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Blizzard wins $7 million in bot company lawsuit

strafer

member
Sadly they will just keep coming.

Blizzard Entertainment has won $7 million in a long-running lawsuit against a World of Warcraft bot company.

Blizzard initially filed suit against Ceiling Fan Software in December 2011. Ceiling Fan was responsible for a number of WoW bots - the most popular of which were Shadow Bot and Pocket Gnome - and has now been ordered by a California court to cease operations and pay Blizzard $7 million in damages.

"After more than two years of legal battles with Blizzard Entertainment to both pursue our right to operate and our customer's right to play WoW as they choose, we did not prevail in the suit and have been ordered by the United States District Court in California to cease our operations," a statement on the Ceiling Fan website read.

Ceiling Fan has also issued an appeal to its customers to help raise money to pay its remaining legal costs.

This is not the first time that Blizzard has taken a stand against gameplay automation in World of Warcraft. In 2010, it won a similar case brought against a popular bot known as "Glider".

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-21-blizzard-wins-USD7m-in-bot-suit
 

eot

Banned
Can't say I agree with that judgement. If your game can be so easily and efficiently botted then fix that instead.

We're talking about people making and selling bots for profit, of course they should go after them.
 

Fugu

Member
I don't think Blizzard should be winning these suits until they start actually putting some effort into preventing this botting from happening in the first place. The fact that there is no CAPTCHA involved in the WoW login process simply astounds me.
 

netBuff

Member
I don't think Blizzard should be winning these suits until they start actually putting some effort into preventing this botting from happening in the first place. The fact that there is no CAPTCHA involved in the WoW login process simply astounds me.

Captchas are supremely annoying and often very hard to enter correctly, I don't think paying WoW customers would take kindly to having to enter a random string of information every time they want to play the game.
 

Damian.

Banned
I think the aspect of bots kept me interested in WoW for a couple of additional months in the end. I loved to actively look for them and throw them off course and watch them fuck up endlessly over and over.
 

Tak3n

Banned
What ever happened to Glider?

I made over £500 using that, levelling up and selling the characters, then one day, Boom it stopped working

Did Blizard make them go bust
 

Dicer

Banned
What ever happened to Glider?

I made over £500 using that, levelling up and selling the characters, then one day, Boom it stopped working

Did Blizard make them go bust

Classy....


Glad botting is cracked down on, esp when they drag them in to bg's
 

Paches

Member
What ever happened to Glider?

I made over £500 using that, levelling up and selling the characters, then one day, Boom it stopped working

Did Blizard make them go bust

Straight from the OP...

This is not the first time that Blizzard has taken a stand against gameplay automation in World of Warcraft. In 2010, it won a similar case brought against a popular bot known as "Glider".
 

Tak3n

Banned
Did you read the OP?

yeah I did, I was perhaps not specific, the last I heard the guy who run Glider had successfully appealed some decision... just wondered if anyone knew what become of them (the 2 guys who run it) rather than Glider, as that was obviously shut

I know he had a house in Arizona, and he was fighting the damages awarded to Blizzard
 
Bots are horrible. But a properly designed game can take some preventative measure forcing the majority of the easy bots out leaving the rest to be manually taken care of.

Or you can just be like Blizzard and sue the bot companies to the ground.
 

Tak3n

Banned
found it

I remember him saying Glider made him a Millionaire effectively, and he won a lawsuit that stop the financial damages being so much, just found this

We've settled the lawsuit with Blizzard, so things are going to happen fairly quickly around here. I can't go into a ton of detail, but I can say I'm glad to be able to close the book on that particular ugliness and move on with a relatively regular life, even if it means no Glider. I can also divulge that my proposed title for the next WoW expansion, "WoW: Mercury Is A Cool Guy And Needs A Nice Girl Who Also Doesn't Mind Cooking" didn't make it very far.

For Glider customers, this means not much change from where we are now. There was simply no way we could get by Judge Campbell to get Glider back on the market, although we came pretty close. Regardless, there is no point in running forums with no future for Glider.

On Monday, August 22nd, we will be taking down the site and forums. I imagine I'll be around here quite a bit more until then, at least once I get back to Phoenix later today.

Most of the people who have helped out through the years will not see this, but I imagine some folks will cross-post this message on other forums. You have my most sincere appreciation; everyone from OMW to Ocktra and all the others. The community is what made Glider into a true force and I never would have made it this far without you. Losing that through the injunction has been the worst part for me.

