MDY v Blizzard: Place Your Bets
Virtually Blind has the initial round of motions filed in the MDY v. Blizzard case posted. (I’ve gone ahead and mirrored them here in case bandwidth becomes an issue; a list of all the docs is at the end of this post.) As you might expect, they live in mutually antagonistic realities. MDY’s pacific “levels want to be free” version:
When Blizzard released WoW in late 2004, Donnelly became an avid player of WoW. Like many others who play WoW, Donnelly became frustrated with the amount of time it took to advance his character in WoW. Inspired by his desire to advance his character‘s level to the same level several of his friends had reached, Donnelly searched online for any available programs that would help him speed up the time it took to level his character up to where his friends were. After searching and being unsuccessful in locating a software program to meet his needs, Donnelly decided to write software code to assist him in catching up with his friends in the game without having to be physically playing WoW. Between March 2005 and May, 2005, Donnelly developed a software program that became known as WoWGlider (”Glider”)…
…MDY has only marketed the game as an alternate method to reduce the time it takes to level a character to 60 or 70. Although a person can use Glider (inefficiently) as a tool to help WoW licensees to “farm gold” within the WoW game, MDY has never marketed the program for that purpose and actively discourages persons from using Glider as a gold farming tool…
…Although Blizzard‘s acts of detecting Glider and banning Glider users‘ accounts led Donnelly to believe that Blizzard considered Glider an unauthorized third-party software program under its EULA and TOU, Donnelly did not agree with how Blizzard interpreted its agreements. Donnelly believed that Blizzard had no right to control MDY’s efforts to sell Glider because he had no contractual relationship with Blizzard. In addition, Blizzard‘s EULA did not originally prohibit “bots.”
Well, since it didn’t say the word “bot” anywhere, it must be OK! Allow Blizzard to retort:
While legitimate players eat, sleep, and attend school or work, MDY’s customers use Glider to shortcut the advancement of their in-game characters and loot scarce game assets. As shown herein, Glider use severely harms he WoW gaming experience for other players by altering the balance of play, disrupting the social and immersive aspects of the game, and undermining the in-game economy…
…Perhaps most significantly, MDY invests great effort to prevent Blizzard from enforcing its rights against Glider users by enabling them to circumvent Blizzard’s technological access controls and conceal their infringements from Blizzard and other players determined to report them. MDY has willfully persisted in this endeavor despite knowing that the overwhelming majority of WoW players despise the presence of Glider bots in WoW, and that Blizzard is being forced to divert significant human and financial resources from game development and support to efforts to stop Glider. Indeed, MDY’s stated goal is to drive up Blizzard’s cost of combating Glider to the point it ultimately abandons efforts to block it, an option that Blizzard’s rule-abiding customers, who have filed over 465,000 formal complaints and voiced their continued displeasure with Glider on Blizzard’s forums, have made clear is unacceptable.
Of special interest is the ‘expert report’ filed in support of Blizzard’s case by Terra Novan Dr. Edward Castronova. He takes the controversial position that cheating is bad.
Glider bots destroy this design, distorting the economy for the average player in two specific ways. When a Glider bot “farms” an area, it picks up not only experience points for its owner, discussed above, but also the “loot” that is dropped by the mobs killed by the bot. Because Glider can run constantly, it kills far more mobs than anticipated by WoW’s designers, thus creating a large surplus of goods and currency, flooding the economy with gold pieces and loot like the Essence of Water. This surplus distorts the economy in a specific way.
When bots gather key resources, they gather them in abundance. Owners of bots usually sell these resources to other players for gold, which inevitably deflates their price. Blizzard’s design intent is for the resources to command a certain high value, so that average players, who might get one or two of the resources in an average amount of play time, may obtain a decent amount of gold from selling them. But because characters controlled by bots flood the market with those resources, the market value of these resources is far less than Blizzard intended, and the average player realizes only a fraction of the intended value from the resources s/he finds. The deflated value of key resources presents a critical problem for ordinary players trying to enjoy the game. Blizzard’s game systems assume that players will be earning a certain amount of gold per hour, and many systems, such as repairs and travel, force players to make fixed payments of gold into WoW’s systems. Buying a horse, for example, costs a certain amount of gold. That pnce IS set by the game designers based on the assumption that normal players will accumulate gold at a certain rate, and that some of their gold will come from the value of resources that they harvest and sell. When the value of those resources plummets because of Glider, the amount of time it takes to accumulate the gold required for in-game expenditures like the horse skyrockets. This skews the economy, frustrates players, and, as a result of a less-satisfied user base, damages Blizzard.
