Bravo Blizzard. You are milking the puss out of the cash cow that World of Warcraft is, gearing up for the critical mass of PC gaming with Diablo III, and the Starcraft II trilogy and you decide to walk out of your elegant manor, stroll into Warcraft village and kick the entire community in the teeth, then walk away with their bread and butter. “You were wholly aware of the decrees of Blizzards domain when you decided to reside here”, said Mayor Pawn. All I know, Mayor Pawn, is that you don’t punish a good and decent community just because you heard the witch was in town. You don’t set your house on fire on kill a bandit, you don’t fire a cannon to break up a kids quarrel and don’t ban the most innovative, dedicated and loyal players of your games! We all know the Warden is now in town. Here to purge the scourge, but let me be clear, good and decent has nothing to do with the community contract or the battle.net user agreement. Use the guise of eliminating hacks and cheats all you want. This is a classic case of inconveniencing the many for the wrongdoing of the few, or just plain uncalled for crack down with the iron first of intolerance.
Who is the new battle.net Warden? Warden (also known as Warden Client) is an anti-cheating tool integrated in Blizzard Entertainment games such as Diablo II (since patch 1.11), StarCraft (since patch 1.15), Warcraft III (since 2009-04-14) and most notably World of Warcraft. While the game is running, Warden uses API function calls to collect data on open programs on the user's computer and sends it back to Blizzard servers as hash values to be compared to those of known cheating programs.[1] Privacy advocates consider the program to be spyware. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warden_(software)).
I hate to get all anti-corporate-establishment on you, but this goes hand in hand with plaguing people’s games with elaborate DRM systems that only frustrate and alienate honest customer and at the most make a hacker’s hobby slightly more challenging
Warcraft III is an old game, but a good one, and the innovations of programmers and gaming enthusiasts makes the Blizzard community what it is today.
This is getting a bit much to base entire leagues, communities and projects on these bots when you are literally facing an uphill battle against Blizzard and simultaneously having to operate under the wire on their servers. It's one thing for Blizzard to state in the user agreement that they do not permit 3rd party apps, and to let them silently operate in peace. It’s obvious that their current stance is completely in opposition of it. Blatant disregard for all communities based on these 3rd party technologies.
This is not a jab at the bot and 3rd part tool programmers, it just gets tiresome to put days upon days of work into building something that enhances a game, when in the end it becomes an unreliable rogue community. One that Blizzard looks down on and fights against.
Notable communities/projects killed via Warden:
DotA Rank
Dota Central League
TDA (functionality limited)
Ghost++ Bot (core use/function)
StealthBot (core use/functoin)
Gstats++
My own project Gameping Dota Stats and everyone who has paid for dedicated hosting to provide the service of game bots.
As said by Deezul.
Also some other great topics on Ghost forums:
http://forum.codelain.com/index.php?topic=4756.0
http://forum.codelain.com/index.php?topic=4766.0