I'm not sure what I'll be doing next, but I'm quite certain it won't involve anything to do with Blizzard. Maybe some kind of regular job that doesn't involve a constant barrage of legal and technical attacks. Imagine that.

And, no, I'm not interested in automating Rift unless your job offer includes a hefty starting bonus. Think Ferrari 458-sized.

So long, and thanks for all the cookies.
 

Remmy2112

Member
Good. Now I want to see EA, Activision, and other shooter publishers going after aimbots, if they are not already (I have not heard anything on that front).
 

Enkidu

Member
I don't think Blizzard should be winning these suits until they start actually putting some effort into preventing this botting from happening in the first place. The fact that there is no CAPTCHA involved in the WoW login process simply astounds me.
Would such captchas actually help here? It's not exactly difficult to just log in manually before activating the bot.
 
We're talking about people making and selling bots for profit, of course they should go after them.

Selling code they created that reads memory and performs actions based on what's read. It's basically the computer version of reading a book and creating a book report.
 

Not Spaceghost

Spaceghost
Lol I remember during the first raiding tier of cataclysm I would set up my fishbot and go to class for the day, come back to my dorm and find myself with almost full bags of fish. I'd hearth to org sell all my fish for ~1500g and fly back to uldum and go to my next class. But I'd hoard those fish for the next day so people wouldn't get suspicious.

I was never caught. Nor was I banned for this, blizzard just doesn't care unless they're going to make money out of it. So when they say they've got the best interest in the community at heart by going after bots I can barely believe it.

Although you could say they never wanted to just catch one botter they wanted to let the problem exist until they could just shut it down, and I believe that. Also I have a weird perspective, since our server was kind of small, only the big deal guilds ever seemed to have crafting materials accessible to them for consumables, but since I started botting I was allowing everyone to get rare fish for a good price in bulk, which allowed other guilds to start getting buff food.

Once the fish bot got patched and no longer worked I didn't mind so much since I had already made enough gold to get me through the expansion. Hell, my inactive account still has about 60k split amongs 3 toons. What I did notice was that fish prices drastically went up and suddenly no one had fish feasts or mastery buff food. My usually customers asked me why I wasn't selling and all I could say was I got busy with school and didn't have time to fish anymore.

So honestly I will say that before that experience I hated botting just like everyone else, but after it despite becoming disgustingly wealthy I realized that it serves a role in the game, especially in low population servers, I had gotten to know the people I sold to and I realized that I was providing a service to these people that no one there either cared to do, could do (leveling fishing has always sucked) or had the time to do, on bigger servers you don't need this because more people catching just one stack amounts to ten times the amount of stuff you'd find on our AH, seriously. Our server's auction house had like maybe 1 or two stacks of lava scale fish at a time and both were triple my old asking price and they would stay up there for days.

Say what you will but what originally started as a "fuck it i don't care if I get banned" get rich scheme made me realize something else about the whole thing. That isn't to say all botters will gain the insight I got or all botting is even good. But just to dismiss it with a "they're all awful people and if they're gone the game will be better" isn't exactly the most accurate attitude.
 
If you played Guild Wars2 at launch (or after) in October-December 2012 you would have seen the disaster.

People had their accounts stolen, by keyloggers. The Guild Wars 1 community (of a game with 8 million copies sold) did not have these issues. But chinese hackers were inflating the economy, people were running bot characters. sometimes with 10 identical characters repeating actions. it was crazy.
People felt the game would die. Aion before it(another NCsoft game) had its economy ruined by bots, and the developers was not able to salvage it.




GW2 was able to save itself from bots for many reasons. One was that they had deeply in the game integrated a cash shop. While people opposed it at first, calling ArenaNet greedy capitalists and using free 2 play shit games as an example of why an in game economy couldnt work were you were able to buy in game gold with real money, - ArenaNet did something amazing.

People didnt use gold websites because the value of the gem currency made it so they could also turn in-game gold into real money. but it was disjointed from the auction house, so it was not like Diablo 3. but it killed the bots business. and its why GW2 now has no bots.



It's actually an amazing story, but none the media have covered. I have never seen such a 180-degree turn for a game in its economic fase. ArenaNet has a real economist working full time, taking care of inflations of everything.
 
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