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.
They better... (Score:3)
They better be making a "World of Starcraft" game, otherwise this just reeks of asshattery.
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Re:They better... (Score:5, Funny)
Hugs and Kisses, Blizzard.
Geez, is everyone a baby? (Score:3, Insightful)
Following the link, no copy of the C&D letter. So we have no idea WTF is going, just the incoherent ramblings of a developer who is whining about not allowed to have anything good. Apparently he e-mailed the tech support department for clarification....
It could be as simple as the legal department scouring the web for the name "Starcraft" - not even knowing there is a tool out there to build mods.
Bottom line, we know nothing at this point. No need to pucker up.
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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).
Re:Geez, is everyone a baby? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Geez, is everyone a baby? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Thanks to the current implementation of the custom map system on battle.net, gameplay and other such minor details are secondary concerns.
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It's Blizzard. Don't you expect asshattery from them? Or any other game company, for that matter... that's the biggest reason I pretty much stopped gaming.
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Funny thing...
My brother and I dug out our tennis rackets, and there is a public court that's seldom used. I'm really starting to phase out video games(too many gimicks, too little story, too many quick to beat games.) The basement has a good sized tablle with a really bright light above it(shop quality long tube FL), and I plan to work on fletching with that. Once I get another job is when we start hitting the shooting range and getting our pistol permits.
So yeah, I'm finding a lot more interesting things
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You would be saying the same thing if somebody got a C&D after making a Lost Vikings mod for SC2.
Titan may or may not be World of Starcraft, but you won't find much info in their lawyer's kneejerk reactions. Somebody stepped on one of their trademarks, and even had the nerve to garner a following- that's all we know.
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I've said this before, and I'll say it now.
"Nuclear launch detected" will mean so much more when it's blaring out of loudspeakers in the city or camp your character is in RIGHT NOW.
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Titan is not World of Starcraft.
Titan is an MMO, however it is a new IP, so not SC, WC, etc. IIRC, it is a MMOFPS, but I will not swear to that one, as I don't remember.
Basically:
It's the worst kept secret in the gaming industry currently.
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I miss Blizzard. (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember back when Blizzard was an awesome company with great customer service. Well, that, and when the gamers buying their games were the "customers" they were so great to.
That Activision merger seems to have totally killed the company we used to know. Not that this is totally surprising, mind you, but it's sad. I would guess that this was a matter of the Blizzard company officials not being paranoid enough to check the fine print in their merger deal. Either that, or they were ready to cash out.
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!"
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The annoying thing about Blizzard is that they are currently in the "Obnoxiously prideful" stage; but that doesn't become the "Hubristic" stage unless they fuck up somehow....
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.
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I hate to break this to you, but your real name is absolutely not a secret. Not even your SSN is a secret, if you think about what 'secret' means. Both of these are a matter of public record, and are absolutely trivial to discover about you by anyone and everyone with whom you trade data bits. If you think you have 'privacy' online, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.
In short, if you're in public, expect to be in public. And it goes without saying that the internet is 'in public'.
I know this
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Your name is public information. Your SSN is intended not to be, but given the number of people/places that require it, it's out there, associated with your name.
The association between you and your Blizzard account (and what that account is, which characters are yours, etc) is not public information by default. Blizzard was intending to make it become so. You might do better to have researched the debate first.
> It isn't the wild west any more, and Blizzard is reflecting that.
Not everyone has surrend
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No, you're just clueless.
Your real name isn't a secret, but the connection between your real name and a particular online identity should be.
Yes, we all know you don't get perfect privacy. Here's the thing. I play City of Heroes now. I have a global handle. The people I meet in game have global handles. We friend each other through those, and we have all the functionality that "Real ID" supposedly offers -- but no one had to give out real names or login information. And that means that the shy people,
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Know this: They are not alone. By 'tomorrow' the whole notion of anonymity online will be gone from any and all mainstream places. You'll still be able to create unique and disposable handles on some sites, but the vast majority will be tied to, say, your Facebook account, and will proudly display your real name.
