just put a player system in that makes it so people can report botters in the action, then have a GM follow them... and once they deduct that it is a bot, perma ban... problem solved
Blizzard awarded $6 million in damages from WoW bot maker
As if the GMs (The legitimate ones, not the ones who sit on their ass and ban people to amuse themselves) didn't have enough work to do...
1) Blizzard sued the "only" bot that requires paid registration?
2) MottZilla, The average price goes up when lots of people sell lots of high demand products because stores will stop selling low level stuff >.> since there's no real money to be made with it.
if 70% of the player base become millionaires, then you can expect shops to adjust there prices/products to suit the 70% of customers and never accommodate the newbies, normal players.
its basic economics... more money... the less its worth....
MottZilla wrote:I doubt he made anywhere close to that much.
Article says he sold something like 100,000 bot programs at $25 a pop. So like 2.5 million. The whole point of taking that much is to prevent the company from having the resources to continue operation and to deter other companies who are thinking about trying to do the same.
I fail at explaining, anyways you should all know that by now >: (
MottZilla wrote:Why would more rare items making them more common make them cost more? More supply/less demand = cheaper product. I see your points though, but personally I think P2P MMORPGs are trash anyway so I couldn't care less. Your reasons also don't give Blizzard the right to stomp on these people like they just did. It's bullshit.
Because the economy of a game is not like economy in real life (close but still not). In a game, more and more money keeps spawning because they come from mobs being killed. While botting, a player acquires both money and rare items, so botting also increase tremendously the amount of money available on a server between all players. When a flow of rare items appear it does not lesser their value because everybody who botted has that much money to buy the rare items at their initial value.
The only people of are hurt in this are those who do not bot because they cannot achieve the money income that botters have and thus, cannot follow the economy created by them.
I see your point. Greed. I suppose I see it your way then. Everyone should play fair in a MMORPG, but sadly this is never the case.
Because the economy of a game is not like economy in real life (close but still not). In a game, more and more money keeps spawning because they come from mobs being killed. While botting, a player acquires both money and rare items, so botting also increase tremendously the amount of money available on a server between all players. When a flow of rare items appear it does not lesser their value because everybody who botted has that much money to buy the rare items at their initial value.The only people of are hurt in this are those who do not bot because they cannot achieve the money income that botters have and thus, cannot follow the economy created by them.
Yes, this is what I meant, but like I said, I fail at explaining
Most of your mom's and dad's are at work all day earning the money you're wasting away on playing WOW, so you probably have no understanding of how somebody using a bot can ruin the gaming experience of others that play the game freely of any speed/hack mods to just have fun. The type of modding this guy was doing was allowing people to leave their compute and it would harvest, mine, kill monsters, etc, meanwhile picking up all the gold for it. After playing WOW for 3-4 years and putting in a shit load of hours before quitting, I would never use a bot at the risk of my account getting deleted.
Glitch and I were the top two hunters on our server at one point, in both skill and gear, and we did that without the use of cheating. It felt really good. Then the game became completely boring to me and I lost interest. Not to mention all the BS and drama that went on in most guilds, just like on these forums! =/
I sold my account right before Burning Crusade came out for over 1k and made out quite nicely for a return on my investment of playtime, especially considering I was playing while in highschool and immediately got a job earning enough to live on my own nicely enough. It's really ironic since 6 months later after the burning crusade launched, the same guy I sold it, sold it back to me at a FRACTION of the price later and now my girlfriend and I occasionally play it when we're bored of everything else we own because we work our asses off IRL.
Plus going out with real friends is much more fun than raiding 6pm to 2am on friday and saturday nights. Glitch and I did this for almost a year straight. I lost my sanity. I'm not even sure how he kept his intact.
Breaker wrote:Most of your mom's and dad's are at work all day earning the money you're wasting away on playing WOW, so you probably have no understanding of how somebody using a bot can ruin the gaming experience of others that play the game freely of any speed/hack mods to just have fun.
You're missing the real crux of the issue. Blizzard successfully sued based on the fact that the program aided players in breaching the terms of the EULA.
This essentially means that it is now possible to be liable in a monetary sense for breaking or helping others to break the terms of an End User License Agreement. Have you read the EULA for every piece of software you've ever used. Have you seriously ever asked yourself 'If I break the terms of this agreement, is it worth being sued over?'
The above statement is, of course, a vastly overblown fear. Nobody actually reads EULA's and there are very few people in the world who actually have to worry about being sued over an EULA violation. But how exactly is your gameplay experience better off? Bots don't just come from the US, they come from all over the world and tracking down every last botmaker is, without speculation, impossible. The net effect is: Blizzard's lawyers get a big fat check (money that could have went towards development or hiring more GM's), and there is now greater precident for EULA's being legally binding.
And your end-user experience? Exactly the same. Hope you enjoyed the warm fuzzy feeling you got when Blizzard won in court (if that), because that's about all you're going to get out of it.
and one programmer is financially ruined over some bull, which could of been you or me, or anyone with the knowledge and inspiration to try to develop a way to make money for free
Theres a difference between aiding some one to break the EULA and making profit off it.
exactly.
For once, AlexMax is right. We can bitch about symbolic gestures all we want, but in the end, nothing for us has changed.
You're missing the real crux of the issue. Blizzard successfully sued based on the fact that the program aided players in breaching the terms of the EULA.
it breached AND profited from breaching the EULA.