So, it probably comes as no surprise that I come down on Blizzard’s side in all this, being that I work on MMOs, dislike cheating, and all that entails. Still, no matter which way the rulings go in this case, the repercussions are going to be interesting:
- WowGlider/MDY is arguing, essentially, that they have a right to run a business based on third party tools for automating World of Warcraft because the EULA didn’t expressly forbid it, and anyway, who reads EULAs, ya know? It’s just another form of playing the game. Also, Blizzard’s a bunch of Nazis who came knocking on a poor bot writer’s door. With lawyers. (For some reason, I don’t see this argument holding a lot of water in court, but who knows.) So if MDY’s case is taken as written, we’ll have legal precedent that botting is an accepted part of MMO play. Also, EULAs will suffer a serious challenge. This will result in, to put it mildly, quite a few more court cases (”Were YOU banned for gold farming? Take it to court!”)
- Blizzard is arguing that WowGlider harms the gameplay of WoW players, is explicity forbidden in the clickthrough TOS/EULA, and thus they have a right and duty to stop WowGlider and similar programs by any means necessary, up to and including polymorphic rootkit-style access control programs and lawyering bot writers TO DEATH. If Blizzard gets a ruling in their favor, that will give them a strong leg to stand on vs. other legal challenges to Warden, their EULA, and will also have a precedent vs. botting/exploiting on the books.
I strongly suspect that, like most lawsuits, this will eventually settle out of court. But even if it doesn’t, we certainly live in interesting times when a game design discussion doc ends up as a court filing.
Paperwork for your own backyard unfrozen caveman lawyering:
MDY’s Motion for Summary Judgment (MDY v Blizzard)
MDY’s Statement of Facts (MDY v Blizzard)
Blizzard’s Motion for Summary Judgement (MDY v Blizzard)
Blizzard’s Statement of Facts (MDY v Blizzard)
Effects of Botting on World of Warcraft, Edward Castronova, PhD. (MDY v Blizzard)
@Paul
I think you misunderstand my argument. If it takes X months on average to level to 70 and with a cheat program it takes X-Y. Even if the player still plays for Z more months before moving on to the next new shiny, Blizzard has lost those Y months of revenue. X+Z > X-Y+Z
I do not mean to imply that this is the case for every player that cheats in this manner. I imagine that there are enough that do to have a noticeable impact on Blizzard’s bottom line.
Also, while I do not have the data to back it up, I suspect that players who level their characters naturally have a stronger attachment to them than those that cheated to get to their current status. The stronger the attachment, the less likely they are to cancel.
@=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.
@ Brask – that was was my point, you phrased it so much eloquently. MDY should sopoena the data from all the cancel subs questionaires Blizzard asks you to fill out when you cancel an account. I feel certain more people quit from the grind of having to level another character, then grind suitable gear, then grind rep, etc etc when they want a change of pace in the game experiencing a new character. I know I do, but soon as I hit level 35 the reality of what lay before that character kills my desire to level. (I already have 5 level 70’s). I would use WoWglider if there wasn’t a chance my account would get suspended.
Games like WoW can easily “beat” RMT and third party programs they don’t like by easing the burden. In fact, they can turn it into a nice new revenue stream. Instead of leveling up yet another 70, I will most likely go to a new game, and Blizzard will lose both of my accounts. It’s cumbersome and boring now. While, if I could pay $10 to get a character to level 60, I would, quickly and without a second thought. (They win both way, the initial cash influx, and, my continued subscription). It is the same with the gold issue, they force me to grind out daily quests (which, again, I can’t state how much I hate) so I can “afford” to “play”. I would rather buy gold from Blizzard, legally. Blizzard could cripple the illegal market by putting in a very reasonable cost structure, but too reasonable for a third party company to sell “illegally”. Accounts will stop getting hacked, as there is no profit in it.
Many will argue they would quit in that scenario because they do not have the disposable cash, that would be the tough balancing act. I would argue that MMO’s in general favor people who have more disposable “time”, over those with disposable income. I work 65 hours a week. I would gladly take one of those hours wages to invest in my entertainment – over and above my monthly fee – so I could enjoy the good parts of the game (raiding, pvp, grouping) and avoid the bad areas (grinding and farming) I simply can’t keep up with the person who works less, or doesn’t work at all, who has more disposable time compared to my disposable income.
I have a question. In 100 years or so, when I can make or purchase a robot to clean my house and organize my garage, can I tell him to farm for Primal Waters when I’m at work?
