World of Warcraft Bot Site For Sale

One of the leading World of Warcraft Bots, Rhabot, has placed itself up for sale on business/website auction site SitePoint. The bot appears to be making some good money, $1,300 per month according to the auction information. This could be a great invest for a gold farming company or power leveling company. I have used Rhabot for a long time, and find it to be one of the best commercial bots. It has support for auto equipping, training, questing, and the author recently finished an auto navigation module. World of Warcraft Bot Company For Sale on SitePoint.com.

Sad News - Glider Agrees to Pay Blizzard $6M in Bot Lawsuit

MDY, the makers of the World of Warcraft Bot Glider, has agreed to pay Blizzard $6M in the on going lawsuit brought by Blizzard. MDY realized it could owe more in damages following Janaury's (2009) trial, so it proposed this agreement. From Virtually Blind's article on the MDY v Blizzard Case:

This judgment does not entirely conclude the matter. Issues still slated for trial in January include whether MDY’s sales of Glider violated the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and whether MDY’s owner Michael Donnelly can be held personally liable for the $6,000,000 judgment.

Beyond trial, of course, there will almost certainly be an appeal to the 9th Circuit on the issue of liability, which would negate the stipulation, and thus the $6m damages judgment, if MDY prevails.

It's a sad day for us all when corporate interests override a person's fair use rights on his own computer.

World of Warcraft Credit Card

The World of Warcraft Blog brings news of a Visa credit for World of Warcraft players. First National Bank of Omaha is offering a Visa credit with a World of Warcraft background. Using the card will earn you extra game time in WoW.

The World of Warcraft Visa card is available to U.S. residents with a World of Warcraft game account, putting one percent of every dollar spent on “qualifying purchases” toward time in the game and giving cardholders a free month of play the first time they use the card. The cards are available in 13 different and very sexy designs, with detailed artwork featuring the game’s various races, including Night Elves, Tauren, Dwarves, Trolls and of course, Orcs and Humans.

It may seem like kind of a weird rewards program, but with 11 million subscribers, many of whom would leap at the chance to publicly declare their WoW allegiance - not to mention the potential for free play time - I think it’s a brilliant move. Even more importantly, it’s yet another sign that gamers are being recognized as adults, and taken seriously for the “cultural demographic” they represent. Of course, laying down your World of Warcraft Forsaken Visa may not get you taken seriously by the maître d’, but sometimes legitimacy has to come one step at a time.

Can Blizzard Be Beaten? Maybe...

For those of you following Blizzard's many attempts to shut down botters, gold farmers, and the like through legal actions, you may be feeling a little despondent after the recent failure of the court when a judge agreed with Blizzard that modifying an program's memory is the same as copyright violation. There may be some good news. An unnamed party sued Blizzard for banning his account. Blizzard had banned the account for botting (a violation of the World of Warcraft ToS). The unnamed party admits he botted on the account. However, the party sued citing a decision in SoftMan Products Co. v. Adobe Systems Inc, which basically says SoftMan had purchased software and not just a license. This will be interesting to watch in the future, as Blizzard contends we WoW players are buying a license, and not software. The difference is that if we buy software, we are free to modify the memory of the program on our own machine. Buying software means we bought a product, and have the rights and warranties of having bought a product. If we buy a license, we are bound by the items in the EULA and are prevented from accessing or modifying the memory of the program running on our machine. Buying a license means we bought permission to use a product, and have restricted rights and warranties. Since we have precedence of a judge ruling we actually bought software, I think this tactic could be used over and over with Blizzard. Blizzard does not want to have a recent court ruling agree with this previous ruling, as it would damage their case against MDY and other companies. If you've been banned recently by Blizzard, you might consider sueing Blizzard and cite SoftMan Products Co. v. Adobe Systems Inc. The unnamed party from above got his account back plus a free year of WoW. It cost him court costs and filing fees (which amount to about one year of WoW service).