Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Cheats, Blizzard, News items

In Blizzard’s attempts to get rid of gold farmers and hackers, one of their most annoyingly persistent enemies has been the WoWGlider bot, now known as MMOGlider. They’ve been throwing suits and countersuits at each other for a few years now, but the latest salvo seems to have gone against Blizzard, the Game Activist reports. Blizzard was trying to subpoena Joe Thaler, owner of Lavish Software LLC, maker of programs such as EQPlayNice. While Lavish Software’s programs do not seem to be cheat programs on their own, they did build a deal with MDY Industries, maker of MMOGlider, to use the programs within MMOGlider.

According the judge’s decision, Blizzard was hoping to obtain all documentation related to the deal, all communication within Thaler and Lavish and MDY and its owner, Michael Donnelly. They additionally wanted a list of all WoW accounts owned by Thaler and Lavish, as well as the contents of the WTF folders of every installation of WOW used by Thaler and Lavish Entertainment. Unfortunately, the Judge ruled that Blizzard was demanding info that could compromise Lavish’s trade secrets and client confidentiality, and that the demand for the data within 9 days did not give Thaler and Lavish ample instance to reply an gather data.

It’s worth noting that the judge did specifically say that Blizzard could file another subpoena that would be more narrow in scope and allow more duration for Lavish and Mr. Thaler to reply, so that is probably not a fatal blow to Blizzard by any means. I personally hope not. I’ve never had much patience for bots, or folks who feel they have a civil right to cheat at games, so I’m rooting for the big poor corporation on that one. What about you?

Thanks for the link, Tyrsenus.

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Original post by Daniel Whitcomb