Legal battle over Warcraft 'bot'

Blizzard is suing Michael Donnelly, the creator of the MMO Glider program, which performs key tasks in the game automatically, such as fighting.
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what's the point in sitting watching a bot play for you?
 
You could do what that guy in UO did - he had about 30 PCs macroing in the game for him, and was selling the gold. Made a sodding fortune too.

Can you imagine how bot infested WoW would become if every gold farmer was able to run 10 of these things at once, rather than doing it the manual way?
 
Gold farmers and botters completely ruin the game for everyone else, and I hope Blizzard win their case. Glider has been posing problems for a long time now.
 
Tefal said:
what's the point in sitting watching a bot play for you?
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You don't sit and watch it, the bot plays the game for you and follows a set path that you create or "macro". I encountered 2 bots over the weekend killing everything in sight in a small area in Duskwood. They were following the exact same path, ignoring some mobs that were just out of range of their predetermined path. I logged out of the game before 12am on Saturday morning, and when I logged back in after 10am, they were still playing and had gained 6 levels each. They were still in the same area, doing the exact same thing, only 6 levels higher.
 
very effective for credit farming just slaughtering low level mobs 24/7, side effect is slow but steady leveling aswell, it happens in all games, but this one doesnt seem to hide like others


was amusing in swg stumbling across a credit grinding group being formed off trial accounts being collected in a starport awaiting the lead looter
 
Tbh, when I first started playing wow I didnt really see much of the whole "Buy 1000G for £15.99" adverts which are now all over major cities on horde side of Spinebreaker. They do sorta spoil the fun because normal trading of goods just gets flooded out of the way by the long-multi-line messages that the botters use to sell gold.
 
Blizzard are definately right to take action against it.
As the tool acts to defeat the protection built into the game (I'm guessing the anti cheat code is probably encrypted in some manner), I suspect they have a fairly strong case.

Bot's are bad enough in single player games, but in an MMORPG they can kill the game, and ruin a lot of the fun for many of the players (what's the point in playing when the good spawns are camped by bots all the time, or the bots are pushing in game prices up thanks to the amount of gold they are bringing into the game)..
 
i know my friend uses it to earn gold and stuff while he isnt there and it pays for his subscription. though i have never played WoW before
 
Macro programs have been out for years and are incredibly easy to make and use, how this guy has managed to 'sell' them when i could easily download one that would work in any application or game is beyond me. If it's more sophisticated it needn't be.

All it needs to do is cycle targets, choose one, approach, then start a button macro of your choice, like a combination of spells.

In Star Wars Galaxies, you could master a crafting profession this way, simply by stocking all the materials needed in inventory, then recording the action of clicking through crafting stages. The program will then repeat this infinitely. For free.
 
CHokKA said:
Tell your friend that he's ruining the game for everyone else. I hope he gets banned.
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lets say he eventually gets 6 alts to lvl 70, it takes the same amount of XP total to do so each time. So the bot means he spends less of his time getting to level 70, but overall makes the exact same amount of XP, he will either in person, or VIA bot spend an almost identical amount of time "camping spawns" for XP, and once you hit lvl 70 it becomes a bit pointless to camp spawns of things. So at the end of the day, because theres a finite limit on what you'll end up getting.

So either you'll see him and his bot for 3 months , or you'll see him and no bot for 6 months, it really won't make much difference in the grand scheme of things.


So a guy was there before and after you logged in, I've seen that in many MMO's without people using bots. There are thousands, millions infact, of people in the damn game, if a bot isn't on a spawn, a real person would be.

Infact i never used a bot, don't think i came across one, but the amount of times i needed a named mob, or a specific type of kill and other people were killing them and "getting in the way" was insane. I would have probably happily used a bot to avoid the wait and monotony that came with waiting for rare mobs/spawns with huge groups. Leave a bot there waiting for it and kill it while i'm doing other things, so i don't sit for 3 hours in game being beaten to the kill by some random stealthed guy i couldn't see, or a faster induction attack from someone else.
 
drunkenmaster said:
lets say he eventually gets 6 alts to lvl 70, it takes the same amount of XP total to do so each time. So the bot means he spends less of his time getting to level 70, but overall makes the exact same amount of XP, he will either in person, or VIA bot spend an almost identical amount of time "camping spawns" for XP, and once you hit lvl 70 it becomes a bit pointless to camp spawns of things. So at the end of the day, because theres a finite limit on what you'll end up getting.

So either you'll see him and his bot for 3 months , or you'll see him and no bot for 6 months, it really won't make much difference in the grand scheme of things.


So a guy was there before and after you logged in, I've seen that in many MMO's without people using bots. There are thousands, millions infact, of people in the damn game, if a bot isn't on a spawn, a real person would be.

Infact i never used a bot, don't think i came across one, but the amount of times i needed a named mob, or a specific type of kill and other people were killing them and "getting in the way" was insane. I would have probably happily used a bot to avoid the wait and monotony that came with waiting for rare mobs/spawns with huge groups. Leave a bot there waiting for it and kill it while i'm doing other things, so i don't sit for 3 hours in game being beaten to the kill by some random stealthed guy i couldn't see, or a faster induction attack from someone else.
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So, basically, it's ok to bot, sell the gold online, ruin the economy of the entire game world by selling acquired items at ridiculously high prices and causing casual players like myself to miss out on a lot of good items and have a less enjoyable game because he will eventually level up to 70 on his own but can't be bothered because he prefers "easy-mode"? Right, ok. I know, why doesn't everyone just bot, and then the entire game world will be full of NPC's instead of real players that you can interact with :rolleyes:

I have seen many people play throughout the night too, hell, I've done it on a few occasions, but it was still ME playing the game. These people were following the exact same path, doing the exact same thing throughout each fight, for over 30 minutes while I was killing in the same area as they were, observing what they were doing. My argument isn't that they're taking the spawns, it's the ripple effect that they cause.
 
Use to love finding a bot, run around them, grab 6-10 mobs, run near him, then hit vanish lol... Watch the mobs go for him instead.

Grinding is a bore, always has been in all online games, how you get around it... no idea.. Thats why bots become fun to use. Having to kill 1500 of one mob to get rep to get one item and only 10 spawn at any one time, kind of the game forcing you to stay there for 3-4 days. Best way is to spice it up, make it 100 of 15 differnt mobs all over the map. Other thaqn that, quit, go play something else :) worked for me..

ColiN
 
Blizzard need to legalise gold trading in some form, I think it'd help the problem.

Glider is a pretty intelligent program though, I've had a look at the code. I haven't been able to work out if it does what Blizzard claim though (load the whole program into RAM to avoid detection - thereby doing something illegal).
 
The gold adverts in WoW are no longer from bots. Most of the gold now being sold is from accounts that have been hacked and their contents sold. A good amount of the sites selling gold have keyloggers in the adverts so it tends to be those dumb enough to use the sellers that then later get hacked.
Blizzard ARE taking action but its rather difficult to shut down. Theres signs the gold farmers are getting desperate though so possible end in sight :)
 
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