well include this site's right to let people 'cheat' on WoW.
If you believe that this site should be shut down, you believe in the same principles that the DMCA was based on. Private technology, even when licensed, can be used by customers in only methods sanctioned by the company they bought it from.
I don't believe in that, no matter how much disdain I hold towards cheaters
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I'll take False Generalizations for $200, Alex. I believe that this guy should be put out of business, but not because of the DMCA.
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Unfortunately, finding a judge won't be as hard as you think. The idea of this type of DMCA suite is to say you believe something is happening that isn't obvious because you have taken step to hide or protect it. By default, there will most likely be a hearing just for the purpose
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I just named two possible claims. Only one had something to do with the DMCA and would be some what of a stretch at best i think. But it seems that is what law is about nowadays. Who can convolute a law into their favor and use it against some one else.
Well first, They don't have to make their
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Would you like all macro programs, even ones that aren't used for cheating in games, to be illegal? Because this is how they all work. In fact, this is how almost every piece of software works. Programs need to read from and write t
Re:No sympathy for WoWGlider's author (Score:5, Informative)
They could get him under Section 1201 (a); "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
The game's Lua subsystem allows for macroing and automation of game elements, but also disallows access to the automation of a number of other elements of the game as well. As such, WoWGlider circumvents the Lua subsystem's prohibition of access to said game elements (such as commands allowing automation of movement and so on)
I myself use a number of scripts utilising the Lua subsystem, some of which automate quite complex series' of actions. The system is more flexible than it is given credit for.
I'm also curious...Did you ever play Ultima Online? The botting scenario got so bad with that game in the end that at times it was impossible to tell who was a live player at the keyboard and who wasn't. It wrecked the game, from the point of view of being multiplayer...if you're going to play something on your own with a heap of AI running around, that by definition isn't a multiplayer game...it's single player.
Would you like all macro programs, even ones that aren't used for cheating in games, to be illegal? Because this is how they all work.
You're keeping your argument centred on macro programs in general terms, rather than talking about WoWGlider specifically, because I think you know that that is the only area where you've got a solid argument. It probably couldn't *quite* be classified as a straw man...but it's close.
There are two points here:-
a) WoWGlider is being used exclusively to perform action/s that Blizzard are opposed to. Macroing itself *is* allowed within the game via the Lua subsystem; I myself use a number of scripts within this system, some of which perform quite complex series of actions.
b) Use of *any* programs which run outside WoW and interact with it are specifically prohibited in the Terms of Service. What that means is that it doesn't in fact matter what WoWGlider does; as a third party program it is in violation of the ToS.
The bottom line quite simply is this:- Blizzard own and run the server network that WoW is hosted on. Any offline establishment (restaurants, gaming houses and so on) on the planet has the ability to set its' own house rules with regards to dress, behaviour, and sometimes other things, and generally also has bouncers to enforce said rules. The only reason why there's a difference to that in this case in your and other people's heads is because the WoW client runs on your local machine.
Following on from that analogy, though...if you have a problem with the house rules of a given establishment, go somewhere else. There are that many other both open and closed source games around (both on and offline, and single and multiplayer) that it should not be a problem.
I think the major problem here is the attitude (perpetuated, as usual, by Richard Stallman) that says that purely because you're handing over money, any given vendor is both legally and morally obligated to give you whatever you want. They are not. They are obligated to give you exactly what has been negotiated by you and them; no more, and no less. Blizzard's ToS is very specific as to what you are being given in exchange for your money, as well as outlining what your remedy is if you're unhappy with that; to walk away, after which you're entirely free to either play a game produced by someone else, join a FOSS project creating a game which may have a scenario more to your liking, or start a project to do so. Blizzard do not (and could not) try to forbid you from playing a competing game if you are unhappy with their terms.
Yet another common a
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Ah, flawed analogy time (my favourite part of slashdot comments):
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I don't see it so much as fanboyishness as feeling as though I can relate in my own head to why Blizzard possibly has zero tolerance towards certain demographics of gamers with script kiddie tendencies.
But maybe I am a fanboy; I hadn't actually heard it put like that before, so it's a new concept. One thing that annoys me about that somewhat though is that a lot of people on Slashdot are irrationally worshipful about a whole lot of things, and somehow tha
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My main problem with Stallman/the FSF, generally speaking, is fourfold:-
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No...I'm claiming that what's being stored at memory address 0x0F45CD is "a work protected under this title." Pedantry, I know...but that is what law is generally based on.
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>address 0x0F45CD is "a work protected under this title."
And were do you find any "technological measure that effectively CONTROLS access" to it?
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Surprising you bring that up, since nobody has mentioned it. If that's what you were going for, you got it. Shill. Although it's more likely you're just deluded into thinking that what Blizzard wants equates to a definition of their rights. Their rights are not defined by some ambiguous and immature "be square with them, and they will be square with you." mentality. THAT'S being childish and unrealistic.
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A question...why is being a fanboy necessarily a bad thing? Do you advocate approaching everything from a perspective of jaded cynicism? I've noticed the marked tendency towards general negativity on Slashdot...and when people deviate from that, the assumption is made that the person in question is either hopelessly naive, or a nut.
What precisely was the problem with bnetd? Other than the technical DMCA infraction, that is. It wasn't used to cheat or to degrade anyone else's e
Because you paid... (Score:2)
You should learn more about fair use and the public domain. The limited monopoly on copyright was created in order to provide an incentive to create more works and to enrich the public domain. Just because Blizzard made a great game doesn't mean they would run the best online servers for that game for instance. Should
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Because:
1. it is an entirely dependent relationship. Your loyalty is going to a brand.
1a. and that brand is managed for the market and the market alone. Genuine aesthetic decisions come in second at best, always. Those brands will be managed to generate the optimal revenue stream, always.
1b. this dependent relationship makes you rather powerless. Most fans will engage in a lot of apologetics for the franchise, brand, or producer that has earned their loyalty,
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There are plenty of people living paycheck to paycheck who have an outlet like World of Warcraft when they want to relax and play a game or just kill time. There are also plenty of kids whose allowance or money earned from chores/etc doesn't cover a whole lot other than their favorite game. But I guess it certainly was easier to do what you did. Requires less thinking about possible scenarios, or thinking in general, rather.
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It's just a game dude, not the valuati
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I have two words for you -- Purchasing power. The people that bot ruin the game economy across all servers through their ill-gotten goods, whether those goods be trade items or raw gold. A person who bots their way to 60 in a week, effectively having no downtime due to the bot, is going to have gained plenty in gold and items by that time. There's plenty of fine loot to be had outside of instances, though without a doubt if you want the best for your level you're going to have to group it in an instance, an
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Gold farming, however, is not a botting problem. Some use bots, many more use chinese labor.
Yes, the best items are BoP.. they're also in instances. There's not a thing to stop a bot from picking up a BoP item, so I think you're a little off yourself.
The Economy in WoW does have a problem.. bu
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Wow, I wish I could live in such a black and white world and not realize it's a fabrication of my mind. Seriously, you appear to have no idea that there are so many variables, more than can be accurately brought up in this reply and keep it at a sane length to myself, that influence one's financial situation. I'll respond directly to the two (predictable) points you mention though:
1. Not always a possibility at any given time, sorry.
2. The best managing of one's money in the world does not modify one's