Blizzard breaks their own ToU

[RoBi3.0]

Unless Swifty is the CEO of Razer I doubt that his employment there had anything to do with the final decision. Razer makes a metric shit of money off off Blizzard. While Blizzard makes a lot of money from Razer they ultimately hold all the licenses to their IPs and I am sure it would not take long to find someone else willing to make qualiy Blizzard themed keyboards and mice etc... Severing ties over something like this stands to lose Razer way more money then Blizzard.

More likely the Swifty supporters had Blizzard by the balls. I know it sucks but what are they suppose to do.

All and all everyone should probably let it go. It is not worth getting your undies in a bunch. Maybe he got special treatment maybe he didn't. As long everyone minds their Ps and Qs and doesn't doing anything to get banned there is no reason to worry about who got special treatment or not.

 

[Xalmgrey]

To basically sum it up, a guy named "Swifty" who apparently works for Razer and makes some warrior videos for the game went on a server crashing spree with this buddies from the guild Dara Mactire from the Darkspear server. They managed to crash three servers before Swifty was banned under Blizzards own TOU.

Sounds simple so far right?

Swifty made a Youtube video with soap opera music to say he was banned.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-DFfBUA6vM

He claims server crashing wasn't his intention and that they were just trying to all have fun. Of course there's actually evidence to the contrary of his tear jerker video in the form of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtGZiG-Z_SM

His legion of followers then held Darkspear server hostage by crashing it en mass by spamming up to 30,000 emotes per person in major cities. The forums were a mess of thread after thread of "unban swifty"

Blizzard ended up caving to either Razer or the legion crashing the servers.

A good portion of the WoW community feels that he should not have gotten any special treatment in regards to getting unbanned as he and his guildies crashed not one but three servers before being stopped by his being banned. You can clearly hear them gloating over it in the second youtube video link. Bashiok one of the Blizzard CM's stated that the Razer CM contacted him via text "just as they were undoing the ban". Here is the forum where as we speak it's still a raging discussion:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2842767666?page=1


I don't know about you and me, but if any one of us WoW players without corporate backing managed to crash not one, not two but three servers we wouldn't be getting our accounts back. Favoritism has got to stop. I'm posting this here rather than in the one contained neatly Blizzard forum to see what the public at large thinks.

I think this falls within the olde "pick your battles".

1) You ain't going to win against blizzard.
2) User apathy will prevent you taking real action, those loud complainers wont stand up and be counted should the time come
and perhapse most importantly
3)it's a game, is it really worth all your time and effort to try and arrange something? Surely that time could be better spent in your real life?

I'm not arranging anything. It was pretty easy to setup and watch this thread. I'm not going to tell anyone they are right or wrong. I wanted to see public opinion outside the Blizzard field of control.

 

[cookyy2k]

snip

I'm not arranging anything. It was pretty easy to setup and watch this thread. I'm not going to tell anyone they are right or wrong. I wanted to see public opinion outside the Blizzard field of control.

Ah cool. Yeah it sucks and is special treatment, but as has already been said the guy had too much power for bizzard to make it permanant. Yeah this does mean certain people can do whatever they like and get away with it but I'm sure blizzard is no happier about this than anyone else.

I bet if a regular player took down 3 servers for any real amount of time, blizzard could prove pre-meditation and they could track that user in real life it wouldn't just be a ban but probably a loss of earnings and money spent repairing it all law suit.

It's annoying but people like that usually always push past what they can get away with and then it all comes down on them.

 

[Xalmgrey]

snip

I'm not arranging anything. It was pretty easy to setup and watch this thread. I'm not going to tell anyone they are right or wrong. I wanted to see public opinion outside the Blizzard field of control.

Ah cool. Yeah it sucks and is special treatment, but as has already been said the guy had too much power for bizzard to make it permanant. Yeah this does mean certain people can do whatever they like and get away with it but I'm sure blizzard is no happier about this than anyone else.

I bet if a regular player took down 3 servers for any real amount of time, blizzard could prove pre-meditation and they could track that user in real life it wouldn't just be a ban but probably a loss of earnings and money spent repairing it all law suit.

It's annoying but people like that usually always push past what they can get away with and then it all comes down on them.

Totally agree with you man. Regular Joe would most likely get sued pretty quick for disrupting game play which is the revenue for the game. I'm not one of those people that think this will change much at all really. But being informed never hurt anyone either right? If just one person thinks about what was said here when they go to purchase a blizzard product then really it has been a success of awareness.

 

[Sightless Wisdom]

Honestly, I think I'm with Blizzard on this one. If this guy is popular enough to have a bunch of people rally against his ban, a good chunk of the community must want him to stay. That's reason enough to bend the rules a little bit.

 

[Keanotix]

I work in a bookies (betting shop) and constantly have to put up with asshole customers getting away with damn near fraud in terms of breaking rules and terms and instead of banning them, the company would grovel and beg to keep them happy. This isnt all that different. Like suggested before, youre better going to the WoW forums or guild forums to get better support. I do agree that these asses need to remain banned, but just wishing for it will not work. Play them at their own game. Get picketing or boycotting with some groups, enough of you will maybe get Blizzard to reconsider.

 

[Vindictus]

It's not favouritism, it's logical.

They can easily ban a handful of people. They don't want to ban lots of people, even if they're crashing servers. It's more reasonable to simply unban the idiot and make the morons happy than it is to ban multitudes of people.

 

[evilneko]

Swifty organized and implemented a DDOS attack. I think that warrants jumping straight to perm-ban.

Every single one of his followers should also be permbanned.

And potentially prosecuted.

 

[Yopaz]

Did people not say he helps many new players and helped bring in a lot of new players so if it wasn't his intention to crash the server then it's alright to unban him.

Plus they made the ToU, they can do whatever they want.

So it wasn't this intention to crash the server. Then he moved on did exactly the same thing and caused another server to crash. A smart person would now see the pattern and stop doing what caused 2 servers to crash. Then he moves on and crashes a third. He may claim he didn't intend to, but even the dumbest person on earth learns that if fire burns you don't touch it. So either he's lying about his own intentions or he's just stupid.

Also Blizzard can do whatever they do since they made the rules? Now let's pull this out of proportions and say if a man were to kill someone. Should he get off the hook because an organization that supports the government on a huge scale backs him up?

Why is everyone so quick to assume he did it on purpose? WoW is his thing and he makes a living playing it. It doesn't sound like his type of thing to purposely crash the server

Because he's a repeated offender, not one accidental slip.

OT: I think he should have been banned and they should have kept it that way. Still Razer and Blizzard are too important to each other, but Razer is the one that could move on with the least financial loss so I understand the decision.

 

[MysticToast]

Why is everyone so quick to assume he did it on purpose? WoW is his thing and he makes a living playing it. It doesn't sound like his type of thing to purposely crash the server

Because he's a repeated offender, not one accidental slip.

The second crash wasn't done by him. It was done by his followers who believed he was unjustly banned. Do we have evidence he actually organized two server crashes?