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• Future Plans

  TG Daily: What do you plan for future versions of Glider? Mercury: For small changes, it's hard to say. There are so many great ideas on our Suggestions forum that picking any of them is hard because you can't do them all. I'm sure general polish and intelligence will continue to be the theme. The big change we have as far as new development is the addition of custom classes. Specifically, that's allowing Glider to dynamically load a .NET class (written in C# or VB.NET). Then Glider would call into the class and let it handle combat with a little object model of the player, nearby monsters, etc. This will allow skilled players to create their own combat routines with absolute control of the fight and post-fight resting. Glider users are very m ustrious, so this should make for some exciting new techniques. TG Daily: Has anyone at Blizzard tried contacting you about the program? Mercury: Not yet. ;) The only evidence we have that Blizzard even knows we exist is that a version of Warden was released in late September that scanned your running processes for a signature of Glider's executable. For people running Glider under the default configuration, that resulted in a lot of bans and a change in our detection strategy to be more aggressive in ruling out Warden's options. Other than that, no contact. Related stories A chat with a World of Warcraft bot programmer

• TG Daily interview: Chat with a World of Warcraft bot programmer

  Earlier this month, we ran a preview of an exclusive interview with Mercury, a developer of a World of Warcraft bot - a cheat program to accelerate the player's progress within the game. In this full interview, Mercury talks to TG Daily editor Humphrey Cheung about his motivation to create WoWglider, how it works and avoids detection, and his future plans for the bot. TG Daily: Were you an avid World of Warcraft player before writing the program - and what inspired you to write it? Mercury: Definitely. I'm one of the many lifelong Blizzard game owners out there. I started with Warcraft and have played all of their titles. When WoW was finally released, I got it immediately and I've been a fan since. The inspiration behind Glider was really what it's for now - to catch up to level 60 without spending so much real time. I'm in a small guild and my guildmates reached 60 while I was still in the mid-50's. I wanted to get to 60 as well to come along on the instance runs, but I had no time to grind it out between work and social life. When I did finally log in for a few hours on weekends, it was frustrating to see them orgranizing pickup groups for Scholomance and the Blackrock dungeons. I'd be off killing Shardtooth Bears and Crystal Rumblers solo. The original version was very unstable and simplistic, but it allowed me to get my warlock up to 60 pretty fast. My Canadian guildmates knew what I was up to and they encouraged me to turn it into a more well-rounded product so I could sell it. After I showed a few friends the rough version, they all collectively badgered me into marketing it. I promised my guildies that if I sold enough copies of Glider, I'd fly up to Toronto and buy them a round of beer, which I plan to do in January. TG Daily: Did any other programs give you inspiration or a template for developing Glider? Where did you learn the programming skills required to write the program and is Glider a full-time gig? Mercury: None in particular. I ran across a few tools that did some game automation, but nothing struck me as very professional. This was back in April, mind you, and things have changed a bit. But even then, our idea was to use my technology and my partner's marketing/design to position it as a very professional, clean app. So avoiding links to "hax0rs!!11" sites and keeping the design clean was the closest we had to a template. As for my own skills, I've been a full-time developer forever. I started with C, switched to C++ when it came out - that should date me - and just went from there. It doesn't take an enormous amount of talent to make something like this, but you do need to have a solid understanding of software development in general, like understanding business needs, prioritizing issues, source control, and so on. And, no, Glider's not a full-time gig. I've lowered my contracting hours to have more time for Glider, but it's still not making that kind of money. A big part of Glider is still the fun factor of working with the game and the users on our forums. TG Daily: How popular has Glider been? Do you have any estimates on how many times it has been downloaded? Mercury: It's been fairly popular, but not a huge, smashing success. In other words, I've never had to get more bandwidth or upgrade my small server. Without looking at the logs, and I don't want to reveal hard numbers, I'd swag it's been downloaded for evaluation around 3000 to 5000 times since the hard launch in late July 2005.

• The emergence of ad-supported online gaming

  With PS3 stealing the spotlight on Monday, and Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii (formerly "Revolution") following up with subsequent world premieres on Tuesday, you'd think E3 was all about consoles. But recent multi-million-dollar investments, such as Viacom's $102 million buyout of in-game messaging firm Xfire, and Microsoft's astonishing buyout just earlier this week of in-game advertising firm Massive Inc., estimated at as much as $400 million, suggest another set of dynamics is at work: The PC gaming market is in transition, as major media and software companies are placing huge bets on gamers' receptiveness to commercial messages during high-adrenaline online tournaments. Their investments could change the entire business model of PC gaming to something almost unrecognizable by just the end of this year. Conceivably, as expert gaming analyst Michael Cai of Parks Associates tells TG Daily, a new, ad-subsidized PC online gaming market could shift the focus of game development itself, perhaps away from the "core" segment of tournament games and first-person shooters, and toward two emerging segments, both on opposite extremes: 1) massively multi-player games (MMORPGs) that depend on the Internet connection which serves as advertising's principal pipeline; and 2) casual games, which take a moment or two of the player's break time, and could very well be the new home for "breaks" of a different sort. "The online market is very dynamic and lively," Cai believes, "and there are a lot of new business models emerging, generating new revenues." Because next-generation consoles will rely on their Internet connections for consumer services, they won't be left out of the loop. Thanks to World of Warcraft, Cai said, MMORPGs have broken out into a huge potential market - which we could see others capitalize on, especially if Namco makes a splash with its much-anticipated Warhammer: Mark of Chaos next week. But the problem with gothic fighting games, we believe, is the context they create: In mythical worlds, it's a little hard to plant a billboard for Sprite or Nike. That's why "sim worlds" of the kind featured in the online role-playing game Second Life are generating quite a bit of buzz. In a world that looks more current-day, where the characters do more current-day things, it's just as easy - if not easier - to bombard virtual people with commercial advertising as it is real people. With hundreds of millions in subsidies at stake, it may soon become a possibility that, even if Warhammer attains tremendous popularity, the games that get front-burner treatment in coming years could look less gothic and more like a sitcom. On the other hand, Viacom's investment in Xfire suggests an alternative: The Xfire instant messaging platform gives gamers a way to connect with and send live messages to one another, without breaking the context of the game they're playing. If Viacom - which originally got its big boost as an outdoor advertising company - takes advantage of this, it could drive growth in advertising vehicles that don't steer the direction of game development. On the other hand, they don't necessarily subsidize game development either, which may make reliance upon Xfire a less attractive option in the future for some game publishers. Michael Cai breaks down the math for us: Just last year alone, advertisers spent over $60 billion on TV advertising. With 108 million households, that's a total investment of $45 - 50 per month. That's not much from each advertiser's perspective, but if you did away with ads, that's how much money consumers would need to spend to compensate. "For video games, especially on the PC platform, there are more than 50 million US Internet households who have active Internet gamers. Only about 1 to 2 million of them are paying for casual online games." Recent buyout announcements that first put in-game advertising in the public spotlight, Cai believes, may be focusing too much on what ads may provide to the core gamer segments, while it's casual gaming that could provide the more fertile proving ground.  "I understand Wild Tangent is doing something in the casual space in terms of in-game advertising," said Cai, "but I think more companies need to step up as they figure out the in-game advertising technology and business model for the casual games as well. That will provide more incentive for publishers and developers to give out better games for the casual market." E3 2006 continuing coverage throughout the week TwitchGuru, Tom's Hardware Guide, and TG Daily will be on location to bring you live analysis of all the events of this year's E3 Expo, as it happens. Follow our coverage to find out What It Is, How It Works, and What It Means. Join our discussion on E3 2006 There's more: Read all E3 2006 stories on TG Daily