damnit. i respected blizzard not only for their game quality but for their respect towards their customers. the bad thing about this is because the average player doesn't read the EULA, nor keeps up with tech news, blizzard may continue doing this in their future games.

screw.

i hope flagship/hellgate london won't have this crap.

What is happening is that all the security you have tried to establish on your computer is being comprimized by corporations that believe they have a right to do so. They are not even law enforcement agencies, yet you allow them to have FULL ACCESS to your PC!

Do you know who is sitting at the other side of that terminal? Who are they accountable to? It is not impossible for this stream of information being sent to them to be intercepted and abused.

If people can so easily "cheat" and "crack" these games, how secure is the personal information gathered by such games that scan your every interaction with your computer? How is cheating in a game more important than theft and privacy?

What's the "Cost"? That's what I fail to see. The fact of the matter is, there are a billion other ways for big companies to rob me of my "privacy" then via an anti-cheating tool.

This looks like another example of "Privacy Advocates" complaining about nothing.

I kinda doubt that Blizzard is interested in the porn site you have open while playing WoW, much less any more innocuous information it gathers to try to limit the number of cheaters.

Warden isn't a rootkit =P

I'd disagree with that assessment.

But I can already tell that you're one of those types who believe that stopping cheaters is worth any cost. So there's not much point in arguing.

I did hope you at least downloaded Walker and took a look at it. As that's the future for you in WoW.

Warden isn't a rootkit =P

And the only reason Sony's rootkit would "Deactivate" Warden is that Warden can't see what Windows itself can't see - if you install your botting software into the hidden $sys$ directory.

#56, you gave up your privacy when you gave that same company your credit card information. LOL.

Obviously, Warden isn't that ineffective if they are catching and banning a number of people. You're not going to get them all, but that's better than praying and hoping.

What this entire situation shows is how stupid people are and the depths of which we have fallen to. The BBC story states that many players were "OK" with having spyware installed on their systems - only because they think 'it helps game play'.

??????

You'll give up your privacy so you can play a stupid GAME?? You #!@&* moron!!

Listen and learn!

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
- Ben Franklin

i'm pretty sure that if they even had the sligthest interest in say, formatting "suspicious" (defined by any criteria they choose) hard drives, they could bury that clause in the tons of pages of mumbo jumbo and still get away because you agreed to when you installed the program. Sure there will be tons of angry users but if they agreed to use the software under certain conditions, I see little room for arguing, especially if the definition of "suspicious" is clearly defined as in.... having in the same HDD antiblaxx, alcohol 120/daemon tools and 3 or more .iso images of copyrighted material.

whether it's effective or not is beside the point imho, they're stuff that should be illegal for companies to do - maybe in a perfect world at least.

It's too instrusive.

The reason he brings it up is because the opposing side is a throng of individuals willing to go to any lengths to stop just one cheater.

They use logic like, "If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide."

or "You're paranoid for not trusting company X."

or "Any cost is worth it to stop just one cheater."

And of course all those arguments are either fallacies or miss a larger picture. It is said individuals though (on top of the piles of people who are unaware or just don't care) that make a policy change like what Indeego showed with Intuit just about impossible.

The whole point is that these systems like Warden, GameGuard are as ineffective as the anti copying technology on the CDs.

People who want to copy the music just hold down the shift key or disable Autorun. People who want to bot at WoW reverse engineer the game protocol and do not use the game client. How can Warden detect something when it isn't running?

Blizzard is actually kind of late to this whole bundle a rootkit/spyware to prevent cheating party.

The Lineage 1 and 2 series, which have millions of players world wide, use a program called nProtect Gameguard. It's functions are much like Warden. GameGuard is also used in a variety of smaller less known games and MMOs.

http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/387574

The players of Lineage 2 North American tried very hard to prevent this program from being implemented in the states. The above article which details a serious exploit in one of the drivers that Gameguard installs was part of that effort to get NCSoft NA to see the light.

It did not dissuade them. They did issue a new driver, but their "fix" still to this day still has some of the exploit vulnerabilities listed in the above article.

Some things have changed since that article was posted at least. Gameguard now works on XP64 and users accounts. While that doesn't remove many aspects of it's rootkit behavior, it does prevent the install of those pesky drivers and limit some of its' behavior.

This story made it onto Slashdot and at least one notable MMO, Terranova.

Despite the outcry and the press, no one seemed to understand or care.

And all too many people were more than happy to have this "protection" installed on their box in the hopes of stopping cheaters.

It to date has failed to acheive that end, but we still suffer with it's consquences.

Frankly I think people should get used to it. For all intents and purposes Punkbuster has just as many bad habits as Gameguard and Warden. People are willing to accept that cost though and the all mighty EULA strips you of any rights.

This kind of software will only become more prevalent in time. Get ready.

Bahaahaahhaha. Nice.

I've always hated Sony(s products), and I've always hated Blizzards Battle.net. For any of you who play Diablo 2 right now, will know what I'm on about. About how Blizzard treats EVERYONE as a potential bot.

This is just too much of a beautiful, beautiful piece of irony. I'm just going to be over here laughing while Blizzard and Sony's legal departments squirm.

So here's a theory and a question. Suppose Blizz shipped WoW, like it used to, sans bad-ware. Suppose you could also, optionally, from the WoW site, a program called "Orc-Buster" or some such. It's really just the Warden, and it's a hugely tentacled piece of spyware, but it serves to restrict your activities. As long as you've got "Orc-Buster" installed, you can play on "Orc-Free Servers". Orc-Buster dynamically allocates and updates itself about once every hour, with tiny tiny changes, re-requesting and re-veryifying things like MD5 hash, file size, number of called functions, et cetera, making it tough to easily alter and hide the fact that you changed it.

