In posts here and here, Xeni Jardin and Cory Doctorow at Boing! Boing! accuse Blizzard of installing spyware on their customers’ computers and then using “a bunch of PR spin” to justify said spyware. For once, I could not disagree more — if this spyware did not exist, I probably would not be playing World of Warcraft (hmmm…maybe I could get my life back then, and that would not be such a bad thing).

This particular dustup started with Bruce Schneier and Annalee Newitz complaining about a program called Warden that Blizzard runs in the background while a player is online in World of Warcraft. Warden pretty much rummages through your computer and looks at every single process that is running the same time as WoW. It then sends a hash of the process back to servers at Blizzard that compare the hash to known cheat programs. Get caught running a cheat program, and you can look forward to an account ban.

Schneier’s post was the most disappointing, as he has in the past generally talked intelligently about security issues and the need to balance competing interests of security and freedom. Here, though, he’s simply in all out paranoia mode. First, the source he relies on is an article by a programmer who has spent a lot of time trying to create cheats for World of Warcraft and, so far, been frustrated by Blizzard’s proactive approach to detecting and banning cheats. No, this does not invalidate the security concerns, but Schneier could have pointed out the self-serving nature of the summary he posted (I can’t imagine Schneier would let an essay by a Bush administration official on the Patriot act slip by as if it were merely disinterested commentary).

Second, Scheniers’ entire objection to Blizzard’s use of software like Warden is that some other company might abuse such technology,

Several commenters say that this is no big deal. I think that a program that does all of this without the knowledge or consent of the user is a big deal. This is a program designed to spy on the user and report back to Blizzard. It’s pretty benign, but the next company who does this may be less so. It definitely counts as spyware.

This known as the fallacy of the slippery slope. Blizzard’s actions should be judged not on how some hypothetical future company might act, but rather how Blizzard is acting now.

As Schneier concedes, Blizzard is pretty benign. Simply creating a hash for all running processes and running those against a database of hashes of known cheats is a good example of only collecting the very minimum of data needed to prevent cheating. The only area I think Blizzard does deserve criticism is for not making it more explicit that they are doing this. A short, plain English explanation of the process would more than allay all but the most paranoid of users.

In comparison to Schneier’s piece, Newitz’s article is laughable. She writes,

Whoa. That’s taking the anticheating spirit a little too far. I can see booting people out of the game if they’re repeat cheaters, particularly if they’re flushing other players off the servers and ruining the experience for paying customers. But snooping through the computers of innocent gamers looking for the bad apples who have installed a map hack? Give me a break.

Okay, I’m paying $15/month to play this game. If you wait until it is obvious that a player is cheating to boot him, I’ve already quit the game in disgust by that time. Blizzard simply cannot wait until after cheaters have ruined the experience for paying customers, or they won’t have any paying customers. People were pissed off at cheaters on Battle.Net which was free. My wife spends enough time getting ganked by Horde — if she has to worry that she doesn’t even have a chance because they’re using a cheat program, she’d probably go back to Sims 2 and Civ 2.

The thing that really pisses me off is that this is all being done in the name of having fun and playing games. I’m supposed to give up my Fourth Amendment rights in order to ax a bunch of warriors controlled by teenagers in Milwaukee? No thanks. I’d rather go back to playing Dungeons and Dragons, where at least I could roll the dice without the DM reading all my fucking e-mail. Breaking the rules isn’t nice, but this is a game, people — a game! It’s not a matter of national security; nobody is going to get killed except the stupid video game avatars. Do you realize the government would have to have a warrant to get the kind of information Blizzard claims it has the right to suck out of your computer to stop cheaters? Doesn’t that seem a wee bit wrong?

No, it does not seem wrong at all. First, we regularly give up rights in private settings that the government would never be able to force up on us. I visit a local newspaper and magazine store that has a very strict policy requiring patrons to turn off cell phones. Every time I enter the store, I turn off my cell phone. You realize that this is something that the government would have to get a court order to do, don’t you? Doesn’t that seem wrong to just browse a bunch of magazines?

But even this silly analogy is based on a lie. Blizzard is not reading or collecting any e-mail or other person content. It creates a hash of your e-mail program, if you have one open, and transmits that back to its servers. Blizzard is quite clear that Warden does not collect or transmit the sort of information Newitz claims it does. Presumably she chooses to prevaricate on this issue in order to dramatize the horrors of having her Fourth Amendment rights violated.