I did not fail to comprehend what Blizzard was planning to do. You, on the other hand, have failed to realize the impact of the popularity of things like Facebook's API.
And I'd like to pre-stipu
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the vast majority will be tied to, say, your Facebook account
Uh, why wouldn't you be able to create a fake profile for Facebook?
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That gap is readily being fixed in other places, though. Gmail, for example, ties it to a real phone number. So while this may not be your actual name, it is still certainly identifiable to 'you' with little genuine effort. So you'd still want to adapt - if for no other reason than the day that Facebook changes this as well. (And if you've been on it lately, they're 'encouraging' you to supply a phone number already. It's a tiny, tiny thing to flip that over to 'requiring'.)
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Gmail, for example, ties it to a real phone number.
Yeah, I've been reading about it. Is it for new users only? Google has never asked me my phone number.
So you'd still want to adapt - if for no other reason than the day that Facebook changes this as well. (And if you've been on it lately, they're 'encouraging' you to supply a phone number already. It's a tiny, tiny thing to flip that over to 'requiring'.)
Thankfully, I can get a SIM card for $5 (sometimes free) without giving any information to my cellphone provider.
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Yeah it could be new.
You can get that SIM today, and for a short while in the future. I can't imagine that this either will last forever.
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It's really annoying. I've tended to just make throwaway gmail accounts for this and that. And I can get why they'd want to limit that. But it's not like I went nuts with it or anything. I think I have like three alts. And they told me I'd used my phone number too many times and wasn't allowed to make any more with it. It was a tad on the creepy side. I've always been a bit of a google fanboy. But it kind of reminded me of all the talk of what might happen when google was too powerful for too long. It's a b
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So you have a whacky idea, and then use exactly no logic to support it.
And of course, you also fail to supply any rational reason as to why that would be a bad thing, anyways.
You have built yourself a nice mental trap. Enjoy your delusions.
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hahaha, no.
They will manage a 'profile' or profiles I give them. They may or may not be accurate.
According to Facebook, after graduating from high school in 1982, I went to mars university and graduated in 1911 with a degree in temporal physics.
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See my other reply, but you're a dinosaur in terms of the emerging internet. Change is happening all around you, and you're failing to adapt.
As am I, to be sure, but still the point remains.
Further, how many WoW players actually COULD beat you up? Also, with identity attached, would it be easier or more difficult to get law enforcement to rectify such behavior?
If society is structured around identity, most of the gaps you're fretting about would go away. It's only when we're assumed to be concealed that
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True. But this is going away, so you may as well deal with it in the near-term as opposed to getting hurt by the transition.
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Your sequence of events is out of order. It has gone away in some small places of the net. This will spread.
RealID was/is a reflection of that, rather than the implementation of it.
Those 'privacy advocates' may have won that particular battle, but they're doomed to lose the war because they're simply not capable of adapting, they have no power, and there are many, many, many more that do not care one whit.
I'm suggesting people concerned by RealID educate themselves and take steps to minimize the impact of
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You lack the ability to tell the difference between the large network and it's protocols, and individual companies.
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As opposed to every other company in the history of the universe who was releasing something that was highly anticipated. Why, I remember when Apple was launching the iPhone, Jobs came out on stage was like, "Uh, well, it's OK I guess, if you care about phones or something, but, you know, its no big deal or anything." Ditto for Microsoft launching pretty much anything - I know I was feeling kind of bad for them when they had their "I'm a PC, and I think my mom doesn't really love me" marketing campaign arou
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"Feast your eyes on yon game! We, Blizzard, have made it, and therefore it is good!"
By Blizzard, I think you mean Valve. :)
You mean the same Valve that has done more than any other company to promote user generated content?
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You mean the latter (at least according to the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narbacular_drop [wikipedia.org]).
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.
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An illegal clause in a EULA makes the EULA void in the US. However, do you really want to go against Blizzards lawyers in court, who would like nothing more than to rip you to pieces, bankrupt you, and destroy your reputation? Even if you win, it could take years to get your legal fees paid.
