Blizzard Take Another Legal Crack At Cheat Makers
Round... six? seven?
I miss the days when cheats for multiplayer games were quaint little things which didn't quite work - wallhacks which turned levels into confusing glass mazes, aimbots which mostly missed unless you had a really low ping. I almost felt sorry for people using them. Now cheats are everywhere, they're horrible, and they're difficult to stop. Blizzard are going straight to the source, recently filing a lawsuit against a company who make and sell hacks for WoW, Hearthstone, Diablo III, Heroes of the Storm, and, most recently, Overwatch [official site]. Well, they're going after them again.
Blizzard have filed suit against the German company Bossland, who create cheats for Blizzard's games - among others - and sell them as subscription services. For example, 12,95€ (£11) would get you one month's access to an Overwatch hack revealing enemy positions on a radar and showing their health bars and so on. They also sell bots for farming in Diablo III, grinding in WoW for Battleground honour points, and so on. Blizzard, unsurprisingly, are none too pleased about all this. They're accusing Bossland of various forms of copyright infringement, "unlawful reverse engineering", harming them by causing frustrated players to stop playing, and so on.
"By Blizzard's estimation, such damage is in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars," the filing says. Lawks!
This isn't Blizzard's first crack at Bossland, mind. They've been scrapping since 2011 over various bots and hacks, often not going nearly as well as Blizzard might have hoped. Bossland are even keeping score. So far they've fought in German courts - where several cases are still ongoing - but this time Blizzard are trying in California.
Blizzard claim that Bossland sell their services to people in the USA and California, use servers and content delivery networks there, contract with banks and domain registrars there, and so on, so the matter falls within the jurisdiction of Blizzard's home courts. They must be hoping for a favourable do-over there.
Bossland's reply declares that trying in California indicates Blizzard are "devastated, clutching at any straw".
Thank TorrentFreak for pointing this out and sharing the filing.