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Court Victory Wins NCSoft a Lot of Foes
(Korea Times Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)By Cho Jin-seo
A Seoul court took sides with NCSoft, Korea's biggest game company in a battle against makers of game cheating programs, but the accused remain skeptical whether NC really wants to fight with them.
The Seoul Central District Court last week sentenced two distributors of ``LinMate'' computer program to suspended jail terms of two years and a 10-million won penalty on the charge of obstructing NCSoft's operation of its``Linage'' game.
``Linmate'' is an autopilot program, or ``Bot,'' that plays the game without the presence of a gamer. It has been widely used not only by lazy gamers who are bored of monotonous play, but also by groups of illegal businesses that rake in game items or cyber money that they turn to cash on trading Web sites.
NCSoft officially condemns such programs as illegal.
The company consulted police to investigate the case in 2004. The company, however, said that it has no immediate plan of leveraging the court's decision to completely root out similar cheating programs, which are openly traded on many Web sites in South Korea.
``We have been sending letters of warning to the vendors. But there is no pending case now,'' said Lee Hwa-soo, an NCSoft spokesperson. ``We hope the vendors now understand that they can be accused anytime.''
LinMate is just one of hundreds of autopilot programs sprouting in online computer games like ``Lineage,'' ``Mu,'' ``Rohan'' and ``RF Online.'' Such programs are often called Bots or Macros in game circles.
Many gamers have blamed game companies like NCSoft, saying that they have been deliberately overlooking the use of Bots, because they are worried that they may lose profit if Bots are banned.
The Bot sellers also insist that NCSoft has been benefiting from such cheating programs and ``LinMate'' was just a scapegoat.
``We think that NCSoft themselves want those cheating tools to be used,'' a program engineer at Otobox, one of numerous Bot sellers, said in a telephone interview. ``Many gamers pay service fees for two accounts at the same time, one for himself and one for the Bot. If NCSoft bans the use of Bot that means its revenue will decrease by half.
``Officially, NCSoft tells the users not to use Bots. But as a programmer, I know that NCSoft purposely designed the game to easily go with the Bots,'' he said.
The engineer, who didn't give his name, said that the reason NCSoft accused ``LinMate'' is that too many honest gamers have complained to the company about it.
``It would be difficult for NCSoft to take a clear stance on the issue. So they are picking up ones that severely hamper their business, while leaving others to continue to sell the Bots,'' he said.
In Korea, some of the Bots are available free on the Internet, while some delicate devices cost up to 200,000 won from online sellers.
NCSoft, which foresees 350 billion won in revenue this year, said the Bots incurred a damage of 10 billion won last year, as they had to spend more money hiring system monitors and developing anti-hacking devices. The company also complained that many users have left the ``Lineage'' game since the Bots became abundant in 2004.
Gamers often like to call the Bots third-party programs, separating them from computer hacking.
While hacking programs infiltrate the game's main server and often damage it, third-party programs do no harm to the server or the system, as they run separately on the user's own PC and never directly access the server.
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