Blizzard Sues Alleged Hackers, Then Drops Charges
- Thread starter Austin MacKenzie
- Start date
Yea, honestly, I think the Starcrack group are doing Blizzard a favour. So many people are now hooked on playing with the meager AI they can't wait for SC2 to get released to play full version. Starcrack is like a demo Blizzard never released, and it will cause a lot of people to buy the actual game, including some I know.
Hmmm, well there are a lot of potential reasons ranging from intimidation, to the hackers backing down, to a lack of evidence as people have pointed out.
Strictly speaking given the lack of information about the situation I'd tend to believe that whatever the reason is, is not beneficial to Blizzard. If they cut a deal or hired them or something you'd probably see some evidence of it. On the other hand if they accused the wrong people or were unable to prove anything, they probably wouldn't admit to that. Ditto if the group had enough anonymous members of sufficient skill to tell Blizzard that if they continued they'd totally wreck Blizzard's online infrastructure and cost them millions upon millions of dollars for the sake of sending one guy to jail (allegedly such things have happened).
Oh yes, and of course the most likely alternative that there is some kind of legal loophole in play used by a defense lawyer. Strictly speaking there is a lot of pro-user legislation in place. If they played the defense right, things like the EULA are actually relatively powerless since they fall under various "fine print' laws (or they did years ago), where basically anything that is to be legally binding has to be relatively short, consise, and easily understood by the everyman. Things like referring to other documents, using asterixs, and similar things can actually reduce the strength of a document if your lawyer knows what they are doing. Basically TL
R can be used (or could have been used) as a legal defense. What's more things like EULAs also fail to have a lot of power because they are only presented AFTER you make a purchuse, as opposed to being printed clearly and consisely on
the package.
The bottom line is, we'll probably never know. It's probably something fairly straightforward though.
Strictly speaking given the lack of information about the situation I'd tend to believe that whatever the reason is, is not beneficial to Blizzard. If they cut a deal or hired them or something you'd probably see some evidence of it. On the other hand if they accused the wrong people or were unable to prove anything, they probably wouldn't admit to that. Ditto if the group had enough anonymous members of sufficient skill to tell Blizzard that if they continued they'd totally wreck Blizzard's online infrastructure and cost them millions upon millions of dollars for the sake of sending one guy to jail (allegedly such things have happened).
Oh yes, and of course the most likely alternative that there is some kind of legal loophole in play used by a defense lawyer. Strictly speaking there is a lot of pro-user legislation in place. If they played the defense right, things like the EULA are actually relatively powerless since they fall under various "fine print' laws (or they did years ago), where basically anything that is to be legally binding has to be relatively short, consise, and easily understood by the everyman. Things like referring to other documents, using asterixs, and similar things can actually reduce the strength of a document if your lawyer knows what they are doing. Basically TL
R can be used (or could have been used) as a legal defense. What's more things like EULAs also fail to have a lot of power because they are only presented AFTER you make a purchuse, as opposed to being printed clearly and consisely onthe package.
The bottom line is, we'll probably never know. It's probably something fairly straightforward though.
As far as i know the only crack for the sc2 beta let's you play skirmish on a limited number of maps against a very sub-par AI. I've haven't had the luck of getting invited to the beta so I had to check it out. Still can't see how they would lose money on it? I mean if you're desperate enough to play SC2 skirmish against useless AIs to get your fix then you're certainly gonna buy the game when it releases. I know I will.
Couple of possibilities...
They really weren't hacking it and were lying to show off.
Blizzard got the wrong guys (physically).
The guys cooperated with Blizzard to tighten up the code.
They really weren't hacking it and were lying to show off.
Blizzard got the wrong guys (physically).
The guys cooperated with Blizzard to tighten up the code.
Completely unlikely. Very few people have the cash and assets to take that would even make a court case even practical.Starke said:
I was talking to a buddy of mine about this the other day (mainly because he brought it up) because he was stoked that he finally figured out why usmc23 disapppeared, and according to him, the lawsuit was never intended to go through, just get him out of the StarCrack loop