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[Adventurer]

Last Updated: Wednesday, 26 March 2008, 11:16 GMT


Legal battle over Warcraft 'bot'

Combat forms a core part of the game play
The makers of World of Warcraft are locked in a legal battle with a firm that has produced a tool to automate many actions in the virtual world.
Blizzard is suing Michael Donnelly, the creator of the MMO Glider program, which performs key tasks in the game automatically, such as fighting.

Both sides have submitted legal summaries to a court in Arizona.

Blizzard says Glide is a software bot which infringes the company's copyright and potentially damages the game.

In its legal submission to the court last week, the firm said: "Blizzard's designs 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."

'Infringed agreement'

Blizzard argued that Michael Donnelly's tool also infringed the End User License Agreement that all parties have to adhere to when playing the game.

More than 100,000 copies of the tool have been sold, according to Mr Donnelly. More than 10 million people around the world play Warcraft.


GAMETIME

[stillnotking]

My understanding of WoW is that it allows and even encourages user modification of the UI.

If this bot is a problem, why doesn't Blizzard address it the way other companies have? Way back in the days of yore when I played EQ and Quake online, there were problems with bots that were taken care of by updates to the game software (e.g. scanning the client system's memory for cheat programs).