Source:

A Bugged Game. Annalee Newitz, Alternet, October 4, 2005.

Blizzard Entertainment Uses Spyware to Verify EULA Compliance. Bruce Schneier, October 13, 2005.

Last year I mentioned my obsession with E-Bay I cut short and haven’t been back to E-Bay for a real auction in more than a year (I do occasionally buy some office stuff from a vendor who uses E-Bay to offer goods at a discount, but I’m strictly a “Buy It Now” guy).

Unfortunately, now my life has become dominated by virtual auctions within World of Warcraft. There’s been quite a bit of press about virtual economies in these MMORPGs, especially when they spill over into the real world such as the people selling their uber WoW characters on Ebay for hundreds of dollars. And, of course, there are a number of services where I could go to buy gold or items for use in the game. Of course, if you get caught buying or selling items, Blizzard will ban your account, plus I prefer to find ways to tweak the game within the in-game parameters. Going outside to E-Bay or some other service is akin to using a trainer program — not something I’ve ever found interesting.

No, it is the in-game trade in items that is my current obsession. World of Warcraft has a fairly interesting economic model which attempts to balance things by setting a time limit on how quickly one can acquire money and items. So, as with most action-style RPGs, the better an item is the less likely it is to drop from a beast or monster, beasts and monsters don’t drop very much money relative to how much time and additional resources it takes to kill them (you won’t get rich farming monsters), and other methods of making money, such as mining for various metals, only respawn at given intervals, so you might find a vein of gold and mine it, but it disappears and then respawns later with the time it takes to respawn based on how valuable the resource is.

But WoW has an additional way of making money and procuring items — Auction Houses. There are three Auction Houses, one each in a Horde and Alliance town and one in a neutral town that both factions can use. The Auction House works like an Internet auction house. You take your item and set a minimum bid, a buyout price if you like, and the length of the auction (the minimum is 30 minutes, the longest is 24 hours). Players find items by searching for what they’re looking for, and the search is pretty granular so I can look for swords that are only of a specific level range and only with a certain set of magical enhancements. I’m not sure how many individual items there are in WoW, but it is clearly in the thousands.

Because it is a simulated economy and not a real one, many (most?) players do not have a good idea of how much a given item is actually worth. If I someone says how much would you sell a brand new SUV for, I may not be a car salesman but I could give someone a decent range. How much should a Level 25 Sword of the Monkey go for? I have no idea, since there are so many items I have no intuitions or experiences with how much most items should go for. My knowledge about pricing is limited to an extremely small subset of items. As a result, the pricing of items is all over the place. You might look at the listings of people selling the same item, and the minimum price might range from 9 silver (very low price) to 2 gold (very high). There are clearly lots of opportunities for arbitrage in that situation, if a player can get a handle on what the market value of the item really is.

Enter Auctioneer. Auctioneer is an add-on to WoW produced by some enthusiasts. What Auctioneer does is add a “Scan” button to the Auction House interface that methodically goes through each auction posted and writes information about the item, the minimum bid, buyout, and current bid price to a database. Perform such scans frequently, and the result is a much higher level of information about the market for goods in WoW than most players have.

This is viewable in game through an enhanced tool tip. I can arrow over any item in my inventory and see, say, that in all of the scans I’ve performed there have been 300 auctions, the average minimum bid was 50 silver, the average buyout was 2 gold, the average bid was 60 silver, and the best estimate of the market value of the item is 1 gold, 80 silver. When I’m ready to sell an item, Auctioneer will suggest a price based on both historical data and the most recent scan that just undercuts the competition. The result is that I’ve gone from selling about 95 percent of my auctions compared to maybe 35-40 percent before using the add on.

If that’s all Auctioneer did it would be indispensable, but it also has a feature that is almost unfair to those who do not install it. It has a number of command line parameters that make it trivial to identify arbitrate opportunities. Run a scan and then run Auctioneer’s bidbroker command. It will then display all auctions in the most recent scan where the minimum bid of the item is 50 silver less than the market price for the item. Buy those items, sell them at market price and count the money.

I was doing pretty good at the auction house before using Auctioneer — after a day of questing and farming I’d make maybe 5-6 gold a day. This Saturday, I made 25 gold just in buying and reselling items at the auction house. As I joked to my wife, I decided to stop playing WoW and start playing Auctioneer. Auctioneer essentially turned the game from an RPG to a trade sim for me.