Blizzard Sues Bot Maker For Copyright Infringement

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When has stuff like this ever been a good idea? Have fun being sued into oblivion by Blizzard.

Blizzard Entertainment is taking a stand against popular cheating bots for World of Warcraft, Diablo 3 and Heroes of the Storm. The game company is suing the alleged operator(s) of a series of popular bots for copyright infringement and accuses them of ruining the gaming experience for legitimate players.
 
dont see where copyright infringement comes in... unless Bliz can show the code they use... have the SC ever ruled on those EULAs?
 
Read the comments from the article on the website. Makes you sick how many people are out of touch and blaming Blizard or are on the side of the bot-makers. They ruined Diablo 3 from day one.
 
Good. Get the bot makers, aimbots, all that bullshit and actually care about the quality of the MP experience!
 
Bowman15 said:
Read the comments from the article on the website. Makes you sick how many people are out of touch and blaming Blizard or are on the side of the bot-makers. They ruined Diablo 3 from day one.
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That's right, they ruined a non-competitive single player game that has a co-op mode.
 
Bowman15 said:
Read the comments from the article on the website. Makes you sick how many people are out of touch and blaming Blizard or are on the side of the bot-makers. They ruined Diablo 3 from day one.
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Impossible. They were error 37-ed on day one.
 
I am against botting and those programmers who develop them but lets face it, Diablo 3 and the Diablo franchise was ruined by Blizzard and their attempts to monetize it and virtually every other game they make. They cost themselves more money in doing so than all the bot programs in the world will ever cost them.
 
IMO those dropping sub numbers in WoW are really motivating Blizzard. I was complaining about bots and similar stuff years ago and they seemed to ignore the problem. Are MMOs ridiculously difficult to keep secure or was Blizz blinded by mountains of cash?
 
I stopped playing FPS games online a few years back and part of why I quit (besides spending too much time playing them) was because I was absolutely sick of cheaters ruining my experience. Every other game or two I had someone shooting me across the board through walls or doing some other stupid shit. If they can get these cheating programs out of the picture I'd love to get back into online gaming (and start wasting too much time again playing games...lol).
 
Make no mistake, this is literally an admission of defeat from Blizzard.

Over the years Blizzard has been incapable of stopping botting through their own coding because their "detection" efforts have always been subpar (warden was defeated many years ago). This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with their games. There have been many incidents (far too many to count) where huge bugs and exploits have made it to the live games even after they are reported multiple times by the community.

The only reason they are taking action now is due to pressure from the community 'cause they got fed up with Blizzard's ineptitude and inconsistency with dealing with botters/cheaters. We have cases where popular streamers are caught botting or abusing exploits live on stream and all they get is a slap on the wrist while regular players get account bans.

Watch this video, the guy forgets his stream is still live and casually sets up his bot while getting ready to go to bed. Then he leaves the bot running overnight while he sleeps and we see him waking up to turn off the bot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2oURqiWxTs
 
mysticdrew said:
That's right, they ruined a non-competitive single player game that has a co-op mode.
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Hence why I don't even game anymore. I was AWESOME at counter-strike. Aimbots came around....I joined the Marine Corps. Odd how that turned out.
 
xJ321x said:
I stopped playing FPS games online a few years back and part of why I quit (besides spending too much time playing them) was because I was absolutely sick of cheaters ruining my experience. Every other game or two I had someone shooting me across the board through walls or doing some other stupid shit. If they can get these cheating programs out of the picture I'd love to get back into online gaming (and start wasting too much time again playing games...lol).
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I ran into a lot of that as well, and it's still around unfortunately, hell the recent beta for Star Wars Battlefront saw cheats pop up near the end of the first day. I couldn't get in to play the beta till the third day and it was obvious there were aimbots. Blizz is just trying to prove something to the players they still have subbed but as pointed out above by others, the anti-cheat boat sailed long ago as far as most players are concerned.
 
Not every game company can go out and sue. But activisionblizzard is a billion dollar company. They'll sue you out of existence.
 
Think this is more along the lines of going after a realistic target. There's no way they can stop all instances of cheating, but they can go after the money, aka the company PROFITING on making Blizzard's customers miserable.
 
I ran a bot in wow. I only liked to play pvp, and if you don't have good gear you get destroyed in pvp even if you are skilled. What was the way to get gear? Grind battlegrounds... so dumb. So I botted the battlegrounds for pvp gear. Blizzard could have fixed that problem easy, make a pvp server where everyone has equal gear, that probably would have kept me playing wow.
 
Considering that one cannot trade in Diablo3 (or at least it's very very limited), I'm curious what the botters do in Diablo 3.
 
Bots exist because there is a market for them ingame. I don't know of anyone willing to spend days on end grinding mats or items . Winning at this game is predicated on amassing as much wealth as possible by sinking vast amounts of time grinding. Blizzard though, with its ah and loot system encourages nonstop farming because they allow most items to be traded. Bad design from the start.
 
munkle said:
I ran a bot in wow. I only liked to play pvp, and if you don't have good gear you get destroyed in pvp even if you are skilled. What was the way to get gear? Grind battlegrounds... so dumb. So I botted the battlegrounds for pvp gear. Blizzard could have fixed that problem easy, make a pvp server where everyone has equal gear, that probably would have kept me playing wow.
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Not even close to true. Most BGs are filled with noobs in greens as well. So what if it takes like 40 hours in regular BGs to get some moderate gear, that's no reason to ruin it for everybody else.

Way back in the day I got rolled in an arena by two of the best. They were in last season's gear and it wasn't even close. One of my favorite moments in game.
 
I get why they would want the practice removed, but I don't see the copyright infringement. These aren't derivative works in the same way the Game Geneie wasn't.
 
