f13.net

I don't have a news link for it however if the Customer Support (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=11112&sid=1) forums are any indication a very large number of botters just got banned. 

I think the most interseting thing is on the Wowglider forums there's a new thread, 24 pages long, of people talking about recent bans.  My bet is they modifed warden based on reverse engineering Wowglider and just steadily built up a list.

What's wowglider?

Is warden the process that searches your machine for bad stuff?

Sorry, I'm not as current on the l33t h4x as I ought to be.

Ah, my bad.

Quick summary :

Wowglider - Popular botting program.  Charges $25.  Claims to be undetectable.

Warden - WoW's anti-cheating measure.  Caused a bit of a stir because it checks process names and hashes them before sending them off to the server.  Checks a few other things as well, and can change what it checks silently to the user.

This quote got me chuckling.


Several folks are claiming they got banned for using Auctioneer.  I wonder if they had "Bottomfeeder" installed if that was the case.  Hrm.

I'm pretty sure that ought to be 'claimed' now. :D

Anyway, I'd write the "Linux/Auctioneer/phase of the moon got me banz0r3d" claims off as botters trying to muddy the waters as per usual.

The forums for Glider are vastly amusing to read today - it's split between "I'm going to sue Blizzard for banning me! I've got rights!!!" (there isn't a rolleyes emoticon big enough), "I'm bored with the game anyway, now that I've botted half a jillion characters to 60" (well, maybe if you actually played the game....), and "It's a fair cop", with a smattering of "You said this bot was undetectable!" and other nonsense.

In related news - expect potion & enchant prices to start going back up a lot, and misc. AH gear prices to go up a little.

I do wonder if it missed all the people using sony's DRM kernel hider to cloak the program....

anklemonitor is comedy gold (http://forums.wowglider.com/viewtopic.42771)

"Still alot of time left for me to get bant though." 

Wonder how much money there is to be made botting in WOW.

At this precise moment in time?  :-D

I am very glad about this. The botting was getting out of control. It seemed like 3 out of 5 people leveling on my server where botting. Not that I minded that much, was fun to tap their mobs.

Ah so it's a very dumb bot program then.  Even better.  I've encountered a few that 1) Stopped following mobs after a while (so you couldn't kite it to drown in the 'fatigue' areas.) or 2) Knew when something was tapped and would abandon the mob it had previously been racing to.


Well, the Auctioneer one I could almost buy - IF - the individuals also were using "Bottomfeeder."  This was an add-on the Auctioneer people had developed that bought-up auctions on its own during a scan if they were within the money parameters you set.   They've since stopped dev on it because someone pointed out it was akin to botting. When the devs checked w/ Blizzard, Bliz indicated it was indeed a 'no-no'.    Sooo.. it's possible, but I agree unlikely, if only because BF was a fairly recent add-on & quickly removed.

Oh, and yes, anklemonitor is indeed comedy gold.

I'm going to walk around smiling all day now.

Well at least it gave me a few good minutes. I love the "I'm calling my credit card company and I'm going to dispute the charges, then go buy another copy of wow."

What a fucking moron.  I can't even smile at him.

You mean lots of people have to buy another box - and will.

What always makes me mad is how whenever a cheater is caught they rarely get embarrassed, remorseful or penitent, they get angry.  Not just in WoW but life in general. 

And if you have to buy that thing why is their forum even public?

So you know it is quality software??? :rimshot:

Saw this on those forums. I think people need to reread their EULA.

I don't get it.

If someone like Schild can level a protection specced Paladin to 60 - then I think anyone has the time to level a toon  :-)

I like how he says "i sold at low and fair prices which ismore than i can say for legit players" like he's Robin Hood or something.  The idea that everyone else sells at higher prices because they actually had to work for it is completely lost on him.

I think he was just joking about having a 60 paladin.

Schild managed to grind a rogue up to level 12 or similar.

Level 28 actually.

*golf clap*.

Rogue was fun for awhile. And then I realized: "This is all rogue will ever be". So my rogue only levels when I'm bored with everything else. I heard about the bannings, and tried to log into my account via the WoW forums -- I didn't used Glide (or bot), but I figure "Might as well check". I couldn't log in. Go to the account settings.

