WORLD OF WARCRAFT HONOR BOT CREATOR EARNS $3 MILLION

Blizzard is now claiming that World of Warcraft bot author Michael Donnelly has made $2.8 million by selling his controversial Glider software, according to past motions filed in court and mirrored on GamePolitics.
Donnelly, the author of popular World of Warcraft bot Glider–a downloadable tool that automatically plays the massively multiplayer game for users–was sued by Blizzard in February of 2007.
Both sides have since been locked in a legal battle, with Blizzard claiming that Donnelly knowingly infringed on its copyright, in addition to breaking World of Warcraft’s End User License Agreement.
“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,” said Blizzard in a legal statement filed last week.
Donnelly claims that his program does not violate Blizzard’s copyright because it never makes a true copy of the game client.
“Blizzard permits its licensees to load the WoW game client software into RAM to play WoW. As such, BlizzardÂ?s licensees cannot violate BlizzardÂ?s exclusive rights under the Copyright Act to make copies simply by loading a copy of the program into RAM to play WoW,” reads one section of Donnelly’s retort.
The MMO Glider program sells for $25, with an optional $5 subscription available that provides additional functionality.
“We are fans of the game that want to try out a lot of different things,” reads a section of the MMO Glider website.
“Getting a bunch of characters to 70 is a pain. Getting gold to equip them is a pain. Doing big instances, Battlegrounds, raids, and generally socializing in the game is fun. We use the Glider to skip the painful parts and have more fun. Someone suggested we sell it, so..”
Hour upon hour of performing continual actions for no tangible move is rattling the sort of thing you’d expect a mechanism to do, but according to Blizzard, creator of World of Warcraft, it’s for humans and humans only.
The company is now suing one Michael Donnelly for designing and selling a tool that automatically performs many in-game actions, including grinding monsters for resources, while you go away and do something useful with your time. The program is called MMO Glider and Blizzard claims it infringes the company’s copyright and potentially damages the game.
From a player’s perspective, there’s rattling no two ways of looking at it - to allow the use of bots effectively nulls the point in having resources to harvest or any kind of levelling system. It’s unfair on those who are not using bots and who just want to have fun playing the game.
However, the fact that this has reached a legal battle that could end up in a courtroom, and that it’s a game as big as World of Warcraft, could have far achievement consequences for other future MMOs.
Mr Donnelly’s defence rests on the fact that he claims the tool does no infringe copyright, because it copies the game into RAM to avoid detection by anti-cheat software. Blizzard in turn argues that this infringes on the End User License Agreement.
Then of course there’s the fact that the bot maker is making money off the back of Blizzard’s game and is potentially spoiling it for other players. Unfortunately that will probably only earn a side note in the legal wranglings.
Blizzard isn’t exactly winning itself popular favour by stomping down with its large legal boot, but it may well be necessary. And if it gets to court, the outcome of the decision could set a precedent that will majorly affect the design of any future pretender to WoW’s throne.
- world-of-warcaft-honor-bot.com