Class action against Blizzard

Hello everyone, I’m tired of this bad attitude towards blizzard customers, they answer questions with questions, they don’t solve problems with the game, they answer once a day, if you’re lucky, I suggest writing a collective complaint and filing a lawsuit, let’s discuss this possibility!

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what crime do you plan to sue them for :disguised_face:

After-sales service, I don’t play but spend whole days on forums communicating with customer support that doesn’t solve the problem but only creates them.

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Sorry bud but crappy customer service is not something you can win a lawsuit with. You can complain to the BBB and they might lower their rating, but being a crappy company isn’t itself a crime or a case that has any merit whatsoever.

he grounds are there, it’s not about the ability to play, it’s like buying a car and two days later it breaks down, and the dealer refuses to repair it or refund the money.

Wait, how does customer service specifically create the problems you’re having?

You clearly don’t understand how the system works.

What if instead of destructive solutions to problems, we aim for constructive solutions to problems?

So, I think as a society, the people who post on these forums here very often want more out of Warcraft III brand and technology. I have seen this common theme a lot. If we gloss over the details for a moment, we want more. We want better. And if the company could actually give us some kind of faith that they were going to offer better for sale, it would probably be motivating to us as consumers to buy the thing that is better. I think people would buy the better thing.

But the problem is right now, Microsoft or their derivatives are holding the keys to updating and maintaining the Warcraft III game. And they are doing that as a monopoly, so that no one else can update or maintain the game but also they are not maintaining it in the way that users obviously would or could have wanted.

So, one possible destructive solution would be to try to attack Microsoft Activision or their affiliates in any way possible legally and sort of use the legal system to beat them into submission to start selling – at a minimum – the Frozen Throne game that customers bought in 2003 that actually worked more reliably. Of course there is some nuance to what reliably means, or what technology is or is not that old game, but if we gloss over the nuance for a moment and just assume that something exists (or existed in the past) that the users want but aren’t allowed to buy and also aren’t allowed to maintain for themselves, we can imagine why the users would have this motivation to go on the offensive against corporate.

But what do I mean when I say that’s destructive? Well, the best case scenario is that Microsoft Activision has to pay a lot of money or penalties in return for having deleted or self-destructed the working product off of user computers and replaced it with a product that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t in a way that users are conflicted about (and is definitely different than the product from 2003 in that way).

But see, even if Microsoft has to pay a lot of money, the end result in that best case scenario does not include an increased number of humans with access to a polished, high-quality never-failing version of Warcraft III.

So, what if instead we imagined a constructive solution? For example, Microsoft could sell the rights to the original Warcraft 3 source code to someone like Warcraft 3 Champions, and have them implement their 3rd party ladder client into the official game so that the game receives tons of additional polish and love from passionate people, but now they would not have to be fighting upstream for control of a system maintained by interns or temp employees. Instead, the system would be maintained by folks who use it and love it.

I imagine we would see a similar situation if Microsoft turned over the source code of Warcraft III to the Hive Workshop modding community. The end result would be different – they might maintain support for 10000s of custom maps rather than focusing on the versus mode – but in either case, giving over control of the future to people who want a good future would improve the technology in a way that leaving control of the future in the hands of the apathetic would not.

We could even imagine maybe a best case scenario where Microsoft open sources the game code – maybe on Microsoft’s own open-source platform called GitHub (some self advertising!) and two forks come into existence creating a custom games fork and a versus mode skill ladder fork that are both available to players, and getting updates from passionate creators and innovators.

All of these constructive scenarios are preferable because they would potentially solve the problem that you are having, and increase the availability of good/polished technology in human society.

If you just go into the legal attack mode, you would most likely cause apathetic managers to hate this product more and more. They would most likely tell their temp employees to spend even less time in the maintenance of the end product.

That being said, if you are sincere about wanting to go into legal attack mode, then if you take my words seriously you should be likewise sincere about convincing Microsoft to embrace the power of their own GitHub site and giving over control of the aging technology [Edit: by posting the source code of game.dll from 2003 on GitHub as a gift to Warcraft III modding :wink: ]. I don’t know how to convince them. And, I don’t mean to convince you to do nothing. But I’m just suggesting some thoughts, and how it might be good to stay positive and goal oriented.

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That’s a lot of words, but it kinda boils down to this. Making a crappy product and having bugs in the software generally isn’t sufficient grounds for a class action.

And for false advertising claims, you have to prove an intent to deceive or misrepresent the product. and I don’t think W3R passes that bar. I believe the original team had every intention of living up to the claims they made, or at least try to. This project was ruined by Activision cutting funding and developer support for the project- not malice on the part of the developers.

For example, fast food companies dress up their products in advertisments to make them look as good as possible even though the actual product has to be made quickly in store and can’t realistically ever look as good as it does in the ads. There is a legal term for this- it’s called puffery, and it’s not illegal as long as the actual claims made don’t misrepresent the product. People have gotten really sue-happy with fast food restaurants, but most of these claims fail in court, because the exaggerations in the ads amount to puffery. A few of these cases had more merit than others. One guy argued Burger King’s burgers were smaller than advertised. However, inspection of the ad indicates that the advertised weight of the burgers (i.e. 1/4 pound) is the pre-cooked weight. This is disclosed in the ad, so the cooked burger weighing less is not false advertising.

Similarly, I think that in general, Blizzard’s claims in its promotional material are often exaggerated, but not intentionally false. You can’t base false advertising claims on subjective elements either- A game might say that it’s “new and improved” or something like that, but if you personally don’t think it’s improved, that’s not a lawsuit. A lawsuit can not be based a subjective claim.

I mean false advertising yes bad customer support no

False advertising cases have a very high bar of proof that wouldn’t be met in this situation. You basically have to prove that the inaccuracies were deliberate and not simply puffery or exaggeration. Planned features not being available at time of launch also doesn’t constitute false advertising. Software is constantly evolving so it’s only false advertising if they say they do something in an ad but actually have no intention of doing it at all.

And this was not the case with war3. The actual devs were working on the game in good faith, all of the features that were missing at launch were in fact in development and we did get them later (buggy, but we got them- and having bugs does not meet the criteria of a false advertising claim), even if it was years later.

Warcraft III was sabotaged by the publisher (Activision) during its development. It was not planned to be the crappy product we ended up getting.

False advertising only works for things that are provable in an absolute manner. Burger King was accused of false advertising for their burgers being smaller than in the ads- but the ads had an asterisk on them stating that the “quarter pound” was the pre-cooked weight, and this was true. So even though cooking causes the weight to decrease, the suit was thrown out. If the ad didn’t specify in the fine print what “quarter pounder” actually meant, then BK might have lost the suit. Subjective things can’t be tried as false advertising- us thinking the game sucked doesn’t mean there was false advertising. Not liking a product is not enough.

To be fair the Activision suboutage of the project is one thing but there is also the verity of absolutely poor decisions the team leaders of Reforged made which were advised agaisnt by devs, and they didn’t listen to them either.

Ive far since concluded that just because they didn’t get some big chonky buck doesn’t mean all their decisions regarding HOW to undergo this project were perfect, it was far from, mostly flawed too.