Blizzard has sued an individual who made a bot for its World of Warcraft MMORPG, alleging the cheating method infringes the company's copyright and potentially damages the game. The popular cheating software, coded by Michael Donnelly, performs many tasks automatically for the player.

Around 100,000 copies of the tool, MMO Glider, have been licensed. By comparison, around 10 million people play World of Warcraft. Apparently, a lawyer and a private investigator showed up at Donnelly's home and asked him to stop selling the software and pay the company the profits he made off it. He refused and the next day the already prepared suit was filed, Donnelly told BBC.

"When they arrived, they presented Donnelly with a copy of a complaint that they indicated would be filed the next day in the US District Court for the Central District of California if Donnelly did not immediately agree to stop selling Glider and return all profits that he made from Glider sales," BBC News reports.

Bots have been around forever, and they are considered cheating tools. They are software programs which perform one or several tasks automatically without the need of a human player. They thus provide an unfair advantage over other players. MMO Glider is especially infamous because it more or less plays the game by itself: in World of Warcraft it roams the land, killing and looting according to the user's presets.

The player's character thus gains experience and loot without any actual human interaction. Furthermore, the cheating mechanism can be activated all the time, whereas a human player only plays the game for a limited amount of time (with few exceptions!).

Glider works a lot like a regular player. It looks at your health, mana, energy, etc. It moves the mouse around and pushes keys on the keyboard. You tell it about your character, where you want to kill things, and what to kill. Then it kills for you, automatically. You can do something else, like eat dinner or go to a movie, and when you return, you'll have a lot more experience and loot. - its website reads