My account expired a month ago. I didn't notice. My wife's account -- same credit card -- still active. I had to resub. Weird.

Reading their banned forums gave me such a huge boner.  The lawsuits, the begging, the anger, the simply delicious crying, oh god theres even suicide notes.  I don't really understand why since i really don't care much about botters but reading those forums has put such a huge grin on my face.

Amazing.. this guy is not only a clearly very experienced forum lawyer, he actually takes the position that botting is not upsetting to game balance, but selling twink items at a high cost is!!

GOLD!

Would it be trolling there to state the truth?

I think this is the best case of people having a mistaken sense of entitement I have seen in a while.

THEY CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH !!!

Went on over there, but I don't know where to start.  Some of the things they are saying are just unbelievably ridiculous.


I'm really, really tempted to ask this guy why the fucking hell he's paying for this game if he's also paying for a program to play it for him.

It really massacres my sense of belief, this one.  It's like someone out there made these forums up specifically to mess with my head.

Well, I know people who made thousands and thousands of dollars selling duped items and gold in DAOC and UO. WOW isn't any different.

Different year, different game, virtually the same type of exploit. Printing money.

Which is fine and a whole other kettle of fish, but it's clearly not why the nutsack above is using the program.

Unless he is selling accounts. /shrug  That was quite lucrative in the UO days.

Heh.  Anyone selling accounts with WoWGlider has just burned quite a few of their clients.  Not that they'll care if they have the cash.

It's rampant insanity, whichever way you slice it.  Even if you stick with the 'Greed is Good' point of view.

Either way I think Blizzard is handling it pretty well.  Not sure if the "wait a while then ban them as an act of shock and awe" tactic has merit but in general they've made it a point to ban a considerably number of people for botting.

Yes.

Unless he hates leveling up new chars, because it can be boring as hell, and just wants to play at 60. Then it's not that insane.

This is the biggest ban wave Blizzard has ever done by a multiple of 10x. Up until now they never had a way of programatically detecting glider. Pretty much all bans were due to player reports but this time it is clearly evident that they have been able to detect glider automatically; people that used the trial for 5 minutes had their accounts banned. From the best I can tell, it seems that at least 95% of people who used glider have had their accounts banned. 40-50% of those people who used two accounts (one main, one second for botting only) had both accounts they botted on and ones they didn't banned as well. When all is said and done I think we're looking at anywhere from 50-100k accounts banned in a single night. We'll see when Blizzard releases a press release documenting their war on cheaters, whenever that is.

Also the WoWglider community is one of the most ignorant, illiterate group of people I have encountered on the internet. I have access to the private forums which aren't quite as bad as the public ones, but it's amazing to see some of the crazy spellings people can come up with for simple, easy to spell words. Centensez that r speld lyke this are not a rarity. The running tally on the "Bannings" forum is up to something like a thousand. We all know what percentage of users actually visit and post on forums, so I think that number is very telling.

Squeal Piggy.

I'm loving it.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/05/Scottcartman.gif/180px-Scottcartman.gif)

I look forward to seeing the effect this has on the market, I'm guessing not a huge one due to sweat shops.

They've done ban waves of 40k before, i doubt this is bigger than that or that wowglider guy must be rich by now.

Heh, a guy in my guild posted that he got banned. He said the only thing he could think of was that he let his Linux-using cousin in China use his account. He emailed Blizzard to find out what happened. He finally got in contact with his cousin and turn out that his cousin was using glide all the time. So he decides to try to place the honesty card and tell Blizzard what was going on.

Blizzard's response:

So if he would have just kept his mouth shut, they would unban his account. Since he admitted that not only was the account shared but also used a bot program, he got the banstick. Dumbass.

So... you think that someone attempting to use honesty to have their account reinstated is a dumbass?  This is exactly what's wrong with the world. 

If all 40K purchased Wowglider at $20.... that would be what? $800,000.00?  Not too shabby.

In corporate America, where policy trumps empathy, I'd agree that honesty is not the best approach to this situation.

This reminds me of a Vlad the Impaler story in which 2 monks visited Vlad in his palace.

