Zynga goes after hobbyist bot programmers

I wasn't sure this was at all newsworthy. Turns out the "newsworthy" part is that they're claiming copyright infringement by a greasemonkey script that plays the game for you automatically.

They got what they wanted because the script creators don't have the resources to fight in court so basically this is a clear-cut case of legal bullying. The claims would not have stood up in court but it would've been expensive to go through the process so the bigger bankroll wins.

We had to do some stuff to stop people from scripting our game recently. We didn't go the legal route, we just wrote some stuff to figure out who was doing it and suspended them.

It's a big deal because it messes up your in-game economy by devaluing the currency. Someone using a script will have a massive advantage over someone not using it. They'll have no reason to ever spend money, and they'll make it so that players not using a script feel they can't compete and thus make them not spend money too.

In our game, it's more of the competitive aspect. We have a system wherein people can get a whole fleet that they spent months (or years, once our game is that old) building. It could be wiped out by another guy in an hour if they make a mistake. If the other guy is playing by the same set of rules than them, it sucks but at least it's fair. If he used a bot to build a much larger fleet to enable him to do so, the customer won't be as understanding.

Looking at the script source, screenshots of the script in use and screenshots of MW itself, it looks like the script embeds a number of MW icons as data urls. These icons are the IP of Zynga and likely the basis of their copyright claim. I bet the C&D they sent didn't actually say that - they just used it to scare off the script writers and it worked.

I saw the title and actually thought it meant Zynga was going to be making games for hobbyist bot programmers. Talk about a let down upon reading.

From the "cheating mafia games" department: I wrote a proxy server that would allow you to cheat at an iPhone variant of mafia wars. I watched its packets and saw some holes in the normally pretty solid OAuth communication it used with their servers. I never published the trick because it really made the game even more unfun than it was. Cheating is pretty rampant in games like this, but I don't know how anyone can enjoy doing it because there's really no fun in any game where the rules are meaningless.

If you're designing games, be sure you try really hard not to rely on the client for important game information, or put in other checks and balances to help catch lies and exaggerations coming over the wire.

From the "when I was a kid" department: The first "software" I ever sold were scripts to automatically play BBS games like TradeWars. I'm glad that companies weren't flexing their legal muscles quite so much back then about auto-game-playing or it might have turned me off to doing software in the first place.

> I don't quite understand why this is a big deal (admittedly, I don't play the game, but I don't see how this is different than if a player sat there and played repetitively themselves)

Maybe it's the fact that a person playing the game can't compete with an automated script whose sole purpose is to win the game and be better than a human player? I'd have very little interest in competing against other robots.

For one thing, the script's name is "Mafia Wars Auto Play". I presume Zynga has a trademark on the term Mafia Wars, and would argue that the script's name implies a non-existent relationship between the two companies.

When Blizzard went after Glider, they claimed copyright, too. It was because Glider loaded the game itself to keep the WoW game client from detecting that Glider was reading and writing to its memory. Loading a copy of an application into memory on your own computer without the vendor's approval is now a copyright violation in court.

I'm not siding with Zynga but there seems to be some precedent here

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/07/popular-wow-autom...