Glider is a tool. A means to an end. It is ok.
I realize that almost everyone in this thread is a non-lawyer, and are quite reasonably letting their general philosophic stance on RMT color their view of the actual law.
I’m a clerk for a federal judge currently, and if these pleadings came over my desk? I wouldn’t even blink before handing in a “ream WoWGlider” opinion draft. I haven’t done all the research but as was said, Blizzard just has to win on one of their many asserted grounds. All the handicap stuff and “but the EULA is unfair” stuff (the standard for unconscionable contracts is sky-high) would be laughed out of court.
Hmm. Research the term “skinner box” triforcer and then let us know if that standard is met. I would at least expect the employees of a federal judge not to be amused.
But if you want another legit use, Machinima is Nectar for your Bathwater.
Re: Triforcer.
I could not disagree with you more. I have been an IP lawyer for over 22 years, I rarely play video games, but my kids are big WoW players. I have read both briefs and I personally think Blizzard is up a creek on this one. To me, Blizzard cannot rebut three simple points that MDY eloquently raised in its brief: (1) simply adding a term to a EULA that makes something a violation of the EULA cannot turn a violation of that term into a copyright infringement, (2) if you circumvent a technological measure, the measure has to be protecting someone from infringing an exclusive right under the copyright act (Warden and Scan.dll do not), and (3) there must be some malicious intent to harm Blizzard by MDY (simply wanting to make a profit by using a game that interferes with a contract is not malicious, especially if the person is a competitor). People are allowed to interfere with contracts. They cannot interefere tortiously and my reading of the brief shows that MDY has to have “malice”. Making a piece of software for profit that might harm someone else indirectly is not malicious, especially , as MDY’s brief points out, if that person depends on the interfered party. It happens all the time.
MDY’s citation to Chamberlain and Storage Tech are right on point because, as MDY points out in its brief, Blizzard is trying to use the copyright laws to police its business model. That’s not what copyright law does. The proper enforcement of a business model is through contracts. The only reason why Blizzard is trying to use copyright is to try to fool the judge into thinking that software is somehow different than if WoW was played as a big MMORPG board game. If WoW were a board game and Blizzard said that if you didn’t play WoW with a WoW hat on while you play the game, would they be able to sue for copyright infringement if someone wasn’t wearing a WoW cap but played the game anyway? I think not. Blizzard relies on Ticketmaster v. RMG which is a horrible decision by a judge who didn’t understand the DMCA and it has no controlling effect on the matter since it is a California district court case.
In my opinion, if MDY loses this case, it would shock me.
Well, as always, I defer to superior expertise- I graduated from LS in June after all. I was primarily thinking about your point #2 and didn’t realize it was a dead end for Blizzard. I’ll have to do a bit of research on this, I’m really curious about the case.
I just read adam’s blog entry at the trackback above. I agree wholeheartedly. I want to see Blizzard lose this case (though preferably without setting too strong of a precedent), because fundamentally its not the job of the legal system to prevent things like WoWGlider from interfering with WoW, its Blizzard’s job and just because they are unable to do it or unwilling to pay for it, does not excuse them using the legal system like a club to beat down their enemy. As with bnetd, WoWGlider should be allowed to exist and people should be allowed to try and use it, and Blizzard should be allowed to detect and banstick those people. And if Blizzard lives up to expectations, maybe the rest of the players will be allowed to play the game in peace.
Snibbs, whether or not people quit for reasons unrelated to WoWGlider has absolutely nothing whatever to do with the case. Furthermore, your argument is incomplete; assuming Blizzard’s argument about damages would otherwise be accepted, to refute it MDY wouldn’t merely have to prove that people quit because the grind was too oppressive, they would have to prove that there are people who use WoWGlider who did not quit, but would have if they had had to grind on their own, that they outnumber the people who quit because they felt WoWGlider ruined their game, and that finally said people who did not quit would not have been banned by Blizzard for some other unsavory activity, had Blizzard known of it.
CiscoKid – They had a far weaker case against BNetD, but they won that one.
Like the BNetD case, Blizzard are making blanket claims whioch will ma eit even riskier to be a game mod developer in America is a company disproves of what you’re doing to their game.
JuJutsu: The scale is completely different. Even the hardest of the hardcore only has 24 hours in a day. A working bot would allow a professional whatever to run as many accounts as he has equipment for. Your average person could probably actively monitor between 20 and 30 bots at once, sufficiently well to defeat any GM inquiries and prevent the bots from getting stuck for more than a couple minutes at a time.
