eula-violation
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Ask Massively: Trailers, emulators, and 'skill caps'
It's time for a grab bag edition of Ask Massively! A reader named Nicholas is up first: I was wondering if you could help me remember a game studio that was developing a new Korean action- MMORPG game engine (and it wasn't Bless, Blade and Soul, or ArcheAge). In the tech demo, no environment was being shown; it focused on the combat aspect of the engine. All the combat took place against a white background, and it was combo-based and reactive to hits. I remember a slow motion scene with an NPC being punched in the face and the face distorting. At the time, there were no announced games using the engine; the video was just showing what tech the game studio had developed. If it helps any, I remember the comments saying that the engine was just going to be vaporware. I think we might! Massively's Lis pegged it as NetEase's Dragon Sword trailer. +1 to Lis.
EVE ISK buyers outed in database leak
Beware, EVE Online ISK buyers! Big brother is watching you. Actually, the whole internet is watching you too, thanks to an insider leak at the IskBank.com currency-trading site. EVEnews24.com, a fan-run news site dedicated to the goings-on in and around CCP's New Eden, has published a huge list of virtual currency buyers that earned IskBank some $290,000 between April 2010 and March 4th, 2011. As you might expect, there's a colossal discussion thread on the official EVE forums, and CCP has issued a brief comment indicating its awareness of the situation. Thus far there has been no mention of potential action against violators of the the game's EULA, but EVEnews24 has posted some reactions from a few of the formerly anonymous buyers. EVEnews24's anonymous source apparently provided a fairly complete record of IskBank's customer and order database, including names and dates, products purchased, and email and IP addresses. EVEnews24 is withholding the personal information of the affected parties but has published a complete list of in-game character names.
The Lawbringer: A primer on private servers
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? The history of private MMO servers goes back to the heyday of the massively multiplayer, when the concepts of these virtual worlds were still in their formative stages. World of Warcraft private servers, also called emulated servers, boast numbers in the thousands, usually running off donations and providing a limited amount of the full WoW experience due to the nature of the reverse server engineering and implementation needed to run the game. One thing is for certain, though: Using the game client to connect to an emulated server is against the World of Warcraft EULA and cuts into Blizzard's profits.
Private server company forced to pay Blizzard $88 million
A judge in the California Central District Court ruled Thursday that Scapegaming, also known as Alyson Reeves, has lost its lawsuit against Blizzard. Scapegaming had set up private Blizzard servers that included a microtransactions market. Blizzard sued them in October 2009 for copyright infringement. As we've covered here before, private servers are a violation of license limitations of the EULA. Blizzard considers any violation of those license limitations to be copyright infringement and sues people for such. Furthermore, Blizzard established in the "Bnetd" case that crafting software to set up a private server is a copyright infringement all on its own. The total reward of $88,594,589 comes from $3,053,339 of inappropriate profits, $63,600 of attorney's fees, and $85,478,600 of statutory damages. Statutory damages are damages required by law that are increased for willful and commercially based infringement. Scapegaming may appeal the amount.
The Lawbringer: MDY v. Blizzard Q & A
Welcome to The Lawbringer, WoW.com's weekly look at the intersection of law and the World of Warcraft. I'm a new law school grad, acting as your tour guide after escaping the rapping, taco-eating armadillos of my bar prep class. Last week's timeline of the MDY v. Blizzard case seemed to prompt more questions than it answered. Therefore, I want to take this week to go through the many questions and comments that were left on the site or emailed to me. Sean asked: "Can you explain the unfair competition claim? As the only one that MDY won (far as I can tell), it's interesting in its own right." Blizzard alleged that MDY's business practices of selling a product that encouraged people to violate their EULA & TOU was a willful and knowing violation of Arizona's Unfair Competition Law. MDY moved for summary judgment and Blizzard didn't oppose the motion. MDY "won" by default.
Confessions of an EVE Online macro'er
You've encountered them before. Those guys. Them. Next to the ISK spammers, they're a plague within EVE Online.They have gibberish names and sit in ice belts all day in exhumers, macro controlling large mining operations. At the first sign of trouble they gang warp out to safety. Or they're automating courier missions in an endless procession of macro'ed industrials, day in and day out. Or they're part of the infinite army of 0.0 ratting Ravens that automatically warp to a safespot and cloak once someone enters the system. They're all in China, right? The macros are all used by large ISK farming operations where people work in 23/7 shifts... right? Apparently, that's wrong. EVE-Mag is running an article written by a self-proclaimed macro'er. Only he doesn't work in a sweatshop in a developing nation. He doesn't grind long shifts for ISK. He's an American in his early thirties, with two kids and a family dog. Just a regular guy. He writes under the pseudonym "EVE Player" and poses a question to his readers, "I have macro'ed the holy crap out of certain video games. I've been doing it for more than 8 years now so tell me; at what point did you notice your EVE experience going down the tubes because of me? I'll bet your downward spiral really has nothing to do with me macro'ing, now does it?"