Vlad was curious to see the reactions of two monks regarding his impaling and atrocities. He led them to the rows of corpses in his courtyard and asked their opinions. One of the monks responded by claiming Vlad was sent by God to punish sinners. The other monk,  horrified by the scene, condemned Vlad for his actions.

Vlad killed one of the monks, although the story changes between cultures which one it was. I have a strong suspicion that Honest_Monk would get the literal shaft in the American version.

You're 100% correct.  That's why I stated what I did.  The fact that situations exist where honesty doesn't work signifies that human beings are broken. 

Honesty doesnt work when you are in fact guilty, which he was.  I don't know what kind of result you expected from someone admiting that his account was used for cheating.

If that excuse would have worked, everyone of these mouth breathers would have used it too.  You can't back down from your stance when you are administering to millions of customers.  If an account had Glide used on it, it is banned.  It doesn't matter why it was used.

I wasn't expecting anything.  The guy was guilty.  I just don't know why being honest in an attempt to get a positive result necessitates the label of "dumbass".  I personally find it admirable when people are honest even when it may end up exploding in their face.  Some people would call that integrity.  

Well I would put that label on him if he thought being honest would work.  I have a lot of respect for honesty, but just walking away would have been fine in this case.

Now, going on forums and declaring innocence from the mountain tops is a completely different story.

I guess you're right here.  Walking away disappointed would have been the better course than taking it to a forum as something new to whine about.

Integrity is taking responsability for your actions and accepting your punishment, even if your only mistake was trusting your chinese cousin.  Confessing in an effort to evade punishment when keeping your mouth shut would have worked better is strictly in dumbass territory.  Edit: also confessing after being caught sorta loses you points in the integrity department, its not like the guy found out his cousin had been cheating and then turned himself in, that would be admirable.

I guess I should have been more specific. All previous large masses of bannings were composed almost entirely of overseas faming accounts. This is by far the largest ban wave of actual players. Previously they'd ban maybe a thousand once a month or so but this has annihilated almost all the cheaters. To me there is a dividing line between farmer/power-levelers/whatever they're doing and "regular" player who are using cheats. Farmers don't necessarily really care when they get banned; they're prepared for it, it's just part of the biz. Regular players are attached to their accounts just like we are, and a banning can be devastating to them. That's why we're seeing a different reaction to this ban wave. Previously they'd ban 40k accounts and you wouldn't notice a blip on the radar. However if you go and check the Customer Service forums right now you'll see...more than a blip.

Isn't account sharing against the EULA as well?

Yes, account sharing is against the EULA as well, but that isn't really the point. If you believe that story about sharing the account with a linux using Chinese cousin then I have a bridge to sell you. I'd be willing to bet anything said "cousin" was a paid power-leveller who almost certainly used a bot to do his work. The EULA ban on account sharing is primarily directed at these powerlevelling services. Otherwise everyone utilizing them would suddenly sprout a Chinese cousin.

Oh, I didn't. I just find it amusing that the "defense" against breaking the EULA was the he broke the EULA. I'm taking the "OMG -- I WAS BANNED FOR USING LINUX" stuff with a grain of salt there too. A giant grain of salt. One could build entire salt cities, that housed all the weeping hordes of banned Gliders, out of that grain of salt.

They should probably just taser the people who break the EULA. They're probably Chinese after all.

Update on my guildie: They unbanned his account, but all his characters were missing...

I'm honestly surprised they took any action at all. In fact I'm surprised he got anything more than a canned reponse "sorry this case is closed and will not be repoened under any circumstances" like what they send to most people.

Sounds more like he just bought a new account.

One of my guildies claimed to have been hacked yesterday and lost his account. I have my doubts heh.

Vivendi/Blizzard going after WoW Glider creator (http://www.markeedragon.com/u/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Board=wownews&Number=239104).

Sweet. Raph should sue whoever wrote EZMacro for letting me and countless others macro flamestriking floorhams in our houses or summoning water elementals at Brit bank. Threatening/actually taking legal action for writing a program that ultimately does nothing but automate process on your own PC is going too far. Reason nine billion why the internet laws written by giant corporations are bad.

You can have EZMacro when you pry it from my cold dead hands!

