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It's okay to cheat
WoW hacking has other similarities to the non-game software security struggles, including the cat-and-mouse game played between those enforcing the rules and those trying to flout them. After growing wise to the bot scripts, Blizzard Entertainment, the provider of WoW, started sending agents into the game to query suspiciously drone-like characters with instant messages asking, in effect, "Hey, are you real?" So a hacker responded by modifying his bot so it forwarded all IMs by SMS to the hacker's cell phone, McGraw said.
McGraw's book, which is slated to hit book shelves next month and was co-written by Greg Hoglund, promises to contain plenty of hands-on demonstrations of how to hack MMORPGs. But his talk also spent considerable time discussing the ethics of the practice. His thesis: With a few exceptions - packet sniffers, denial of service attacks on opponents and the like - it's all perfectly OK.
For one thing, there are no laws that prohibit cheating in WoW and other games, and the end user license agreements (EULAs) are so chock full of ridiculous provisions that their ability to be held up in court are open to genuine debate.
"A lot of people think you can get in trouble for breaking EULAs," McGraw said. "It turns out EULA writers can get in trouble for asking improper things."
One of the legally specious requirements enforced by Blizzard is user permission to have software run on the player's machine that monitors instant messenger activity, open programs and other computer functions and reports them back to the company. The software, which Blizzard dubs The Warden, probably violates an anti-spyware statute in California, McGraw said.
So McGraw and Hoglund have responded with their own piece of software, which they call The Governor. It closely monitors The Warden and curtails activities the authors deem invasive.
Given there is no legitimate reason to argue against hacking MMORPGs, McGraw concluded, it would be irresponsible not to research how their rules can be circumvented. These games, after all, spawn real economies with gross domestic products that can rival many industrialized nations. What's more, the market for virtual assets such as land in Second Life or gold in WoW is large now and expected to mushroom to as high as $7bn in the next two years, according to IGE, a broker of MMORPG currency and assets.
Said McGraw: "Should we talk about breaking (MMORPG) systems? Absolutely we should, because otherwise we won't know how to build systems that don't suck." ®
COMMENTS
WoWbot was fun
As WoW came out a community built up around a piece of software called InnerSpace. This tool gave anybody the ability to write scripts the control elements within games. Along with an extension for it called ISXWoW that exposed the inner workings of WoW it became possible to automate mundane tasks within the game. Its odd that some elements of a game that meant to be entertainment were mundane but that’s how it usually works. To get better at something you have to practice it again and again and in many cases that was monotonous.
After messing about with these automation scripts it prompted me to think about automating you character entirely and so WoWBot was born.
Its been well over a year since I stopped developing WoWbot. The bot itself didn’t die though other members of the InnerSpace community took up my code and improved upon it, its probably not got much of my original code left in it now but that doesn’t really matter. What matter was during the time I was working on it I had more fun scripting my character in WoW than I did actually playing the game.
I no longer play MMO's myself as the entertainment vs time invested is just not worth the hassle and that seems to be the problem with all MMO's its a tired genre and I dont really expect it to improve until we see some major advances in display and input technology and a massive increase in AI capacity. What we need is something akin to the Holodeck in Star Trek, kinda hard to cheat if your really there!
Until then I am sticking with Pen and Paper rolling playing with a bunch of real people all sat in the same room. Its far more fun to have some face to face interaction.
RE: Blizzard designed WoW to be a farmers heaven
First of all congratz for those dumbasses who use the "hacker" word for cheaters. If you really want to connect this word to WoW, then you can tell it to those who write farmbots like glider and other tools but not for farmers.
I think -as someone who banned from wow- that most of those who cheating are do that because they tired of playing with the game or just happend to be in wrong guilds and hated it from some reason. These people ARE NOTHING TO DO WITH HACKERS. Most of them can't even install a fucking windows, they just buy the bots/cheats/game flaw guides like wow underground or download them for freely and suck because it was detectable, anyways not everyone started as a cheater but many people switch to the dark side :D
So you guys who gets angry because people cheating in the game are fucking stupid. I was got banned cuz I had enough, I had a lvl60 char on a server where was only a few good raid guild and of course they didn't recruit everyone. I did a month farming on my lappy and played with other game, blizz got me and banned me with the rest but I didn't care with it at all. My guildies never known that (shame?) blizz banned me only that I switched to another game -yay so many good out there don't stick with wow-
Wow can be badly designed because it eats up all your time to level, raid, get epic shit but until you play it for fun, have friends, good guilds there is no point to cheat just enjoy the game and one day if u have enough from wow just give your character to your brother or someone.
BTW for those who are so naive, many people farm in wow, even those who you never suspect to do like your best mate. Don't Believe Any of it, its all true.
Zeratul
justice
The whole point of computers is to be programmed to do repetitive tasks themselves. If you spend several hours a day doing repetitive tasks on a computer (call it playing MMORPG or whatever), you missed the point completely and deserve to be whacked by a bot. That's what I call justice.
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