MDY v Blizzard: Place Your Bets

I find myself aligned with Matt on this issue.

I’m opposed to cheating. I fully endorse Blizzard’s right to ban people from botting. I don’t, however, like the implication that they can control third parties in this manner.

We are really looking at third-party integration here. The automotive industry would have loved it if they could have prevented third party parts being used on their cars, but as far as I know their attempts are routinely defeated in courts. And, if we value third party support higher than *people’s lives*, I don’t see why we should abandon the right to reverse engineer to preserve something as measly as the integrity of video games. (I’m pretty sure Ford would argue that third party parts endanger innocent consumers if they felt it could justify the abolishment of the after market)

This is not to say that Blizzard won’t win. The courts sided with them on the Diablo server emulator, after all. It just means that I don’t think they should win, and I think in the long term (20 years?) the idea of Blizzard being able to make such a claim would seem as ridiculous as Ford demanding I use Ford tires.

I’m sure someone will now point out that since it is a game, and you voluntarily decide to play the game, you should accept whatever happens to be in the EULA, even if that prohibits using after market components. First, owning a car is voluntary. Second, I really, really, don’t like the idea that we enable people to hand over their rights in this manner. If I had my druthers, we would have stronger consumer protection laws which make such one-sided contracts inadmissible. This is not without precedent – I’m sure you have all seen the “THIS LIMITATION MAY NOT APPLY IN SOME JURISDICTIONS…”, implying that there exist jurisdictions where you are simply unable to give up your right to a warranty.

People should not be required to install a root-kit to play a video game, any more than they should to play some music. This might seem unfair – how can one ensure a trusted play environment without Warden? Well, that, I thought, is what we were paying the Game Designers for. There are certain “laws of physics” associated with online worlds. I mean, no matter how cool http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/19/led-lamp-uses-grandf.html would be, it’s like saying “Communism would be great if it only worked”.

The hard fact that if people are sitting in their own living rooms, you can’t provide a trusted environment. Professional sports should make it clear that even when you own the field, you still can’t provide a trusted environment.

I should be able to play your game on any equipment, and with any equipment. I don’t want you banning my mouse because it is “too high precision”, or “has too many buttons”. There is room in my world for a “stock” game system where people compete on standardized equipment. To claim WoW is anywhere remotely near that world is laughable.

UO macroing is always an entertaining example to bring up. About the only reason why that mattered one iota (rather than the load on the servers) was the feedback mechanism left in place to determine skill gain. That turned the relatively harmless fast-advancement into a prisoner’s dilemma requiring everyone to macro.

@=j, your summary is accurate only if the players were going to spend X to level up the character in the first place. If I am planning on quitting after W months due to the grind, but instead get a cheat program that keeps me occupied for X-Y months to get a level 70, the question becomes if W < X-Y.

Even more importantly, I am not all that convinced people would be buying Wow Glider to level up their first character. I certainly hope WoW, (and from all accounts, WoW is) playable enough to feel relatively grind-free getting your first lvl 70. Where macroing is tempting is when one has already”won” the game legitimately but are now trying different variations. Here, macroing can actually increase your stickiness since it allows people to get more alts to “playable” levels, keeping the player interested in the game more often. We saw DAoC explicitly acknowledge this when they added in-game tools to automatically boost your new alts to level V provided you had already leveled to V+N somewhere else. (Well, that was also motivated by the desire to server-balance…)

I am thus not at all convinced that WOWGlider users are likely to quit any sooner than they would have if WOWGlider didn’t exist. Instead, consider the impact of the bot-player’s harm on the economy resulting other players leaving.

The lost subscriptions are likely among the non-users of the botting software, not the users. The non-users need to grind more hours to get enough gold to bid against those who botted. The extra hours grinding (rather than socializing, exploring, or raiding) increases the chance of them burning out and canceling. The bot user, on the other hand, merely needs to leave the computer running a longer to acquire the gold, so is relatively unaffected by the inflation they’ve triggered.

@kalain: You object because WowGlider is mucking with the data/stream of a client/server app. This is not a strong argument because it fails to address what really annoys people about bots. Manipulating the data stream is not the issue at hand.

First, consider a router. A router’s only purpose is to much with the data stream between the client/server apps. Of course, it does “proper” things – NAT forwarding, QOS, whatever. My point is merely that munging the data stream isn’t the crime.

Second, consider a third party XBox controller. I’m sure Microsoft would draw a diagram showing that the xbox controller sits in the middle of the client/server data stream. By a third party creating a controller someone is mucking with that data stream. Personally, I feel our world is better off if third parties are allowed to make their own xbox controllers. In the old days, your controller affected your game play – to fire rapidly you had to rapidly press the button. Then third-parties created rapid-fire buttons or modes where the hardware would deal with toggling the fire button at the highest rate. This affects game play, and even breaks some game designs (consider the track-and-field style games where mashing the button was the object). I’d object strongly if some game company wanted to sue those joystick manufacturers for unbalancing their track & field game.

Third, directing your energy at the data stream is ignoring the actual crime of botting. It is theoritically possible that I could put a camera on a tripod pointed at the Blizzard-Approved monitor with a set of actuators sitting over the Blizzard-Approved keyboard and Mouse, hook that up to some powerful computer and screenscrape my way to victory. This setup should be every bit as objectionable as the data-stream-manipulator.

I’ll also note that WowGlider charging for their product shouldn’t somehow make it more or less legal. The idea of third parties exploiting niches created by deficiencies in primary service providers is an important role to be filled in our economic system. When one is the primary provider, it certainly feels like leeching. Especially when you were intentionally leaving those deficiencies in place. But, ironically enough, it usually turns out that Used Bookstores and the like actually improve the lot for the primary provider in the end.