Say it ain’t so? As far as I know, I was never told that Blizzard would be using my bandwidth to serve other clients. I hope I didn’t miss it in the long EULA I skimmed over and agreed to.

As you can see in the image above, I am downloading Starcraft 2 Beta from a number of ‘peers’. I have a unique Peer ID (blacked out for privacy purposes), and each of my peers have the same. The leftmost column is the IP address for all the clients I am connected to, and the rightmost column is their Peer ID.

What is also curious is my download speed is only twice my upload speed. Sometimes it is even equal. It seems to me that Blizzard does this to keep as many peers as active as possible. There is no option to throttle my upspeed, or downspeed for that matter.

I love Blizzard and all, but these ‘sneaky’, old media, tactics are not befitting such a forward thinking company as Blizzard.

Perhaps this could have been buried in the EULA, and if that is the case, without any other notification, I feel….kind of…taken advantage of.

Edit: Just re-read the EULA and saw point #3 which discusses this issue:

3. Distribution of the Game. Blizzard may choose to distribute the Game through the use of the “Blizzard Downloader” utility which utilizes the ‘upload’ capability of your computer to distribute the Game to other participants of the Beta Test. In such an event, you agree that Blizzard may distribute the Game by using your home computer to ‘upload’ all or part of the Game to other participants of the Beta Test.

Another particularly heinous section of their EULA is Ominously titled ‘Consent to Monitor’.

8. Consent to Moniter. WHEN RUNNING, THE GAME MAY MONITOR YOUR COMPUTER’S RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY (RAM) FOR UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAMS RUNNING CONCURRENTLY WITH THE GAME. AN “UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAMS” AS USED HEREIN SHALL BE DEFINED AS ANY THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY “ADDON,” “MOD,” “HACK,” “TRAINER,” OR “CHEAT,” THAT IN BLIZZARD’S SOLE DETERMINATION: (i) ENABLES OR FACILITATES CHEATING OF ANY TYPE; (ii) ALLOWS USERS TO MODIFY OR HACK THE GAME INTERFACE, ENVIRONMENT, AND/OR EXPERIENCE IN ANY WAY NOT EXPRESSLY AUTHORIZED BY BLIZZARD; OR (iii) INTERCEPTS, “MINES,” OR OTHERWISE COLLECTS INFORMATION FROM OR THROUGH THE GAME. IN THE EVENT THAT THE GAME DETECTS AN UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM, THE GAME MAY (a) COMMUNICATE INFORMATION BACK TO BLIZZARD, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION YOUR ACCOUNT NAME, DETAILS ABOUT THE UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM DETECTED, AND THE TIME AND DATE THE UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM WAS DETECTED; AND/OR (b)  EXERCISE ANY OR ALL OF ITS RIGHTS UNDER THIS AGREEMENT, WITH OR WITHOUT PRIOR NOTICE TO THE USER.