'Tis the unfortunate reality of the modern consumer-corporate relationship in the USA. Even though the vast majority of EULAs are illegal, few, if any, have been tested in court because of the resources and time required
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Not true. There have been many, many cases where piece of a contract was shut down by the court, but the remaining contract stayed valid.
Your memory betrays you (Score:5, Insightful)
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The merger with Activision befuddled me. Blizzard was on top of the video game world, it didn't seem like they needed anyone else. It just reeks of a top level buyout cashgrab
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Blizzard was an ass towards everyone not playing their games as they intended it long before that. Bnetd being the well know example of that one. Glider being another. But there are more examples out there.
Blizzard is quite simple to follow. They make wonderful games, they take their time to make them. They'll make a shitload of money with them. But if you are a tinkerer, then stay away from them. They simply do not tolerate tinkering out of the sandbox.
Re:I miss Blizzard. (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember back when Blizzard was an awesome company with great customer service. Well, that, and when the gamers buying their games were the "customers" they were so great to.
What timeline were you living in? Blizzard has been known to be quite hostile to modders and independent developers for some time now. Just look at the original map editor for Starcraft. Look at what they did to bnetd [wikipedia.org]. Heck, I'm surprised to no end that the makers of bwapi [google.com] have been allowed to continue with the project, given that the project relies on hacking the Starcraft client via DLL injection.
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They want the guy to change the name of his mod and suddenly the golden fairy that made love to you in your sleep is your evil step father that gets drunk and beats you. Over react much?
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That Activision merger seems to have totally killed the company we used to know.
FWIW, the bnetd [wikipedia.org] debacle predates the Activision merger.
When you see something like this... (Score:4, Funny)
...a smart company with plenty of resources like Blizzard/Activation should be saying: "Hey, you guys want a job?"
Re:When you see something like this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Who do you think they are...Valve? :p
Re:When you see something like this... (Score:5, Funny)
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World of Portal 4 Dead?
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World of Portal 4 Dead Fortress.
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World of Portal 4 Dead: smash zombies up using only gravity and well placed portals, and sell their remains for profit.
Sounds like something Valve and Blizzard would make.
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And another company now as, or at least wants to talk. (bottom of page of the 2nd link)
SOmthing I have come to expect: (Score:2)
Blizzard will make the UI changes available in the options menu of the inevitable expansion without crediting the people they obviously got the idea from. If questioned about this, they will claim that the team stole the idea to make StarCraft more like WoW from them.
Sometimes, I hate how cynical I am. Then I surf to /.
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I hate C&D as much as anyone here, but where did the original idea come from? World of Warcraft, by Blizzard, of course. Then from that, it was Everquest. Then various MUDs and MOOs.
The _idea_ is clearly not protected by anyone's laws (IANAL, usual disclaimers etc.), but the name "World of Starcraft" is obviously Blizzard's trademark.
However, if the C&D is not clear about what is the eact violation so that the authors can rectify it, I think Blizzard should be hammered down, maybe even lose that exa
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.
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Re:As for the Starcraft AI... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the competition was AI vs. AI, and the Berkeley guys cleaned up, they obviously deserve kudos; but it is arguably a weakness of Starcraft's design that such a lot of it revolves around high-speed micro. The AIs just make that more blatant.
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The AI proved good versus other AIs, but it would get slaughtered versus human top level players due to the strategic inflexibility. (humans won't let you sit and build units f
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Spoiler: it won against the #1 in Spain, who's also #16 in Europe. Go read the article. It's a great read.
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Most comments on this note the player is not particularly great as far as Starcraft players are concerned, nowhere near an actual pro-gamer, and the only tournament mentioned is from 2001. So at best a good (but not great) player who's 10 years out of practice and behind on current strategies of playing. Also, the article only mentions that the AI won one test game against the player. Not even an actual game since it seems testing Goliaths was the real point of that game.
Re:As for the Starcraft AI... (Score:5, Informative)
Having programmed an AI for that same competition, I can assure you that nobody should be surprised an AI can beat a human.