Would people do it? How many would? How many wouldn't?

To me, that seems like the optimal situation. Get the spyware you want, if you want, and otherwise, you don't get the benefit of it.

These same people use this program to then turn around and sell their ill gained loot to other players for $$$. Without something to try to stop this from happening, the game's economy is ruined and who gets screwed? The non cheating population.

I'd suggest you download a copy of OOG Walker.

http://www.tt2xz.com/down/

10.6.0 English Full.

Then tell me exactly how you're gonna stop the above mentioned fully complete 3rd party botting client with your 1st party client run rootkit when people have cracked your data stream to the point that the shipped client isn't even needed to bot?

These arguments would be entirely more interesting if there wasn't so much ignorance involved in them.

As LiamC points out, all these anti-cheat programs do is essentially compromise your security and privacy. They cannot and will not ever solve the underlying problem they were designed for.

The cure is worse than the disease.

I don't care about playing with other players I don't know, who may or may not be cheating. Being a console game should reduce the cheating, of course, until someone works out a way to run cheats from memory cards or whatever.

I'd far rather play with a group of friends, either via a private server (again, Blizzard messed up here) or by being able to connect to the central game servers (I don't care who runs them) and configure a private game.

Of course, MMORPGs aren't ideal for that situation, and to stop cheating (for the benefit of your other paying customers) you have to ensure that the player is actually playing, and it isn't a bot. I can't tell you how much I'd be put off playing a game (i.e., I'd stop) if I was playing normally and obvious cheaters were running rampage.

Where's the fun in cheating, the personal satisfaction? That's why in-game trading for real money isn't good, in my opinion.

Looks like I'm in a bit of a minority here, in as much as I don't really object to Blizzard's "Warden". Which is a component of the game, only running when the game's running. When the game's running, why on earth would you want to run other apps (especially the oft-cited ones that might have your credit card numbers in the titlebar - what the f**k are they?!) in the background anyway? Other than the 'background' stuff like an AV scanner, and possibly Firefox sitting at somewhere like curse-gaming.com if I've been updating addons, there's nothing there to see. And if it buggers up the cheating little so and sos - great. As for the "oh noes, Blizzard might get my credit card number" - they probably have it already, considering the game requires a subscription to play...

Sony's rootkit, on the other hand, is bloody ridiculous; it'll be interesting to see how many viruses try naming themselves $sys$whatever.exe in the next few months.

Ahahahahahahahah!! Woohoohoohoo!! HaaaHaaaHaaa!!

<wipes tears from eyes and struggles off the floor back into my chair>

You get a good percentage of people complaining, and not subscribing, and you can change policy.

Between ignorance, apathy, and those more than happy to sell themselves down the river the situation is easier said than done.

Your case at least involved a mechanism that everyone had to deal with. Programs like Warden are transparent.

I'm afraid I believe it's gonna take a bit more than the norm to incite change.

Blizzard I could care less about, I don't play online games anymore because of crap like this, but also because I don't get enjoyment out of playing with strangers as I do with friends and friends' boobies.

Heh. Know what you mean. I've given up on multiplayer FPS short of LAN parties. Mostly do co-op these days.

Noone is forcing you to play..

I really hate this logical fallacy. These programs are barely understood by the average IT geek, much less joe six. Even more aren't even aware they actually exist within the programs in question.

Who will stand up for these individuals?

The average geek will gladly demand for the opting out of spyware and malware like the Sony BMG rootkit.

Soon as you discuss cheating in a video game though.... All the sudden people take on a very weird double standard.

Saying don't play isn't the right answer. The right answer is for these companies to respect their customers privacy, security, and stability.

As when you get down to it: it is a video game. Why are we compromising tangible real life things to stop some wankers in digital world?

LoL @ Geoff Gasior:

Where are you with your "tinfoil hat" comments now?

LOL, this is outrageously funny :D

Wasn't BLizzard chastised for doing this a long time ago with Battle.net for Diablo?

That doesn't answer my quesiton, Tupuli.

And if makes you feel any better, I don't play WoW.

I should note though: I don't believe that choosing to not subscribe will in any way change these policies.

In Blizzard's case, it's more of a case of the game designers trying to prevent people from writing scripts that essentially let people play the game without even being on the computer - (they're that advanced - check out www.wowsharp.net) - which effectively ruins the balance of the game for people who don't use unattended macroing.

These same people use this program to then turn around and sell their ill gained loot to other players for $$$. Without something to try to stop this from happening, the game's economy is ruined and who gets screwed? The non cheating population.

AhHahhahAHhAHAHaHA ROFFLE.

Omg that put a smile on the dial.

We enter a time of calamity!

Why does everyone make a big frigging deal about someone looking for cheats as in the case of WoW? If you don't like it, go play another game.

Noone is forcing you to play.. if it keeps the majority of players in line then all the power to blizzard. They're in business to make money and keep the kids happy.. not to cater to some privacy freaks... it's not like they're taking control of your web cam or key logging your credit card info..

yeesh

Sony and Blizzard should both go to hell.

I wonder how many people have problems with blizzard spyware?

Makes me glad I dont play WoW.

DRM ftw.

Seriously, gfg.