Vivendi sues creator of Warcraft bot

If kids play it too much - it the lazy ass parents fault. They not only have the options to limit the amount played but also have their finger on the switch at the socket. Dont blame Bliz for creating a game which many people want to play A LOT - hats off to them!

And yea i play a lot - when i have time after full time work/GF/baby/TV/beer.

Full epic set = easy @1-2 hs a nite

My stupid nephew plays this game on average 8 hours a day. Next time someone close to you is playing put in the "/played" command. What a waste. Get a life, go outside, touch a real life girl or just get a job.

They should allow bots, but if you use a bot, you have to pay by the hour. And complaints about flames that deal with the idea that someone is inexperienced for their level should be laughed at by the administrators.

Maybe make a script that automatically replies to the message, but adds lol at the top. Nothing else, just lol.

Define "bot" ,as in robotic in nature. I have seen a mechanical contraption to physically push keys on a keyboard to automate certain tedious task. That is a bot, but undetectable by software standards. Unless you see a pattern for 100+ hours straight that no human could do. But then I have seen humans( like in a dorm ) tag team play and repeat a specific farming action for more hours than 1 human would be willing to do.

Never gonna stop it completely. My gamble is on the people who think of ways to make their game time better and defeat all attempts to block them otherwise.

What Blizzard should do is to delete the accounts of those responsible for using the Bots.

Agreed, with Bots it really actually makes real players work harder than they normally would have to.

Glad I stopped the game.

After all that bluster you still haven't explained exactly why this effects you or your game in anyway? Oh it doesn't!

I know that Everquest used to make certain quests takes AGES to complete. Either you had to wait for the moon to be in the right equinox (yeah yeah, perhaps it's more RPG that way.).
Or you had to spend hours killing little bunnies find an obscure item that is dropped by 1 in a million bunnies.

Everquest purposefully made tasks which were meant to take a large amount of time to complete.

Now, as you're paying a subscription on a monthly basis it's in their interests to keep you playing as long as possible.

A Bot would be wonderful here. Quest requires you to wake up at 2am in the morning to kill a bunny? Have the bot do it.
You need to kill a million bunnies? Have the bot do it.

There are some definite uses for bots, but if one's used to "farm" an area, or stop a player doing a task in person, then the player's bot should be logged off.

IIRC in Everquest bots were reluctantly permitted as long as the above situations didn't happen.

I hope he wins.

bots should be made acceptable by all the MMO publishers/devs.

i see nothing wrong with eating a sandwhich and letting your BOT do some work for you.

i would even go as far as saying that its handy to pop off to work, cook dinner, have sex and come back to do some co-op play.

again - all MMO should have built in BOT to do your farming for you.

Then forbit Autopilot too. It's also kinda bot.They detect bots anyway and ban users. Big deal.

And 100K copies out of 10M users is just 1% It's nothing for their servers even working 24/7/365. These bots are not as smart anyway

Wowzie asked: "just wondering if your making a program that is require wow to use, isnt that considerd a wow program?"

Answer: The same would apply to every plug in around, so it doesn't matter. That's just how the CPU ecology works.

I am a MMORG player (POTCO) and I agree with others: go after the cheeters!

For those who are not knowledgeable on the topic, the use of bots is a bad thing. It puts 'vritual players' into the game world, which kill off parts of the game ecology and interfere with the activities of normal players. The game money and so on gained from the activities of the bot is then typically sold via a gold farming website.

But even worse than that, it allows a farming bot to level a character while the player is not online... this is kinda like taking a movie and running it through a chopper program to get rid of everything except the last 10 minutes. The player ends up bypassing a lot of content, and reaches the level cap (the highest level available in the game) with only a vague knowledge of how to play their complex high-level character, and sometimes without essential skills.

Blizzard took a stance against these kinds of things right from the start, and although some people (who'd like to have their cake without working for it) may not like it, it is their right as creators of the game to make it according to their vision.


Wouldn't it be the users of the bots who were infringing the EULA rather than the creator?

Blizzard has a well defined history of going after people that create bots/hacks in violation of their online EULA. I also seem to remember some stuff about how it's illegal to eBay ingame items, etc, and he's technically violating their EULA to profit off the game...seems like murky water, but well within Blizz's rights to at least get an injunction.

"Blizzard claims that Donnelly's "bot" program really does infringe its copyright because Glider copies the game into memory."

Thats the lamest excuse ive ever heard,, 
I mean, everything you do on a computer is copied to memory at some point, copyrighted or not.

..everytime I reboot I make another copy of windows to my memory,, dont you?

"Sounds to us a lot like Vivendi simply wants the money that Donnelly has made by selling copies of Glider."

Your article doesn't give this impression at all. In the reply to the lawsuit you quoted the following:

"...if Donnelly did not immediately agree to stop selling Glider and return all profits that he made from Glider sales."

I'm assuming that you properly quoted the statement and that it is verbatim. If so, it was merely stated that Donnelly return the profits from Glider, not that he give them to Vivendi/Blizzard. The statement I quoted above gave me the impression that he was to return the profits to his 100,000+ customers, not to Vivendi.

Bots completely ruin MMOs, where the entire point is for you yourself to invest time (and have FUN). They farm gold, jerk up prices on the auction house, and get in the way of actual players in the game world.

Bots are the bane of an MMO, and I, for one, welcome the wrath of a level 80 elite Blizzard lawyer.

SM: At last some sense.

Feel sorry for the judge in this case -- he'll / she'll probably be very much lost as the lawyers try to explain the concept of 'bots' in that control orcs and elves in an online game. Unless he / she is really, surprisingly, inordinately hip.

Having played Wow for the last 2 years and watched the rise of bots, I say "so what"!

It's not like they effect me or any other player in anyway other than you might have to wait 30 seconds for a character to re-spawn.. big deal, par for the course.

To say bots farming for cash in anyway effect *your* play is nonsense.

It's not like loads of cash is that important beyond buying an epic mount, none of the decent gear can be purchased.

I don't see what the problem is, I've seen loads of bots and it's never been a problem for me or anyone I know who plays.

Blizzard could easily stop ingame gold adverts if they wanted, it's telling that they haven't made any effort to do so.

Last time I looked the excellent Thottbot site was financed by ingame gold sellers, for me this alone outweights the disadvantages of bots/gold sellers.


Strange that they didn't demand the database of people he sold it to and then banned those cheaters from their network, that would make more (legal) sense since it's those people who bought it that would be the ones using it and breaking the EULA.
Of course they'd first have to determine they are using it after they bought it, but still, those are the culprits.

Based on Blizzards' arguement, that Glider copies the game client into memory, then they could sue everyone who plays WOW, because thier Systems' RAM does the same thing everytime they play!

I don't agree with cheating programs, (God knows, I hate playing against people using Aimbots and such.) however, I hope this guy wins, because he found a loophole and the corperates need to learn that if they make a mistake, they can't just run to thier lawyers to fix it.

If you're not using the service 100% all the time, you're not getting your money's worth!

just wondering if your making a program that is require wow to use, isnt that considerd a wow program? and by using this bot you are making things easyer were you dont even have to play no more and let this BOT run around and do your job for you, that just makes the game not fair for others that there time in game.