According to this random post on Markee Dragon, WoW has filed legal action against WoW Glider, the 3rd party app that allows players to grind unattended.

Blizzard and Vivendi ( www.blizzard.com ) today filed against MDY Industries ( www.wowglider.com ) and Michael Donnelly in the state of Arizona USA. Blizzard is seeking injunctive relief and money damages against MDY. What that means is they want him to stop the production of WoW Glider and they want him to pay them damages. Blizzard believes that Glider infringes on their intellectual property. They believe Glider allows players to cheat, giving them an unfair advantage and that they believe Glider encourages Blizzard customers to breach their contracts for playing the game. Last they claim that Glider is designed to circumvent copyright protections.

Blizzard is famous for not being shy about suing 3rd party mods they deem as harmful to their service. In this case, WoW Glider actually sued them first (presumably to beat them to this injunction). From a news story last November.

MDY Industries, the creators of WoW Glider, a third-party software that lets you run World of Warcraft on autopilot, are suing Blizzard in order to assert their right to distribute the software.

According to the lawsuit, three gentleman representing Blizzard and parent company Vivendi came to the house of one of the MDY employees with a briefcase that allegedly contained the draft of a formal complaint. Blizzard believes WoW Glider violates their terms of service (it does) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). MDY Industries is seeking legal right to distribute their software and any monetary supplement decided by the court.

My first thought: The app in question, WoW Glider, looks pretty sweet! And to think, I never would have found it without the lawsuit buzz!

That being said (and this may show my bias as having worked on these games in the past), I have to be rooting for Blizzard on this one. Unattended macroing is a huge problem for the people trying to run an MMO:

  1. It becomes the easiest and most efficient way to farm for gold, which causes inflation of the economy.
  2.  It creates a huge number of customer service calls, as people who aren’t using the tool complain about the people who are (or more frequently, who they suspect are).
  3. It starts a slippery slope towards the automated PvP bots that ultimately decimated games like Counterstrike.
  4. While not applicable for WoW and most other games, if the company is in the business of selling gold or advancement for real cash, the bot can effectively compete with your business model.
  5. While subtle, fast advancement creates a mentality that characters are cheap and disposable, which increases the likelihood of antisocial behavior.
  6. Left unchecked too long, and you get a situation where so many people have the tool installed that you can’t take action.

Deciding what is and isn’t cheating is always an interesting and passionate debate even on the development teams that build them. What is often lost to the outside observer is that these things do have a business impact that is unseen to the average player.

Original comments thread is here.