Warcraft Bible

The battle between Blizzard Entertainment and un-official (unlicensed) developers of World of Warcraft after-market products such as game guides is heating up.

24-year-old entrepeneur Brian Kopp is suing the company for interfering with his auctions on eBay, where he was selling his “Ultimate World of Warcraft Leveling and Gold Guide.”

Brian started selling the Guide on eBay in August 2005. Blizzard lodged complaints with eBay, citing violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (a piece of crap legislation if there ever was one). eBay eventually sided with Blizzard, and terminated Brian’s auctions.

Brian’s legal action seeks monetary damages for lost sales of the Guide, which he continues to sell privately from his own web site.

I can see both sides of this situation. Blizzard needs to protect its copyright, while players and the World of Warcraft community need (and are entitled to) after-market products to improve their experience of the game.

In this case, and generally with regard to gameplay guides, I side with the guide writers and publishers. Blizzard is shooting itself in the foot by trying to shut down enthusiasts who work at developing a richer game culture.

As it happens, Brian Kopp’s guide was a good product, offering great value for World of Warcraft players serious about the game. But I’m sure Blizzard wasn’t making a quality judgment. Some months ago, Blizzard (or rather parent company Vivendi Universal) shut down Germany-based GuideFox, arguably the best quality publisher at the time of WoW class guides.

(note: one or two of the GuideFox guides have started showing up on the market again, at the new Guide Bazaar site… worth a look)

I don’t hold out much hope for Brian’s chances in this situation, but I wish him luck!

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Long queues to get through the World of Warcraft log-on process. WoW servers that suddenly go offline for hours at a time for “urgent maintenance.” Increased latency, general slow performance, and characters dying due to lag spikes.

It seems like the frustrations of server performance in World of Warcraft are not going away. In fact, many players feel that things have gotten worse since the latest 1.10 patch in March.

It doesn’t help that World of Warcraft’s rampaging success, with 6 million subscribers and still climbing fast, seems to outpace Blizzard’s ability to build a technical infrastructure that can scale seemlessly to handle the load.

Personally, I think Blizzard is doing a fairly OK job of keeping things on track, given the rampant success of WoW. But there is obviously room for improvement. Many players are seriously frustrated. Does Blizzard’s network provider AT&T suck? Is Blizzard skimping on hardware? Does the World of Warcraft code scale poorly? Who knows, Blizzard isn’t talking.

But with Blizzard more or less single-handedly maintaining the profitability of media giant and parent company Vivendi, there should be more than enough cash around to throw at server and network problems. 6 million World of Warcraft subscriptions at $10+ per month each… just a tiny percentage of the subscriber fees buys a LOT of performance.

Come on Blizzard, invest in your core technology, make the players happy. You can afford it!

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Leeeeeeeee-royyyyyyy !

The scourge of World of Warcraft players the world over.

Soon to be replaced by:

1) “minus 50 DKP”

or

2) “more DOTs!”

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