World of StarCraft Mod Gets C&D From Blizzard 227
eldavojohn writes "If you've been following the team who created World of StarCraft (an amazing mod of StarCraft II to be more like World of Warcraft), their YouTube video of what they've done so far has already resulted in a cease and desist from Activision/Blizzard. Evidently when you are given tools to make custom mods to games you should be careful about making something too good. The author of the mod is hopeful that it's just a trademark problem with the name of his mod, but few reasons for the C&D were given."
In other StarCraft news, reader glwtta recommends an article about how a Berkeley team won the world's first StarCraft AI competition with code that can beat even pro-level human players.
Re:I miss Blizzard. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure the Activision merger had a lot to do with it, but I think the rampant success of World of Warcraft has inflated their ego. The way they released Starcraft II content leading up to its release was done with a tone of "Feast your eyes on yon game! We, Blizzard, have made it, and therefore it is good!"
As for the Starcraft AI... (Score:5, Interesting)
Disappointingly, though, the punch line boiled down to "We discovered a tactic that is functionally unbeatable if you have superhuman micro and aren't handicapped by starcraft's(sorry fans) frankly shitty interface". Much of the most interesting AI work was them allowing their team to survive long enough to build the unbeatable mutalisk swarm, along with a little bit to build a threat heat map and a target value map to guide the swarm as it picked the enemy apart.
Essentially, mutalisks' virtues were "balanced" by the fact that their range sucks and they tend to clump, which makes them easy meat for AoE AA attacks. It turns out, if your micro is inhumanly fast, you can break and reform the mutalisk clump fast enough to avoid most AoE attacks while still achieving concentrated fire on high value targets.
Re:I miss Blizzard. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, if you read the EULAs surrounding Stacraft 2 map editor, you'll notice that ANYTHING you make becomes property of Blizzard. This jackassery was not unexpected.
Re:I miss Blizzard. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think so. I was a WoW player for about 5 years, and they were great about dealing with the community and addressing concerns until a couple of months after the merger. After that, they started doing stupid things about privacy and security on a pretty epic scale; see, for instance, the "Real ID" fiasco.
And before everyone jumps in with "they backed down!"...
1. They said in an interview shortly later that they weren't doing that "for the time being". In English, "won't X for the time being" means "will X, but not yet".
2. In fact, the new forums did display your real name on the screen when you logged in. Just your name, not anyone else's (yet), but... Plain text over the open internet? That's real smart.
3. They still (last I heard) haven't added any capacity for aliases or handles to the "Real ID" thing.
4. They still use your login name as your key for inviting people, making it much easier to crack accounts than it used to be.
5. All of this directly contradicts statements Blizzard had made about privacy or security prior to the merger.
Net result, I went ahead and wrote to privacy@ and told them to delete all my personal information, because I no longer feel I have justified confidence that they will not, at some unspecified future date, decide to show real names to anyone and everyone. Went from 3 active subscriptions to no chance of ever buying from them again. Very, very, slick relationship management, there.
I used to know at least a dozen people who played WoW. Now, no one I know who has any kind of security or law background, or even a basic IT background, plays.
Re:Geez, is everyone a baby? (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with Anonymous Coward.
(and the earth cracks open beneath my feet). Personally I'd ignore the Cease-and-Desist since I'm not doing anything wrong. The Company provided the modding program, thereby giving me permission to do whatever I please with it. They cannot later retract that permission as it would violate consumer laws (I paid; they disabled the product; I was ripped-off).