World Of Warcraft - Battling In The Courtroom
By: John Vinson
There are 10 million subscribers to Blizzard’s ever popular World of Warcraft. If you compare that number to the population of the world, it’s minscule, but as game population is concerned it’s, pardon the pun, “massive”.
It looks as though Blizzard is taking the fighting outside of Azeroth and into the courtroom. Blizzard is preparing to take on Michael Donnelly, who created the Glider program for WoW. With the program, users can assign key tasks to undertake, without any human involvement. Anyone outside of the World of Warcraft might ask, How could this benefit the player, isn’t the point of playing a game…to actually play?
Well in a sense, you would think a program such as this couldn’t really have much of an effect. But games such as WoW, that are based on community style tactics have a balance that keeps the game fair for all players. The economy is the key issue here, as most people use the Glider program as an easier means to gather gold and resources. It’s much easier to let a program do the work for you, while you go off taking care of errands and what not.
People that use these kind of programs casually aren’t the big issue at hand. WoW has become so big that in-game currency has become a huge market for real-life currency. To throw a personal twist into the story, I actually know someone who dropped out of school and quit his day job to sell WoW gold online. It’s these kinds of problems that Blizzard is trying to stop with its’ fight against bots, and currency selling.
Blizzard has shunned these practices, and is continually in a fight to root out cheaters. It’s within the Glider program that Blizzard is having problems with. There is programming in Glider, that allows it to avoid the anti-cheating software implemented by Blizzard. While this sounds like a great way to avoid being caught, it’s what Blizzard is using to sue Donnelly. They are suing Donnelly for copyright infringement because the software makes a copy of the game and puts it into RAM.
It’s kind of sad, that a game has caused so much addictiveness that people need to buy game currency to get by. I personally was a WoW gamer for a good amount of time, and it definitely has an addicting feel to it. I bet there’s a WoW addict right now, who has Glider running and cursing this article, all the while finishing up his bag of Doritos he has resting on his stomach.