Unfair ban?

Apparently there's some commotion about someone named Lamaagetting banned by Blizzard for botting. Many people have risen to his defense, but I'd hold judgment for now. There's not that much evidence around.

A part of the problem is that the ban was a part of the latest wave of mass bans, so Blizzard's going to be swamped by complaints from both the innocent and the guilty. Lamaa says he's innocent. But both the truly innocent and the guilty would say that. People say that Lamaa would never do such a thing. I don't know Lamaa, these people or their motives, so that means little to me. From personal experience I do know that even people you like and trust can disappoint you. Blizzard does have an appeals process, but whatever department at Blizzard that's handling account suspensions and bans is going to be very busy for the foreseeable future, no matter how much hell Lamaa's blogging friends raise.

There's also been talks about fraud, since Lamaa did pay for a subscription, which he cannot use now. I don't think that appealing to fraud is going to help much. Blizzard can terminate the account at any time:

BLIZZARD MAY SUSPEND, TERMINATE, MODIFY, OR DELETE THE ACCOUNT AT ANY TIME WITH ANY REASON OR NO REASON, WITH OR WITHOUT NOTICE. For purposes of explanation and not limitation, most account suspensions, terminations and/or deletions are the result of violations of this Terms of Use or the EULA.

If Lamaa agreed to the Terms of Use, he also agreed to that part which says that Blizzard is not required to explain it's actions. End of story.

Well.. not quite. Maybe we should go through one hypothetical scenario: That he did purchase Glider, but didn't use it to powerlevel or farm gold. If he bought it, he probably installed it and started it as well. If Glider was running while WoW was running, Warden would have detected it, because it scans the process list. And as far as Blizzard is concerned, that's enough evidence to ban him:

WHEN RUNNING, THE PROGRAM MAY MONITOR YOUR COMPUTER'S RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY (RAM) AND/OR CPU PROCESSES FOR UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAMS RUNNING CONCURRENTLY WITH WORLD OF WARCRAFT. AN "UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM" AS USED HEREIN SHALL BE DEFINED AS ANY THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY "ADDON" OR "MOD," THAT IN BLIZZARD'S SOLE DETERMINATION: (i) ENABLES OR FACILITATES CHEATING OF ANY TYPE; (ii) ALLOWS USERS TO MODIFY OR HACK THE WORLD OF WARCRAFT INTERFACE, ENVIRONMENT, AND/OR EXPERIENCE IN ANY WAY NOT EXPRESSLY AUTHORIZED BY BLIZZARD; OR (iii) INTERCEPTS, "MINES," OR OTHERWISE COLLECTS INFORMATION FROM OR THROUGH THE PROGRAM. IN THE EVENT THAT THE PROGRAM DETECTS AN UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM, BLIZZARD MAY (a) COMMUNICATE INFORMATION BACK TO BLIZZARD, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION YOUR ACCOUNT NAME, DETAILS ABOUT THE UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM DETECTED, AND THE TIME AND DATE THE UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM WAS DETECTED; AND/OR (b) EXERCISE ANY OR ALL OF ITS RIGHTS UNDER SECTION 6 OF THIS AGREEMENT, WITH OR WITHOUT PRIOR NOTICE TO THE USER.

It doesn't matter whether he actually used it to powerlevel or farm gold. If he did have Glider running at the same time as WoW, then he did break the terms of use and deserved to be banned. But as I said in the beginning, there's not enough evidence to make that call right now.

The moral of the story? Read those Terms of Use and End User License Agreements. They're not there just for show.

Negative synergies

While browsing the WotLK alpha wiki I spotted these two talents:

Burnout - Increases your spell critical damage bonus with all Fire spells by 5/10/15/20/25% but every time you critical with a Fire spell you lose an additional ?[internal entry blank]% of your total mana.

Hot Streak - Any time you cause 3 spell criticals in a row you have a 33%/66%/100% chance the next spell will gain 100% increased chance to score a critical hit.

So, if you crit you'll burn a percentage of your mana, and if you happen to chaincrit you crit some more. Hopefully Hot Streak has an internal cooldown or a counter that resets whenever it activates. But even then the "synergy" between these two talents can be devastating to the sustained damage of fire mages. Assuming you don't overaggro first, that is.

Betting on Failure Cascades

Tobold's been talking about how Age of Conan and Warhammer have been busy imitating World of Warcraft. He thinks that the developers are shooting themselves in the foot by providing a too similar experience to WoW. He's probably right, since the network effect is currently working in WoW's favor. However, there may be more to it than meets the eye. I think that FunCom and Mythic are betting that Wrath of the Lich King flops.

People do play WoW because their friends/family/coworkers play it. Breaking the network effect is hard, but it's not impossible. At some level, Blizzard does realize this. The old model was to funnel the whole player base towards high-end raid content. Homogenizing the player base is not unlike putting all your eggs in one basket. If you make old PvE content obsolete and your new PvE content is a major disappointment, your risk alienating a large percentage of your player base. If there's a viable alternative available that's praised by early adopters, the network effect could remanifest as a failure cascade, where the exodus grows exponentially. WoW doomsayers have been summoning this exodus for quite some time now, but so far it has not reached critical mass. This is why Blizzard has been promoting PvP more and more, because this reduces the overall risk. If your PvErs jump ship, the PvPers could stay put.

If AoC or WAR were only seen as good PvP games, many disillusioned WoW PvErs would not see them as viable alternatives. But if they provide incentives in the form of decent PvE games, they could attract both PvErs and PvPers and thus increase the chance that WotLK's failure cascade would direct all of those potential customers to them.

It's a risky bet, though. Like Tobold points out, there is a real danger that AoC and WAR will be simply seen as cheap copies of WoW. And even if Tycho threatens to sing if people point that out, it's still a valid point.

The pre-WotLK wait is here

My guild's been stuck on Kalecgos for a few weeks, so our raid leader called for a two-week raid break. Considering that I've been playing more EvE than WoW (even during raids), I welcomed the break.

Now with about a week and a half through the break, the 25-man raid announcements have started popping up on WoW Raidar once again. However, there's only 8 signups. With Age of Conan out soon and WotLK probably due to be released around Christmas, many people seem to be in the wait-and-see mode. Still, I'm getting a deja vu. I had two guilds pre-TBC that stopped raiding after a few wipes on Razuvious. That time I could get a few upgrades from PvP that were good for PvE, but that isn't the case here. If I'll never enter Sunwell again, I have almost as good gear as I can get. If history does repeat itself, there's no reasons left for me to resume my subscription until WotLK.

So.. I will wait and see.