Pryme8 wrote:and one programmer is financially ruined over some bull, which could of been you or me, or anyone with the knowledge and inspiration to try to develop a way to make money for free
Oh dear merciful heavens now we're victimizing the bot programmer? Have you played an MMO? Let's look at it from the viewpoint of a player of both free and pay-to-play MMOs.
In a free MMO, your most valuable resource is time. A good farmer knows drop rates, money drops, market values, and relative effort of each action. The farmer carefully calculates his every action so that he's yielding the most profit per time unit. This requires careful attention to detail and a dedication to playing the game. For the normal player to make money, he must know of some niche where time spent = profit and then spend time there.
A bot farmer ruins this for the player. The bot farmer loads up multiple accounts, presses a button, then goes to do something else. Time spent is zero. Effort spent is zero. However, the bot farmer then places items on the market. This increases supply, which lessens demand, which lowers the price of the items. Suddenly the people who actually play the game have to step back and recalculate where they should spend their effort. Eventually, the bot farmer notices this as well and moves into the new niche, or perhaps they spread their accounts across multiple niches. Bot farmers introduce higher supply because most game design does not model a player that can play for 24 hours a day. It's cheating, because in the end this player is putting 24 hours per account into the game whereas a hardcore obsessed player can probably peak at 16 if he gets a day off of work. The bot farmer is watching TV, playing other games, or generally doing something else while the normal farmer has no choice but to play the game.
In a pay-to-play MMO, things are still problematic. In this case, a farmer is familiar with the game currency to dollar exchange rate, and typically the goal is to make enough in-game currency to pay for the month of play (I did this in EVE-Online; if you specialized in some skills you'd want anyway, it took maybe 20 hours per month to pay for the month if you could shoot mobs undisturbed/hit good mining systems as soon as they spawned.)
A bot farmer can disrupt this seriously. First, the bot characters are consuming resources non-stop, restricting access to normal players. Second, since they're bots and not real people, they can be first to the superior spawns regardless of what time they appear. Third, bot characters produce more supply than the normal players would, which increases supply and drives prices down. This makes the currency to dollar ratio less favorable and requires normal players to farm more. The increased farming burden increases the perceived cost of the game, and leads to players quitting.
Let's make an analogy to drive it home. You work a shift as a cashier at a gas station. It pays minimum wage, and you spend 8 hours a day doing a menial job. John has a job as a cashier making minimum wage. He hires two monkeys to take his place, and he pays them $0.10/hour worth of bananas. Since he has proxies to do his work, he always signs up for the graveyard shifts and holidays. The monkeys don't care because they're monkeys and hey, free bananas! John's sitting at home playing video games and watching movies. He loses $4.00 per month to the monkeys, but this is less than an hour of work.
The time comes for promotions, and you're sure you'll get them. You've been smiling, and even busted a few thieves. However, corporate notices that your hours are always 8-5 and you've used your sick days for trivial reasons like "a life" and you need to "go to school", meanwhile John's been clocking in daily overtime and works any time he's needed. He doesn't take off for lunch and is never sick. John gets the raise, you get scolded for not following his example. John's so pleased, he hires a third monkey so he can work an extra shift. He also points out that this monkey thinks sinks are toilets and they always go at the end of the sift, so could you handle that please?
John's using bots to gain an unfair advantage. You can't put in as much time as his team of trained monkeys, but to corporate all they see is an extremely dedicated employee that can work superhuman hours without complaint. You end up doing more work for less money because you can't compete with him. (Let's ignore the fact that in real life the company would fire John because immigrants work for less than monkeys and he's wasting company money.)
So yeah, I'm pleased as punch that a bot-writer has to pay a ridiculous amount of money. He's causing problems for a game that's enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of people and you have to be a pretty big dick to do that with a smile on your face, even if you're making good cash. This guy didn't just write a bot and use it to farm things; he sold the bot to other people, in effect making him the boss of a ring of farmers.
I do think this might have serious implications as AlexMax pointed out. There's nothing good about making a precedent for enforcing EULAs.
However, whining about how this poor soul is financially ruined because he wrote a bot is incomplete. It's like whining that some poor man and his elderly mother are facing jail time for buying ads on national television citing nonexistent medical research that their snake-oil pills increase your dick's size. Poor, poor criminals.
*edit* I had to change links in a hurry. It turns out my first choice of site about enzyte was an advertisement for a competing product that was backing up its claims with lots of pictures of dicks. Funny, but not appropriate.
ohh so appropriate... some of them woulda liked it...
AtmaWeapon kinda extrapolated at bit more on what I said, and I like the analogy. The EULA is simply there to protect themselves and they won't hunt 99.99% of people who break the EULA because their action do not affect anybody. Blizzard does not give a s*** wither or not you lend your account to a friend. The EULA is only there so you can't sue them if you do and you get busted by your "friend".
It is for the same reason that laws like "A pedestrian can only cross streets at a street corner" exists. Nobody gets arrested because he didn't cross the street at a corner, the law only exists so that if a dumbass goes running in the middle of the street, he can't sue the driver for his own lack of common-sense. Same why McDonalds now put "content is hot" on their coffee cups, because somebody actually sued them for not telling them their coffee was hot.
If everybody cared about others and had common sense, laws wouldn't exists.