There exists the very real possibility that we are talking to Richard M. Stallman hisself!
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Something I would never do to a legal document I take seriously? Something I would fire a lawyer for, before suing them into the ground?
I know I donāt. And I donāt.
It doesnāt matter what the EULA says. Thatās the law. You canāt override, modify, or otherwise generate law by contract. Lots of contracts also say āas allowed by law.ā Itās still redundant. It also cannot stop a child from clicking āI agree.ā
As allowed by law, (Oh, did they not include a legal redundancy there? Convenient.) I can tell by the analogy youāre drawing that you donāt understand contract law. Contract law, federal law, state law, and to some extent administrative law, and precedent govern this, not analogy.
So Blizzard can stop kids from clicking, āI agreeā and playing the game? Wow. I want that superpower.
Itās funny to me how people who can think critically about science and technology donāt stop to do the same when it comes to legal matters. Shitās complex, yo. The law is not simple, and while the legal education economy is breaking down in this country, law school and bar exams exist for a reason. Do yourself a favor? If youāre ever sued, hire a lawyer. You are clearly ill-equipped to stand up for yourself in a courtroom.
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So neither of us understands contract law, because you would have noticed that contract law states that child may not get into enforceable agreement - so first paragraph of EULA is just reminderā¦ and we are back into termination, because technically there is no agreement, no account. You would also notice that contract is something you are supposed to get into voluntarily.
No Blizzard may not stop kid from clicking, but it may terminate account if finds out that kid has created the account; again there is no agreement.
I know that the local law is always precedent - most of agreements somehow mention that (somewhere around that thing about living in Australia.)
Yes the law is too complicated for common people and there is entire industry around it - and I do understand that this is not of me. I only know enough of law (of my country) to not get into trouble and read agreements for the same reason (and curiosity.) And yes I have been consulting some EULAs with corporate lawyers because I was not able to decide on my own.
Right now this topic is changing into fight to prove which one of us is smarter; you know what? Iāll give you the second place in this contest. I would have given you the first place but it is already overcrowded by Blizzard lawyers.
Cheers mate! Just do not sign under something you do not wantā¦
Regardless. Reading a document as it is updated and pushed to the client every so many months is reasonable, and you donāt have to play the game if you donāt agree to the terms.
You are not getting hidden clauses signed for you ala banks and credit cards.
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Quantification is part of the problem, since what Iām after is a qualitative experience, and in this, as in many other spheres of modern life, the relentless drive to quantify everything tends to lead to the deliberate exclusion of anything that canāt readily be quantified.
Iām tempted to go on at some length about role-playing in MMOs. To put it simply, the best online experiences Iāve had involved relatively open worlds, with detailed settings, but with few constraints on player character backstory or motivations. By contrast, the last few MMOs I participated in had rigid, pre-determined storylines, and a fixed, linear series of quests to play through, in which the player was never given an opportunity to make a narrative decision. Worse, the narratives only made sense as globally unique experiences ā there was no way for player characters to interact and refer to shared experiences, without immediately going out-of-character.
I havenāt played WoW, only shoulder-surfed as others played. My impression is that itās intermediate, but leans strongly towards the latter pattern.
The MMOs I have in mind as relatively good examples had smaller budgets and player counts than WoW, and survived for years, though I doubt they were nearly as profitable. This may be an example of the common phenomenon in entertainment industries in which the big production companies churn out copies of last yearās blockbuster and strenuously avoid innovation.
By āCow Clickerā, Iām referring to the heavy reliance on āgrindingā and time-gates, not to simplicity. Crafting systems can be very complex, for instance, but they usually amount to repeating trivial tasks over and over. And this is exactly the sort of thing where people want to resort to bots to bypass.
You could probably find what youāre looking for in modern-day MUDs.
That, or carefully curated shards 
Every now and then, I start trying to parse the world of modern MUDs.
Thereās a game in development Iām following, Shards Online, and Iām considering whether to try to pull together a group of people to run a server for it, though thatād be a major undertaking, and Iāve only been on the player side of things until now. Also, Iām not sure whether Shards Online will work for what Iād like to do, though itās only in pre-alpha, so itās hard for me to know what the final release will look like.
Thatās your opinion.
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And is her/his common sense way of dealing with this issue, rather than signing something up and then using lawyer to fight it off your back.
Same thing really, but with a flashier UI.
Exactly, basically the same thing, but requiring less imagination.
#FTFY
cf.:
Blizzard reserves the right, at its sole and absolute discretion, to change, modify, add to, supplement or delete, at any time, any of the terms and conditions of this Agreement, any feature of the Game or the Service, hours of availability, content, data, software or equipment needed to access the Game or the Service, effective with or without prior notice[.] (source)
Beyond the boilerplate, you ARE notified when it changes with every release and asked to accept.
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Of course, I donāt mind spending a minute reading the TOS for the client, and the TOS for the service every few months as a patch comes out.
If one does not wish to read TOS, they are free to never play online games, and free to never patch their single-player videogames.
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