Doesn’t really matter what the country is. They were uploaded to YouTube or Amazon, which means they’re responsible under US copyright law. That means fair use applies.
The law applies the same in a civil suit as in a criminal suit. The only difference is that a criminal suit is filed on behalf of the state, usually because of police action, whereas a civil suit is filed by another private entity. Whether the action done by the defendant is illegal or not is governed by the same laws regardless.
And yes, it’s true that some game makers have make quite a bit of a fuss about transformative works on their games, such as Nintendo. This has generally been to their detriment. YouTube probably could have fought this, but decided not to because it would expose them to unnecesary risks, so they just folded. Wasn’t really their problem anyway.
Modding is not a right gamers have. It is an option that is either given, permitted or not permitted. Blizzard could make the most amazing models this game has seen and people would still use modders to change them, because not everyone is appeased by the same things. I agree more customisation would be good and more model updates, but it is not the right of the player to feel they can just poke about a game’s code how they please.
I agree heavily with this, It rarely feel like an “should” lately. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The game literally doesn’t require/force you to engage in social interactions with other players until Mechatoque HC. Which feels very bad for an MMORPG, I’m effectively playing a single-player game below that point of difficulty. I don’t need anything what so ever from other players, and they need nothing from me. Players have NO reason to interact, beside High keys, pvp, raiding( from Mechatorque and above). People even act bot-like, it’s all instant invites “123 please” instant leave without any additional communication at all, I’m starting to wonder how many “people” are actual serversided AI’s
The game have been streamlined and turned convenient into oblivion, and boring as hell, unless you have a guild or another group you do end-game-content with regularly,.
This exactly.
It should have given a ban regardless.
The problem for Blizzard is that it was commonly used among people “favored” by Blizzard, meaning a lot of content creator and other high profiles, that would lose acces to their main accounts for good.
-Which is surely part of the reasons it was reduced to a warning.
I don’t see how that is fair to the rest of the player-base, “ordinary people” if you will. These content-creators have not only used it but also openly showcased and you might even say promoted the cheating as well. This should all add up to the severity of the ban!
-Had it only been “ordinary” people and not high profiles, they would’ve gotten perma without reverse.
Those who was lucky enough to get revoked wiithout being part of that “favoured group”, was simply just unbanned because “favored” people did. So Blizzard decided to eat a bullet on that one, as it would otherwise make exactly this VERY apparent.
-Those content creator and high profiles make enough money and knew the risks, like the rest of us, they can buy new accounts like anyone else banned in the past!
I’m personally not gonna play a game with unfavorable odds like that to the majority of the playerbase, leaving a few “special snowflakes” to do whatever they want and being able to impact the ban itself by getting it reversed to a warning. -Take real-world celebrities when they are breaking the law, they get BIGGER fines than everybody else not smaller fines.
A lot of those who don’t care, or think it’s okay with an warning, think it’s addons or that it wasn’t that serious a security-breach at all. Fact is, they couldn’t be more dead-wrong.
It’s like there are 3 words that scare blizzard. Content-creator, influencer and RP’er.
4 months ago - “Hi Blizzard, I’m any given ordinary player. I broke the rules, can I have my account back?”
Blizzard: “lol, no. You have no rights, you cheated!”
-With a bit of luck, depending on the severity, a perma might’ve been reduced to 6-months.
Today - “Hi blizzard, We are a very widely known wow-celebrities. We broke the rules, can we please have our accounts back?”
Blizzard: “Yes, but then we have to unban EVERYONE else that also did the same thing. Just to make sure it doesn’t look suspicious at all that we, actually for once in our company’s life-time, go back on ban. You got a deal!”
Sorry Blizzard, you don’t even try to hide it. I’m done playing and paying for it, when stuff like this happens.
Why cant there simply be a legal way of doing this. No one else can see your “showing off” mount or other unobtainable item but at least you can see it. Why is that such a massive crime. You are playing the game how you want and other people dont even see it. Why cant my night elf hunter look like a blood elf and have Rhok delar bow that only I see.
The correct answer here would have been introducing mod support for texture packs, so those who want to texture mod have a proper way of doing it, instead of forcing them to break the client up.
Even worst case scenario blizz should at least consider paying some of these people for their creations and implement them. Blizz lately cant give two ****s about creating stuff anyway, so i really dont see why they wouldnt take the help of those willing then.