You can find a list of the rules to the competition here [ucsc.edu]. One thing to notice is that there are some glitches that are permitted. Having an AI that can control and make decisions for each individual unit almost at the same time (not really at the same time, the AI still has to go through steps and issue commands sequentially, but it's so fast it might as well be same time) means the AI has a HUUUGE leg up on even the best Starcraft pros whose actions per minute only range in the few hundreds.
All you need to beat a human is to program in strategies that just need the speed of an AI to execute
And if you want to watch some good micro-managment, on that website you can view the final matches between AIs in each tournament here [ucsc.edu].
Wrong link. (Score:5, Informative)
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Having programmed an AI for that same competition, I can assure you that nobody should be surprised an AI can beat a human.
Turns out the AI didn't and can't. From a different article on the tournament [ucsc.edu]:
The showcase game of the competition was a bot versus human match. In the exhibition match, =DoGo=, a World Cyber Games 2001 competitor played against the top ranking bot of the competition. The result was an exciting man versus machine match highlighting the state of the art in real-time strategy game AI.
Whi
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Oriol is very good—one-time World Cyber Games competitor, number 1 in Spain, top 16 in Europe
There seems to be confusion about the name of the player. The player that the UCSC article refers to, =DoGo=, indeed participated in WCG 2001 finals for Spain, but his name was Antonio Crespo Gomez.
Who knows what the context really was? Maybe the developers asked h
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It's called the Magic Box trick and high-level SC2 players use it as well. It's basically spreading your muta's far enough out that they can all attack without taking splash damage. If you just move-hold the muta's can take care of plenty of Thors.
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Worse than that, the AI's would be tremendously frustrating to play against. Wouldn't this kill the regular game if players never know whether they are playing against another human being or an AI? Is there a way of knowing whether or not your opponent is using the API? AI vs. AI would be fun, but human vs. AI would suck.
The mods required to inject the AI code into the game prevent you from playing through battle.net
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Makes me think the next contest should put a cap on AI command input speed, particularly if it is property that could be easily altered. It would make it a lot more like a chess AI problem, then just a raw speed problem.
If you do that then the best algorithms will perform as badly as the worse ones. Unless you're talking about human vs AI, then I could see that being plausible. But how else should you level the playing field? Should the AI only be able to command what is on screen as opposed to all units at once?
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talking to other units would be silent if on screen together but would have to be in public chat if trying to talk to an off-screen unit
Wait... (Score:2)
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Blizzard is suing people for a mod that makes one of Blizzard's games, Starcraft 2, more like another one of Blizzard's games, World of Warcraft? How exactly is Blizzard harmed by this; is it causing Blizzard to lose game sales to themselves?
Your description of the cyclical nature of this controversy evokes an image of Blizzard with their own head up their own ass.
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Well, yes. Remember that StarCraft 2 is something you purchase once and then are finished spending money on, while World of Warcraft requires a monthly subscription.
Code beating human ain't a surprise... (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem in the RTS genre is that there's *way* too much emphasis put on micro-management. When I write *way*, I really mean **wwaayy** or something like that (jokes welcome).
The fact that so much emphasis is put on micro-management instead of strategy leaves the door to a great many hacks/cheats and also make it easy to write AI beating even top-notch players.
Bring us RTS where the 'S' means something. A lot of people would love it.
Btw, I was highly ranked on Case's ladder at Warcraft II but not in the top 10. Yet my rank was due to me outsmarting my opponents using real strategies. In Warcraft III it became much harder if not impossible (besides a few cheap builds that get rendered useless by the next anti-imba-patch anyway and that anyway aren't "strategies").
So yup, please, bring back the 'S' in RTS...
Here we go again... (Score:4, Insightful)
So apparently they already had his demo yanked off of youtube, and the above linked youtube video is just a repost - so they are taking it fairly seriously.
I am always amazed on how little forsight is put into legal decisions like this one.
Why don't they just hire the guy, and let him run with it. He clearly has the skillset they are looking for - he made the entire app, demo and produced a bulk of materials by himself. Sounds like he deserves at least an interview with them...
Diablo 3 (Score:2)
I remember when www.diablo3.com was bought by Blizzard.