B00nie said:
Yes exactly, individual MMO cheaters should all be sued not just the bot makers.
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Yes! Don't just ban them for EULA violations. Sue your customers! Because history has shown that always works out well for companies. :rolleyes:
 
I misread the title at first and saw "Blizzard sues Makerbot"
Was think "what the crap? Are they suing a 3D printer maker because people are producing WoW character figures with it?"
 
HFBallad said:
Considering that one cannot trade in Diablo3 (or at least it's very very limited), I'm curious what the botters do in Diablo 3.
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Players compete to be top rank on the greater rift leader boards. Some people take it to an extreme, the sorts who make their living from streaming gameplay. They stream are sometimes playing 12+ hours a day.

Because D3 tracks play time in a publicly visible way you can identify obvious botting players. Its been shown that some players have hours played so large that the math works out around 2 hours not playing per day since the start of their efforts (for some). These cheaters are often top 10 of the particular board they are on. Any other player not botting is at an extreme disadvantage comparably.
 
LOL gold farmers have had "break the pots" bots in diablo since 2012, who cares at this point?
 
DPI said:
You conveniently left out Auction House, which was the whole goal of botters.
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And you could probably argue that the Auction House ruined the game since drop rates were tied to availability of what was sold. Luckily they removed that POS garbage later, but the damage was done, Blizzardvision basically wanted complete control over everything in their games, people want to have a eSports league, HA! You have to go through our servers now! 3rd parties were allowing the selling of gear in Diablo 2 and other games, wait we want a piece of that action!.


BettiePage said:
dont see where copyright infringement comes in... unless Bliz can show the code they use... have the SC ever ruled on those EULAs?
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Maybe because the bots are considered to "modify game code" ? Who knows.
 
xJ321x said:
I stopped playing FPS games online a few years back and part of why I quit (besides spending too much time playing them) was because I was absolutely sick of cheaters ruining my experience. Every other game or two I had someone shooting me across the board through walls or doing some other stupid shit. If they can get these cheating programs out of the picture I'd love to get back into online gaming (and start wasting too much time again playing games...lol).
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I've never had a problem with cheaters. It is simply a matter of finding good servers with active admins. Proactive adminship is far more effective at dealing with cheaters than any technological measure.
 
Corvette said:
Not even close to true. Most BGs are filled with noobs in greens as well. So what if it takes like 40 hours in regular BGs to get some moderate gear, that's no reason to ruin it for everybody else.

Way back in the day I got rolled in an arena by two of the best. They were in last season's gear and it wasn't even close. One of my favorite moments in game.
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You were playing a completely different game then because what you posted isn't true at all. 40 hours got you 1 maybe 2 pieces of gear.
 
I never botted as our main tank in WOW was banned for running a fishing bot of all things. I did however use an obsoleting fan with a pencil taped to it to make me jump while auto joining battlegrounds.
 
mstersmith80 said:
I never botted as our main tank in WOW was banned for running a fishing bot of all things. I did however use an obsoleting fan with a pencil taped to it to make me jump while auto joining battlegrounds.
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lol and then people say there is no content.

Bots and multiboxers or cheaters ruin the experience for other players. Also it makes things like striving to be number one in halo or call of duty is dumb because the first 20 spots are taken up by people that have impossible to achieve scores like higher number of played hours than the game or console have been in existence.

While it made me laugh, it wasn't fun to play against a 9 boxer running death knights. omg the armies.....
 
mstersmith80 said:
I never botted as our main tank in WOW was banned for running a fishing bot of all things. I did however use an obsoleting fan with a pencil taped to it to make me jump while auto joining battlegrounds.
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Wonder if botters do the same shit in real life where safety controls matter. Like the time I saw an engineer rig up the oscillating Dodo bird pressing F9 which was the alarm acknowledge function... worked great until the next watch came into the control room, saw the Dodo bird - engineer reading a book, and noticed the fuel tanks for the engines almost ran dry.

Botting and cheaters is why I don't waste my time with online gaming - let my WoW account go dormant years ago. Now that I have children I would rather waste my time on them instead of pointless leveling up amongst a pool of cheaters - when the kids start gaming I might jump back into it.
 
munkle said:
I ran a bot in wow. I only liked to play pvp, and if you don't have good gear you get destroyed in pvp even if you are skilled. What was the way to get gear? Grind battlegrounds... so dumb. So I botted the battlegrounds for pvp gear. Blizzard could have fixed that problem easy, make a pvp server where everyone has equal gear, that probably would have kept me playing wow.
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So, you didn't like the totality of the way the game was set up, so you cheated to gain an advantage? WOW is an MMORPG, everyone isn't meant to have equality of gear.
 
TwistedAegis said:
So, you didn't like the totality of the way the game was set up, so you cheated to gain an advantage? WOW is an MMORPG, everyone isn't meant to have equality of gear.
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Some people just need instant gratification, working for something in video games is fading away sadly. I found the grind to be satisfying, as you get gear quickly if you get a team organized.
 
Darunion said:
Some people just need instant gratification, working for something in video games is fading away sadly. I found the grind to be satisfying, as you get gear quickly if you get a team organized.
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And that is what SINGLE player games are for, I'm sorry you can cheat to your hearts content in any single player game (although Diablo 3 kind of ruined that from the get go), and I totally get it, the grind is often too much for people, luckily for games like Diablo 3 if it's the story you're interested in you really don't need to grind at all at lower difficulty levels.

But when it comes to multiplayer games you fucking play the game that is put out for you, you don't fuck run bots because you're too fucking lazy to play the game, you don't use exploits, cheats, etc, you're fucking it up for everyone else. And if it has some P2W mechanics that you feel like ruins it for you, then tough shit, you play something else.
 
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