As I said in other messages on the topic, I like the idea of this, but in the end it's a lot or ruckus about nothing. In the end suing people who don't have any money worth note is not going to accomplish anything. To make a differance in this case they would have to make a criminal case, convince the goverment to prosecute it (and probably extradite these guys) and send them to jail.
Telling Jim Bob that he now owes some company 88 million dollars is kind of pointless if he doesn't have that money, since right now there aren't any debtors prisons in the US, the only time failure to pay something like this becomes a crime is if the person has the money they aren't giving up, or if they are viewed as not making a reasonable effort to pay back the money given their condition. Sueing a poor person can result in a company getting like $5 a month out of their social security or whatever as that is reasonable based on their destitute nature and abillity to pay.
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As far as not supporting Activision/Blizzard goes, I'll say that I agree with the general sentiments, but not over this. If you want to oppose their policies and practices though you have to not buy their upcoming products like "Black Ops" and "Cataclysm" to really make a differance.
One of the reasons people talk about game addiction, and I use analogies to junkies in talking about the behavior of the game community even if I don't believe in actual game addiction, is because in the end we gamers will buy the product no matter how we're treated. Activision is the devil, right up until "Black Ops" is on the shelves and all the FPS junkies run right out and buy it because all their friends will have it, rather than rallying to make a point of playing OTHER games (even older ones) instead.
Still, of all the reasons for going after Activision and the developers it owns and trying to cost them money, this actually isn't one of them. The people being targeted by this really do damage the games and their communities. Especially if you want the multiplayer to be actually competitive, and for the achievements to mean something (and if you have the intention of actually attaching a value to those achievements down the road as some rumors point to when it comes to Blizzard).
If anything the problem with what we're seeing here is that it's all smoke and mirrors, it sounds flashy and impressive, but in reality the money they are spending on legal actions for this is pretty much money being used for advertising. It's about the flash of the whole thing, and saying "we care about the integrity of the community" without actually doing anything. This is all pointless until we see people in prison for it.
It's sort of like gold farming, it's never disappeared because the efforts made are mostly trivial ones calculated to make it seem like there is an effort. Banning a million people or even 10 million people is meaningless when they can just get right back online. On the other hand if they bothered to actually extradite just one person and get him thrown in jail for a ridiculous amount of time it would make a big differance.
China for example doesn't usually cooperate with extraditions in general, especially for things like this that it as a nation benefits from (money coming into their economy, virtual currency farming overall generates a not inconsiderable amount of money as has been pointed out). On the other hand for the cost of all those gold farming bans, Blizzard could hire a bounty hunter to abduct the guy in China, claim to apprehend him in some country with an extradition treaty, and have him prosecuted.
The whole thing about using bounty hunters (which really exist) in an illegal fashion to kidnap people and then claim that they just happened to stumble accross them in an area where they could be apprehended is an old trick, it just tends not to get much press time, unless your dealing with someone like "Dog" who was doing similar (though not identical) types of things on TV and getting away with it.
Oh sure, China would pitch a fit especially if the guy was used as a public example like we're talking about, but is unlikely to be able to prove anything in the end (which is the point), and nobody is going to start a war over a scumbag (which is why it's never happened).
This kind of thing would probably scare people enough to influance gold farming. But of course Blizzard doesn't really care enough to deal with all the flak it would entail.
The same applies here with the cheaters, they seem to be working within the civil court system because making a criminal case out of it would simply be too much of a headache and get some negative attention (20 years for cheating at a game!... no matter what the legal justification about IP laws and such a lot of people, especially the ignorant, will be outraged). The short term annoyance is not worth the long term benefit to them.
Such are my thoughts.