Other than being the blind-deaf-mute idiot of the gaming industry ofc who had their actual creators replaced with CEOs and 700 different types of air heads who cant do a damn thing with the game other than stagnating it to death.
You are right. They can be banned.
And you are also completely wrong cause this is not an argument still.
All of you ban favoring children are falling back to an argument of authority and fail to draw correlation to the fact that this is a victimless crime.
Cause what is your argument here?
No, do go on. Think this through carefully.
Want help? Here:
“Its true that what you did literally had no connection to the gameplay, that you basically applied a texture pack and a UI change, but i want to ban you on principle”
This is what power tripping looks like btw. Without regard to context, damage or the existence of a victim, you just want to exercise your bs over other based on absolutely nothing other than your fetish of doing so.
And this is where you lost your connection with reality and any form of rational argument. Remind me… how do you consider draenei boob size changes and worgen tail additions a cheat…?
No hacks, no cheating, no nothing has been committed that would influence the game. This is literally confirmed by blizzard.
“Many of the suspensions issued were for 180 days, as the exploit we detected allows for very malicious activities such as gameplay automation or rotation/interrupt botting. Upon further review, we found that some suspended accounts appeared to be only using the detected exploit to do client-side character model alteration.”
Blizzard confirmed that the people, who used it for models and those for malicious activities, both abused the same exploit. -But for different purpose, with different software.
They cheated to avoid something they didn’t like, roations or models, by luck or skill.
I didn’t use it, so what do I know.
-But what you’re writing, is outright wrong.
It just happens that client-side character model alteration does absolutely nothing to the game other than making things appear differently on your screen. So no.
You can keep on arguing that (since its unsupported) the only method to do this is via cracking the client open, but nothing will change the fact that this remains something that does no damage, exploits nothing, creates no victim and hands you no advantages.
As you yourself point out:
You are arguing that a knife can be used as a weapon and so we should charge people for the possession of it, even if they had done nothing with it other than eat a meal at the dinner table.
Yes. Modifying the client can be used to do exploits. Correct.
But as everyone pointed out including yourself and blizzard: THATS NOT WHAT THEY USED IT FOR.
We keep on repeating the same argument.
Yes. They violated the ToS.
No. They didnt do any damage, exploited nothing, created no victims and had no advantages over anybody else. This is a non-crime.
The solution is to make people able to do texture packs without having to mod the client for it.
Basically support. Blizzard needs to give support for this feature.
And we are done cause we already established that only the means are problematic. Not the act itself.
Blizzard should enable an online platform where we could share visual mods. We wouldn’t meddle with files, there’d be a Download and Install button that would do the installation process automatically for you.
Something like The Sims have, where you can share and download characters and houses, and the installation process is automated.
Any modding outside that platform would still be considered a violation, risking a ban or suspension.
Now look at this from Blizzard’s point of view, why would they create a platform to do so?
Makes them responsible for it (providing support), having to maintain and test it at every patch… and most importantly for a business pov; why use a paid race-change if you can just mod your troll to become belf?
For the same reason they did so with mods.
Cause it increases player satisfaction, gives ppl something to do, overall allowing longer sub times, better experiences.
False. Do you think they do that for all mods that are being made for wow?
No they dont. Its on the modder to do so.
If their mod works, its accepted and used. If it doesnt work, then its thrown away.
Where did you get the idea that blizzard is responsible for mods or that they have to test them?
Cause its only a belf on your screen. For one.
Cause the game will still handle you as a troll. Cause of racials. Etc.
But even if you restrict characted conversion, there is still the argument of chracter enhancement, armors, mounts, items, etc.
It’s not a crime, but letting the players mod the client is a big risk for any online game, because not everything is handled on the server. For example collision detection. Also very often character movement is almost entirely done on the client, with some rough checks once in a while done by the server.
So any change to the client could be used by the players to cheat. And no, changing the models or the textures is not safe, because it could be used to cause a buffer overflow and execute arbitrary code when decompressed. See for example https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2004-0200/, which was a jpeg decoder vulnerability in the windows GDI+, which was used with special pictures sent by email or on a web page to get privileged access to a machine.
“Invisible transmog”. Normal transmog is legal in the game. Why cant there be an invisible version. No changing game files, no cheating, no scamming just a pretty item for only your eyes to see. Done!
![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")