In true Butterfly Effect fashion, a World of Warcraft related lawsuit threatens to shut down one of the most popular Pokemon GO bots (not spoofers).
Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft, won a 8.5 million dollars lawsuit against Bossland, a German company that creates game “cheats, hacks and bots” for living.
In the past, Bossland was responsible for creating bots for several Blizzard games, namely Honorbuddy, Stormbuddy and Heathbuddy. However, their work was not limited to Blizzard, as they also created the popular Pokémon GO botting software called Pokéfarmer.
Last week, the long running lawsuit came to a conclusion in the California District Court, awarding Blizzard with more than 8.5 million dollars in copyright damages.
Consequently, this lawsuit could be the financial end of Bossland and thus end of the Pokéfarmer. It’s very easy to get excited about this lawsuit, but there are other factors to consider before popping the champagne.
Excitement is good, but let’s be reasonable, shall we?
However exciting this news may be, the fact remains that Bossland is still allowed to work on their botting and cheating software. Not only that, they are allowed to continue selling their products as valid market goods.
Sure, they’re neck deep in debt towards Blizzard, but there is nothing stopping the company to continue providing services and selling software.
In other words, this news could indicate the end of a single Pokemon GO bot, but it is likely it will turn out a bit differently. Companies like Bossland are notorious for their resilience and it usually takes years before they shut down completely.
And to be honest, that is not as bad as it seems. In the unlikely case of Bossland going under, a potential next step would be to open source their botting software, in order to inflict as much damage as possible.
If that happens, we won’t be fighting just Pokéfarmer. We’ll be fighting Pikachubots, Gymlords, Rattatatatars and similar imaginary future bots.
We hope that Blizzard can properly handle this situation. Hopefully, they’ll make sure that not a single line of code gets released by Bossland. We just hope Niantic will follow along and give them a hand.
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