Comment “Nintendo lost against Game Genie”
Your thinking is flawed.. that’s like comparing apples to oranges.
NES was a 2 player console game before internet and online gaming existed. You bought your game, you owned it.. there were NO subscription fee’s, or additional costs the game developer had (server costs, quality of service etc). You OWNED the game.
WoW is a MMORPG. You BUY the game.. but you can NOT play the game with out LEASING time through a paid monthly subscription. The game is played on Blizzard’s server’s, which they pay for and maintain, improve the virtual world you play in etc. They have bandwidth costs to pay for as well as equality to maintain.
Hacking in this game isn’t like a console game you play at home.. cheating hurts the entire server.
MMO Glider has no purpose other than for being able to CHEAT at playing WoW. It It’s not a stand alone prog.. it requires WoW to use, which Blizzard doesn’t sanction it’s use. Further more.. Blizzard has software to detect these types of programs, MMO Glider PURPOSELY loads the entire wow game into memory (which the standard wow client does not) just to prevent wow warden from detecting it. MMO Glider has made his entire fortune off someone else’s product essentially, without consent I might add.
MMO Glider really doesn’t have a leg to stand on considering they actively acknowledge on their site in selling it that it’s against the EULA to use, and that blizzard doesn’t support it’s use and will result in a Ban if caught.. (but MMO Glider developer knows with the way it works, it’s undetectable) as he so happily admits, which has allowed him to sell so many.
Blizzard will win this lawsuit hands down.. . and rightfully so. Why should they lose the ability to manage a leased time product used on their servers/bandwidth b/c of a program that someone developed without their consent.
It is all very well for people to view bots as cheating.
If Blizs “expert” argues that a bot confers advantage citing as he does simple comparrisons between time a human can play vs a bot, how would Blizzard square – inroducing recruit a freind and offering free levels, hugely inflated experience and fre items to players that participate, changing the experience required to level because it helps them sell copies of their expansion, constantly revising classes so their abilities change from one revision to the next and thus their ability to get experience or items, changing the “price” or aquisition rate of points used to buy cetain – pvp – items, changing the rules of th e game such that “lying” or “misleading” another player breaks the rules.
Bots may be “cheats” by Blizzard and their EULA/TOS and their constant changes to the game mechanics are the real cheats.
Consider the argument tht blizzard make that bots gain xp etc aster than intended- Blizzard has itseldf published the deeds of many a powerleveller that has circumvented the ordinary designed levelling route by recruiting a group of m8s to run instance s etc wherby the powerleveller tags mob that a the team then take down – giving all the xp to the powerlevelling character. Difficult to see how you can resonably argue that when they publisise these types of levelling and damn bot s – that take mnay many times longer to level that someone doing the above,.
Arguing the loss of revenue route is horribly flawed too. Many botters say they would have left the game were it not for the renewed interest in the game botting gives. Many botters run multiple accounts – again with a resultant increase in box sales and subscriptions for Bliz. Moreover when banned many botters claim to restart new characters.
If bliz wants t o attack the RMT market they should go after the demand side not the supply side. Banning players that Buy accounts, items or gold would be far more effective and far easier thasn trying to stop 0000s of suppliers wh o wil ljust start up another account. Bliz wont do that becasue they know their average subscriber ultimately is happy to buy gold and they would probably destroy a large % of their playerbase if they banned buyers of gold, accounts etc.
In their submuissions blizzard list complaints from people saying they will cancel their subscription becasue they come accross bots. One of the main ones theycite is sm1 complainig about a bot on a level; 16 set of quest mobs… as if ! If their case was strong in this respect youd expect them with over 11 million sales, to come up with some better examples than sm1 wit ha character at a level you can achieve playing ‘nortmally” in less than a day.
Oh and the Blizzard “expert” claims to have played the game for but a few hours and seen loads of bots… yes right m8. This “expert” really is no “expert” when you consider his background and experience in relation to MMORPG, Economics or IT. There are many a 14 year old that have racked upo far more expertise than he in mmorpg and wow and plenty of older players wit hmore rlevant qualification and experience to match his PLUS years of experience in MMOGS.
This case is substantially about copyright. Whichever side of the fence you fall on botting it cannot remotely be in the consumers interest for a software co to be able to sue fr or copyright infringement becasue their rules say if you break the rules of the game you dont have a licence to use their game and since computer copies the gaem in to ram you are therefore creating an illegal copy of the game.