Comments on: The9 Wins Lawsuit Against Chinese Gamer for Using World of Warcraft Plugins

By: PJ

PJ — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:02:04 +0000

Yeah, this story doesn’t make any sense. World of warcraft has been designed from the group up to allow addons (they don’t call them plugins) – they have a limited scripting language, and if people us it for something the developers hadn’t envisaged, the (the developers) remove the ability from the scripting language so the addons no longer work.
This is no illegal in the west – of course you can’t rule out what nuttery they would be up to in china – but i believe the game has the ability to reject use of addons if directed to do so, so clearly not a problem.

Now, a smaller group of hackers have created external programs which can the game for purposes of cheating – and those are not allowed. But since it is an external computer program divorced from the official game they can be harder to detected.

Perhaps it is just an incompetent translation.

By: Chinese gamer sued for using WoW add-on | Games Money

Chinese gamer sued for using WoW add-on | Games Money — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:09:19 +0000

[...] that stemmed from a player who got their account closed when they were shown to use an add-on. In an article discussing this subject over at Virtually Blind, they suggest a server made just for add-ons, for anyone who wishes to participate. Taking into [...]

By: Kenan Farrell

Kenan Farrell — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 16:18:07 +0000

Too funny Doubledown! You’d better start building a practice course in your backyard.

Also, I’ll echo Ike on making clear the distinction (at least in the U.S.) between plugins (for example, 3rd party bots) and addons (UI mods). I’m not sure yet whether China allows either. Maybe China WoW doesn’t even make the distinction and simply disallows everything. Anyone out there playing WoW in China???

Thanks for all the great comments.

By: Doubledown Tandino

Doubledown Tandino — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 16:02:02 +0000

@ Kenan 3 and 8

yeah, any time I come close to any kind of info, I get tons of chinese websites and popups and craziness flashing stuff….. I’m afraid I’ll have a seizure. Anyway, I can’t find much info in english on the net….

but on the brighter side, I think I just signed up for the TV show “Most Extreme Elimination Challenge”

By: Kenan Farrell

Kenan Farrell — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 15:02:24 +0000

Here’s the Chinese WOW site…http://www.wowchina.com. Unfortunately, it’s all just beautiful scribbles to me, so perhaps a Mandarin-reading VB friend can try to locate the Terms of Use.

By: arti57

arti57 — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 02:23:07 +0000

The no add-on policy does seem out of line with Blizzard over all and I see no reason as to why anyone would just outright ban them for simply business reasons when the software was designed around them. I am willing to bet that this has something to do with the restrictions that the Chinese government has placed on WoW and other MMO’s that are played there.

By: Chinese gamer sued for using WoW add-on | DailyWarcraft.com

Chinese gamer sued for using WoW add-on | DailyWarcraft.com — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:09:11 +0000

By: Ike

Ike — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:56:47 +0000

Kenan,

I have to agree with Anon that there is some confusion about the type of additional software that is being used.

Blizzard Entertainment not only allows user-interface changes to theirs, but encourages it and supplies documentation for it. These are referred to in the US as “Add-Ons”.

The major problem with US breaches of TOS is the use of programs that run in the background alongside World of Warcraft that intercepts and modifies data sent to the servers, or “plays” the game automatically, with minimal input from the player.

I suspect that the terminology in your blog entry is confusing a fair number of readers, insinuating that the add-ons (those user-interface modifications blessed by Blizzard’s own hand) are somehow illegal in the Chinese version of the World of Warcraft.

Some re-writing or appendages to this post may be in order so as to keep the legal issue accurate and concise.

Best,

Ike

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:47:05 +0000

Blizz TOC doesn’t prohibe addon but 3th party software.

Does anyone have acces to the chinesse TOC ? The jugement itself ?

best regard!

ps. I love this blog!

By: Kenan Farrell

Kenan Farrell — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:57:29 +0000

Yeah, not too much info was out there on exactly what plugin was used by the party in this lawsuit, bot or otherwise. The links up there are the only ones available at the time. Hopefully we can gather some more info from people with knowledge. I’m going to keep checking and I’ll certainly update with anything additional I find.

Here’s some Wiki info on Warden for those interested: “Warden is an anti-cheating tool integrated in Blizzard Entertainment games such as Diablo II, StarCraft, Warcraft III and most notably World of Warcraft. While the game is running, Warden uses API function calls to collect data on open programs on the user’s computer and sends it back to Blizzard servers as hash values to be compared to those of known cheating programs. Privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, consider the program to be spyware.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warden_Software.