The guy that owned it was a huge diablo 2 fan, and he built the blog to track all news about an upcoming sequel. Blizzard didn't want to announce any plans yet for their upcoming game, but they wanted to announce that they were going to start working on a "new game". Since the guy was such a fan, he sold them the site, and honored their request to not announce that Blizzard was going to make an announcement about announcing a game. Really, I am not ma
I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised... (Score:2)
by the number of idiots who have posted comments on this story. 1. Blizzard has to defend their trademarks or lose them, so of course someone creating a game called "World of Starcraft" is going to get a C&D. 2. People seem to get the idea that fans of something should be able to do whatever they want with that thing. Fanfic can be interesting, but non-canonical, and a creator may feel that his/her baby was violated by it. I feel it is entirely up to the copyright owner as to whether or not they all
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Don't be coy, they stole assets from WoW in the process. That's not Kosher in modding.
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Oh wait, looking at the video instead of the screenshot, those are sc2 icons. MY BAD
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You got that backwards. It's a mod of StarCraft, and it doesn't incorporate ANYTHING from World of Warcraft except the title. (Although I'm pretty sure "World of X" is pretty generic in and of itself.)
Other than the title, this is just a copy of any of a million 3rd person RPGs. I haven't done more than watch the Youtube trailer, so I don't know what the mod-team was promising to do and if any of that would cause problems, but changing the UI and the camera angle on the game doesn't seem to warrant any
Re:ummm (Score:4, Informative)
Nope. They took the tools included with every copy of Starcraft II and used it to make a World of Warcraft-style.
A better analogy would be: they were given a bunch of Legos, then were smacked for putting them together to make the Lego logo.
Re:ummm (Score:5, Informative)
No. Read TFS, if not TFA.
It was a mod for Starcraft 2. They were making a mod of Starcraft 2 with serious RPG elements (all of which is perfectly reasonable, given the tools that are available) and named their mod "World of Starfcraft" (for obvious reasons).
If the cease and desist is just because their mod name was too close to that of an official Blizzard product, I'm sure this will be a non-story and the mod will continue with a more original name. If the C&D was just because Blizzard don't want RPG elements to be used in a mod for their strategy game, that is some serious arse-hattery,
Re:ummm (Score:4, Informative)
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Given Blizzard, we can't really tell which it is though, and their past actions give equal probability to either.
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There are several custom mods that have RPG elements. Check out SC2mapster.com for a list.
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If the cease and desist is just because their mod name was too close to that of an official Blizzard product, I'm sure this will be a non-story and the mod will continue with a more original name. If the C&D was just because Blizzard don't want RPG elements to be used in a mod for their strategy game, that is some serious arse-hattery,
I'll one up that, if the cease and desist is not because of incredibly obvious trademark infringement, monkeys will fly out of my ass.
You guys are hilarious... "if"...
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Depends - Which is worse - being C&D'd by Blizzard, or by Kirby [kirbykirbykirby.com]?
Though I hate to admit it - Imagine a MMORPG based on that - {G};
Pug
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World of KirbyCraft?
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Yep, but that's not exclusive to Blixxard. Almost every 'real time strategy' game is really a 'real time tactics' game. Also, the speed at which units appear is mind bending for 'real time' - it's really an 'accelerated-time tactics' game, where there's no time to give real strategic thought to the game, not the style of control necessary for strategic activities. About the only thing which even comes close to a true strategy game is Supreme Commander 1 (not 2) - and that's still accelerated-time.
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If people can just come along and knock your shit down?
Do not despair...here is a nice song that will be stuck in your head now...
I get knocked down but I get up again
You're never going to keep me down
I get knocked down but I get up again
You're never going to keep me down...
I'm not saying it is right... but just because something isn't always seen as correct and is bombarded from many angles does not make it pointless or even wrong. I understand your sentiment and I will say the principles of the internet will always allow scumbags, intellectuals, lolcats, 8 year old girls on youtube, vast indices of knowledge, crazy scientology nuts, people with an agenda to sue, people who create works for the common