What happened to Enigma.D3?

[Borbers]

interested when thud is gone..

[thumsoul]

Wow ... KillerJohn gona stop to ?

Bad news for D3 players, this game is so unoptimized without tools like maphack or TH. I think its the end for me (3k paragonon) on this game.
Special thx to @CrEEzz @Enigma32 @KillerJohn, and i hope TH gona be still maintained.

Best regards.

[Borbers]

no, but if this shit happens here it is only a matter of time when thud is at this position..

[JackCeparou]

I'm puzzled how most of you react to this..
Enigma32 is an amazing person with so many human qualities besides computer skills, and all you think of is the miss of a maphack.

@Enigma if you can read this, hope you are fine and know that we [already|will] miss you!

[johnbl]

My guess is that he didn't get sued, but received a C&D of some sort. If he complies, which seems likely, it usually stops there.
AFAIK he didn't have any connection to botting software (which continues to work without any problems), so I don't think Blizzard will pursue him any further.

If they're really trying to "clean" the game, my guess is that KJ will be contacted next.

[foobard3]

I'm a bit confused as to why he'd stop or why he'd receive a C&D in the first place.

AFAIK C&D are when you're breaking some sort of law and to my mind Enigma wasn't breaking any laws, he was simply reverse engineering. I can't imagine that Blizzard would have any grounds to sue him. It's just like taking apart your lawnmower to see how it works and/or fixing it yourself: you can't be sued for that. Reverse engineering has been proven in courts to be 100% legal even for large corporations creating and selling products for profit. And he wasn't profiting from the RE here, it was simply a passion of his and he was damn good at it. The only way he could have been breaking any laws is if he was working for Blizzard and leaking their IP to the public by way of the framework and AFAIK he wasn't an employee of Blizzard.

Also, he wasn't even the creator of any of the most popular "end user" programs such as bots or THUD. He created the framework for reading the memory of the game. Yes, he did have the MapHack overlay but it wasn't nearly as popular as THUD is, so why go after him first (above paragraph notwithstanding)? I wonder how much the bots and THUD are based on his framework, if at all. He does mention KJ as a friendly "sparring partner" so if that's the case then it seems maybe KJ has his own memory reading routines.

Because of him not doing anything breaking any laws one possible explanation is Blizzard may have offered a cash settlement to him on the condition that he stops all development and removes work he's already done to date and doesn't talk about it. Also Blizzard may have hired him perhaps and this is a condition of his employment.

Either way if he was scared off by a letter from a lawyer I hope he retained his own competent/experienced legal counsel before doing so in order to not give in to false claims/empty threats by Blizzard. If he doesn't have the resources for this perhaps we can get together a few thousand $ to hire proper legal counsel to review his side of the case? Also, we could get the EFF (eff.org) involved as well, they offer free legal counsel for cases such as these.

[foobard3]

It looks like Blizzard decided to "solve" the botting problem the other way around since they cannot protect their code well enough. I heard that Blizz contacted Ubisoft to ask me to stop what I'm doing (however, I don't know all of the details yet). Anyway, I'll take that as a compliment Since I'm not really an anonymous person, I will remove my Enigma.D3 fork and Nav.D3 part of Nav. Nav is a universal navigation library with no connection to D3 and I will keep working on it and it will remain publicly available. I guess there is no point sending my CV to Blizzard now

I don't follow how Ubisoft would be involved here, are you an employee of Ubisoft? Even if you are there are no legal grounds for Blizzard to ask someone's employer to do something about one of their employees, none. You are doing the reverse engineering work on your own time on your own machine, your employer is not involved. If you are employed by Ubisoft and they did threaten to fire you, you could sue the living crap out of them for millions because they're breaking the law.

I support your reverse engineering work the same as Enigma's or anyone else. I would strongly encourage you to place back online all of the work you have removed because you haven't done anything illegal. Let's not let a "AAA" (said in the mocking way of Jim Sterling) scare anyone if they're not doing anything illegal.

That's another thing I haven't thought of: we can go to the large gaming media outlets with this story as well and ask them for coverage and review. As I said above, we can get the EFF involved.

Don't let big corporations scare you, they have zero legal ground to do so.

[durdurdur123]

I don't follow how Ubisoft would be involved here, are you an employee of Ubisoft? Even if you are there are no legal grounds for Blizzard to ask someone's employer to do something about one of their employees, none. You are doing the reverse engineering work on your own time on your own machine, your employer is not involved. If you are employed by Ubisoft and they did threaten to fire you, you could sue the living crap out of them for millions because they're breaking the law.

I support your reverse engineering work the same as Enigma's or anyone else. I would strongly encourage you to place back online all of the work you have removed because you haven't done anything illegal. Let's not let a "AAA" (said in the mocking way of Jim Sterling) scare anyone if they're not doing anything illegal.

That's another thing I haven't thought of: we can go to the large gaming media outlets with this story as well and ask them for coverage and review. As I said above, we can get the EFF involved.

Don't let big corporations scare you, they have zero legal ground to do so.

Cr33zz
I’m a full-time game developer (@ Ubisoft) and part-time bot developer (@ home). Programming since I got my Atari 65XE in 1996.

As for Reverse Engineering, I don't know where you get that information from but reverse engineering is not allowed (it was never allowed) unless it's for your own research (as long as it's individual research and you do not share anything to 3rd parties or share it publicly), at least in USA. In other words, if you can reverse engineer something - just keep it for yourself otherwise you override company's copyrights & EULA. I remember about 10 years ago an american publisher of a MMORPG who started reverse engineering their game-server and the company who created the game found it out, went to the american court and they won the case.

In this case, I don't think that Blizzard would ever pay the court for a dead game but you never know.

[Skeetss]

I'm puzzled how most of you react to this..
Enigma32 is an amazing person with so many human qualities besides computer skills, and all you think of is the miss of a maphack.

@Enigma if you can read this, hope you are fine and know that we [already|will] miss you!

I agree. if you're reading these threads Enigma, thank you for everything you've done. Reading through your sources and responses has made me a much better developer and I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that. Good luck with whatever comes next, I'm sure you'll do big things.

[johnbl]

I don't follow how Ubisoft would be involved here, are you an employee of Ubisoft? Even if you are there are no legal grounds for Blizzard to ask someone's employer to do something about one of their employees, none. You are doing the reverse engineering work on your own time on your own machine, your employer is not involved. If you are employed by Ubisoft and they did threaten to fire you, you could sue the living crap out of them for millions because they're breaking the law.

I support your reverse engineering work the same as Enigma's or anyone else. I would strongly encourage you to place back online all of the work you have removed because you haven't done anything illegal. Let's not let a "AAA" (said in the mocking way of Jim Sterling) scare anyone if they're not doing anything illegal.

That's another thing I haven't thought of: we can go to the large gaming media outlets with this story as well and ask them for coverage and review. As I said above, we can get the EFF involved.

Don't let big corporations scare you, they have zero legal ground to do so.

Take a look at what happened to bnetd. It was "just" reverse engineering and Blizzard won the lawsuit.
Also, what happened to graf_chokolo with the PS3 is another example of big companies destroying someone's life because of reverse engineering.

It's easy for you to say "don't let big corporations scare you" when you're not the one on the receiving end.

[CrEEzz]

Cheers guys! GLHF