$6,000,000 for doing it wrong
October 4th, 2008Blizzard has won a lawsuit against the creators of bot software for World of Warcraft called “Glider”. I actually hadn’t been following this before, but personally, I find at least part of Blizzard’s reasoning for the lawsuit to be patently ridiculous. In the original story, they stated:
“Blizzard’s designs expectations are frustrated, and resources are allocated unevenly, when bots are introduced into the WoW universe, because bots spend far more time in-game than an ordinary player would and consume resources the entire time.”
I find this to be a completely underwhelming argument, as the game is designed to allow people to login at any time and play for as long as they want. And, contrary to what they say, there actually ARE people who will sit on their computers for days at a time just playing the game… some of them have even died from doing so. So to say that a bot “frustrates” their “design expectations” is absolutely laughable.
Perhaps more legally significant to me (as a layperson anyway) is whether the bot violates Blizzard’s license agreement that you agree to when you play the game. Whether people read these or not they do represent a legal contract. Blizzard specifically forbids the use of 3rd party programs that interact with the game in their EULA (or actually in their Terms of Use, which you agree to in their EULA). This doesn’t necessarily answer the question of whether or not selling something that breaks Blizzard’s contract with end users constitutes damages for Blizzard, but apparently the court felt it did to the tune of $6 million.
In the end, my only question is, what the hell was the point of all that? The creator’s of Glide now owe $6,000,000 for creating software that allows you to avoid actually playing a game that you’re actively paying for. If the game is so boring to play, then why are you playing it to begin with?
Posted in Industry, Jeff, Online, PC |
October 5th, 2008 at 7:26 am
Well, the supposed point of Glider (or any botting program, really) is that you can bot your way past all that tedious, boring stuff like leveling and item collection so you can do the fun stuff like endgame events like 25-man raiding. Leveling your fifth or sixth character to level 70 gets boring, I guess.
Maybe it’s just me though, but I like leveling my characters, at least once I get out of the n00b starting zones. I get a really tangible sense of progression that I don’t get when I’m level capped. And it’s not even all that tedious compared to WoW of 2 or more years ago, since they dropped the amount of EXP needed to level and there is rested 2x EXP to speed things up even more. But different strokes for different folks and all that.
October 5th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
I’ve said this in differnet contexts before, but as Duckk suggests, the main fun of WoW isn’t actually playing it. You slog through the pain of tedious leveling/collection so you can have the power to breeze through the battles that you had to experience to get there. Having epic gear and obtaining the ability to kill noobs by the boatload is, in essence, a reward in and of itself.
This isn’t really a bad thing, but it turns the traditional gaming formula on its head. Previously, the gameplay itself was rewarding, usually because it was in some way skill-based. You “had fun” executing some action successfully. You can see something like this in traditional JRPGs, where random battle-grinding is required to gain the Magic Sword that will kill everything in a hit.
As a result, Blizzard doesn’t like bots because they cheapen their rewards. If everyone has Magic Armor of the Celestial Dragon +160, then it’s no longer valuable as an incentive to grind. It eliminates the value of the levels and gear in the first place, because their scarcity is what makes them important. Destroying that artificial economy is what Blizzard is opposing, not the effort itself.