Orcs and Humans are still A-OK in World of Warcraft. Robots? Not so much. Blizzard has recently announced plans to sue Michael Donnelly over the popular WOW-automation program Glider.
Glider -- like many other bolt-on WarCraft applications -- is a program that automates the drudgery of performing routine and mundane tasks in-game (most importantly, fighting), leaving your RL self free to go make a sandwich or something. While this is certainly advantageous to those individuals whose idea of fun is powerleveling while they're working the 9-to-5, it also kind of breaks the entire game for the 10 million actual human WOW subscribers.
Said the company in their legal submission filing last week, "Blizzard's design expectations are frustrated, and resources are allocated unevenly, when bots are introduced into the WoW universe, because bots spend far more time in-game than an ordinary player would and consume resources the entire time."
Glider's creator alleges that his program hasn't done anything wrong or broken Blizzard's End User License Agreement or copyrights because the software does not actually make a permanent copy of any game data anywhere on a user's hard drive. Unlike other bots, Glider works by building a virtual copy of WoW in RAM in order to sneakily avoid Blizzard's anti-cheat detection software.
According to the BBC, Donnelly found out about the lawsuit after Blizzard sent a lawyer and a private detective to his house to serve him the papers. Apparently Blizzard had even offered not to take the case to court if Donnelly agreed to stop selling his bot immediately and to return all the profits made from Glider's sales -- a request which reportedly "offended" the programmer.
Both parties are now awaiting a summary judgment in the case before legal proceedings can continue.
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