I scripted my necromancy up to GM in UO, but only because I was building a weird template that required the Vampiric Embrace spell just to get by.  Other than that I've never messed around with scripts/bots, but at the same time I don't feel guilty.  Fuck them, I've been playing for enough years that I deserve one break.

Yes, a jury trial with a huge multinational corporation, involving complicated DMCA copyright issues, over a precedent setting case, in a country where you can not recoup your legal fees is certainly something he should try to get.

It could all be spent on lawyers now.

That petition is a joke.  I hope that they typed that pleading from their laptop on the drive to the courthouse in order to beat Vivendi there.  Otherwise, their case is a piece of crap.  No where in the pleading do they attempt to explain, even at the most basic level, the substance of the infringement. 

FYI, you should have filed in state court and force Vivendi to remove it.  At least try to hometown the megacorporation before they can bring in the money and the mouthpieces. 

Vivendi is going to slaughter this guy until he caves.

Win or lose, this Glider guy is about to get buried financially in legal red tape. 

I caught one line in the MD story that really interested me:


The eula has been a very easy way to smack these people down, but there's a secondary issue here which is that this type of thing interferes with the rights of other players and it's interesting to see Blizzard/Vivendi exploring that direction as well. I've always thought there was a compelling case in the right of a gaming company as a "game official" to regulate the game according to the "rules" in the same manner that a sports league does. And that's really where I see the main issue, even if the eula/copyright thing is an easier case to make in court.

Could be worse - someone could have gone to the IRS, mentioned that WoWGlider bloke has sold X thousands of copies at $25 each, and they were wondering if he'd paid his taxes?

It's not too late!

I don't think WoW Giider's author has the financial resources to combat Vivendi / Blizzard on this, but it would be interesting to see the EULA evaluated in a courtroom setting. After all, a judge could find it invalid, and wouldn't that be fun?

Blizzard has a history of legal action against those who create 3rd party apps for their programs. Afaik, none of these ever get to court because the authors choose to dump the app rather than be sued into bankrupcy.

The bnetd case went to court and Vivendi/Blizzard won twice (the original and the appeal).

Viewpoint shift. People running WoWGlider are user scripted NPCs. How awesome is that.

Uh, no, because Blizzard doesn't have control over what these "scripted NPC's" do, like they do with the regular NPC's.  Not to mention the fact that the "scripted NPC's" are non-killable and you can't get quests from them.

That is a great idea!

Every botter gets taken over by the server.  Gathering bots offer quests for the items they are farming in return for gold or items (more than it is worth of course).  Others become the targets of kill quests, who still suffer durability loss but also have the potential of dropping pieces of their equipment and gold (from the bank, too).  The non-bot players get a new dynamic quest system plus get loot and experience for destroying the botters' characters.

For additional fun, the botter should be locked out of user input.  Logging in to the character gives them a first, or third as prefered, person view of life as a mob in WoW.

Heh.  It's actually a major headache, being a mob.  I've tried to mind-vision a few, and they turn 180, walk 3 steps, turn, walk 3 steps, turn, walk 3 steps...  the constant camera movement as it tries to follow is a pain, gave me headaches every time.

Even better. :evil:

That's the point.

I'm SURE someone has already.

"My friend gets banned from WoW" (http://www.taultunleashed.com/phpBB2/about28799.html?t=29765&view=previous)

KNOCK..KNOCK..KNOCK

i find it very odd there would be a typo like that

Nice necro, but I can't beleive I skimmed over this.  I highlighted another typo in the OP's quoted material.  Either the friend in the guild reproduced the email from memory or just manufactured the whole thing.  I find it hard beleive that money hat CS sends out emails with typos, and bad grammar to boot.

What I'd do if I was Blizzard is this:

1) Mascarade as a legitimate user to download the most recent version of Glide and evaluate it for a weakness that wouldn't affect a normal player.
2) Exploit said weakness to identify and ban all users of Glide at machine speeds (rather than trusting C/S or player moles to identify them for you).
3) When a new version of Glide comes out that defeats this weakness, repeat step #1.

Eventually, you bankrupt most everybody who uses Glide.  The tricky bit is just finding other applications you're not aware of yet.

The following thread is just a congo line of pure stupid.