MDY was legally wrong, but what an embarrassment for Blizzard. Their game is so repetitive, mindless, and stupid that a bot can do the bulk of the tasks...and it improves gameplay enough that 100,000 users are willing to pay for the difference.

It's the McDonald's of video games. Just because the sign says BILLIONS SERVED doesn't make it good.

LOL. So true

I agree!

Except unlike McDonalds, which leaves no other possible outcome but to serve billions by building a restaurant 30 minutes from any point on the globe, gamers flock to Blizzard.

Your comment is itself a specimen of mindless stupidity. The genre of role-playing strategy games has always featured a certain amount of repetitive tasks that can be exploited programmatically. Nearly every noteworthy game title in the genre has dealt with similar bots and cheats.

Its OK if the genre doesn't appeal to you. But your quip attempting to establish your superiority relative to WOW players only betrays your ignorance (and arrogance).

No need to hurl fire like that here. The McDonald's point is a valid one, and there are a lot of people that like McDonald's.

As for the case, I have to wonder sometimes about where Blizzard is drawing this invisible line between acceptable automation, a la macros and the like, and cheating. What's the difference between handing off your keyboard to a superior player while you go make a pot of coffee and handing character control over to a scripted AI? In fact, most of the functions MDY's program did could have been done in WoW's own UI API and macros. So really the issue is not so much the fighting and looting aspects of this program but the automation of movement and limited decision making in combat. So again how's that different from handing off your keyboard to a friend?

Granted even the act of letting someone not registered on the account play under your name may violate the EULA but I know of plenty of households that have only one computer and the kids have to share the one account because of budget constraints. Does this mean that Blizzard is going to ban them for cheating as well? Or worse yet, if you paid me to play your account until you reached a certain level or attained some other goal, could Blizzard sue me for damages? It seems so, but how is Blizzard damaged by such activity? If Blizzard has made WoW as generic and widely available as McDonald's then who cares if the game is flooded with a couple thousand lvl 70s. Most of the fun I've had playing the game was at the lower levels anyway. They themselves have said they have over 10 million users, that's less than .1% of the user base that purchased this MDY product. So who's really getting hurt here?