Blizzard shutting down Nostalrius, popular WoW private server • Hacker News Board

Re: Blizzard shutting down Nostalrius, popular WoW private server

#111

Post by Falcon9 » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 5:02 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #107

ChuckMcM wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue that the Lich King was the last "good" patch for WoW. What I've never understood though was there is clearly some residual demand for "down rev" versions of the game where the mechanics favored a more engaged play style, why not facilitate it? How much does it really cost to run a single realm at the Vanilla, TBC, and LK levels? So many new players where their first experience with Onxyia was soloing…

Not a terrible idea. Maybe a "seasonal" server that runs through the expansions every 6 months. That said, I'm sure maintaining different versions of the servers would actually be a huge pain. The live ops was most likely not a solved problem at the end of an expansion. It would take a lot of back porting security patches as well as bringing certain things forward like connecting to the current bnet.

And the customer service concerns are an interesting consideration as well - Game Masters use ever evolving tools (which evolve with the game client) to be able to more effectively help players. Changing the client will break the tools which will require new tools to be developed, new policies to be developed around those tools, new (or really, old but forgotten) types of solutions for game issues that have been obsoleted.

Just imagining this small aspect of the overall challenge makes it clear to me that this type of server just would never happen on an official basis - so many cross-linked considerations and it's really hard to make a business case for almost any of them, even if it would be a lot of fun from a player point of view. Which means that allowing a volunteer community like Nostalrius is really the ideal, outside of the reality of the law which requires protecting intellectual property in all cases in order preserve it in the cases where you really want to. Could some kind of official license be made available specifically for Nostalrius?

Re: Blizzard shutting down Nostalrius, popular WoW private server

#112

Post by 15155 » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 5:03 PM UTC

Meekro wrote: post #4

I used to be involved with this sort of thing, and it's actually pretty interesting stuff. There are enormous open source projects, operating largely out of public sight, that have recreated the WoW server backend in most of its glory. The lower-level content works quite well these days, though a lot of complex raid scripts are missing or broken. This one is probably the most popular: https://github.com/TrinityCore/T…

> Every patch since Lich King, though, has attacked these reverse engineers on the technical front by adding layers upon layers of obfuscation to the protocol.

I haven't seen such obfuscation, personally. Mostly design/implementation inconsistency, which, can happen to any large, old software project.

The biggest nastiness I personally witnessed was the battle.net authentication system upgrade, and it wasn't borne out of anti-RCE efforts.

Re: Blizzard shutting down Nostalrius, popular WoW private server

#113

Post by dduarte » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 5:10 PM UTC

15155 wrote: post #112

Meekro wrote: post #4

I used to be involved with this sort of thing, and it's actually pretty interesting stuff. There are enormous open source projects, operating largely out of public sight, that have recreated the WoW server backend in most of its glory. The lower-level content works quite well these days, though a lot of complex raid scripts are missing or broken. This one is probably the most popular: https://github.com/TrinityCore/T…

> Every patch since Lich King, though, has attacked these reverse engineers on the technical front by adding layers upon layers of obfuscation to the protocol. I haven't seen such obfuscation, personally. Mostly design/implementation inconsistency, which, can happen to any large, old software project. The biggest nastiness I personally witnessed was the battle.net authentication system upgrade, and it wasn't borne ou…

Randomization of opcode identifiers or shuffling packet structures every other (client) build is not "inconsistency".

Re: Blizzard shutting down Nostalrius, popular WoW private server

#114

Post by Falcon9 » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 5:11 PM UTC

throwaway125 wrote: post #67

dogma1138 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of the private servers are either WOD or MOP, there are virtually no TBC servers and Nost was one of the few vanilla servers. There are allot of WOTLK servers because WOTLK was the most "popular" patch of WoW and allot of work on both the emulation and the database was done for that patch. However private servers for Cata, MoP, and WoD came out pretty much almost hand in hand with live release, they were…

>all the text, sounds, textures models are present on the client side alone This isn't entirely true. All the quest text, monster says, NPC interactions and more are sent by the server. Sure, the models and sounds are part of the client, but the server tells your client where to place which mobs, how much health they should have, how they react to you, etc. >The content that is available on Nostralius is literally no…

Where do you draw the line? Should I legally be allowed to run my own League of Legends client that is current version - 0.0.1 since that's no longer available to players, and offer all skins/runes at a fraction of the cost to my user base?

There is something of a problem here, but the solution (as ever) is not a simple one.

Re: Blizzard shutting down Nostalrius, popular WoW private server

#115

Post by jayhuang » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 5:16 PM UTC

A bit late to this discussion (understatement I know), but running this type of private game server was partially what got me in this industry. In my case, I was running relatively successful Maplestory private servers back in 2008, on the order of 12,000~15,000 concurrent users.

Hundreds, probably thousands of these servers cropped up overnight after the first "core" was created, and many many variations of that core quickly followed. At some point, many of us in the private server community caught wind of Nexon (creators of Maplestory) going after certain kids for their private servers. This was an everyday occurrence. Almost always, it was in the form of a Cease and Desist letter.

Many of these servers had There were private server rankings. Everyone would be vying for votes to get to the top 3 and gain visibility, which invariably resulted in them receiving letters. Those of us that became significantly more popular and had players actively going out and advertising for us quickly came under the spotlight and received letters with the threat of legal action if not promptly shutdown.

In fact, these shutdown letters were such a big part of the scene at the time, that some popular servers got shutdown by competitors sending fake Cease and Desist letters (don't ask how I know)...the response would typically be a quick and simple shutdown, waving goodbye to the community. Some owners with more skin in the game would deviously "shutdown" their server, then "re-birth" it as a different, smaller server since any communication sent in game was unlikely to be seen by Nexon. Few brave souls would post the Cease and Desist on their website while taunting and berating Nexon, though I never found out what happened to those guys.

Seeing this post brings back so many memories -- Honestly, a lot of time was wasted on that game but I would not be doing what I do today if it weren't for the people I met while doing it (my next major project was with a friend of a dedicated player on my server). It was also lots of fun.

Re: Blizzard shutting down Nostalrius, popular WoW private server

#116

Post by stcredzero » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #36

kibwen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal intuition is that splitting your userbase like this is disastrous for a game in the long-term (to say nothing of my intuition that 90% of people longing for "the old days" are just looking for a quick hit of nostalgia, with no intent to pay long-term). However, it's worth mentioning that Runescape now officially offers a "classic" version of the game alongside (and separate from) the modern version, which…

You know that is an argument about expansions in the first place? Significant player dropoffs in WoW happen in the last patches before new expansions. The userbase usually spikes up on new releases, but almost always drops lower every time, predominately because new releases gate players who were on old versions against those on the new one. Friends stop being interested, unsub, and never come back because the player…

I've always thought that level caps in MMOs, particularly the WoW variety slash-and-burn where you basically make a new theme park every two years and throw the last one in the dumpster in terms of player viability, is a destructive cycle not conductive to building real living worlds.

Theme Park/Resort Casino. Basically dazzle your senses while getting you to play a rigged game to massage you with variable schedule of reward. A real, living world is spoiler-proof.

Re: Blizzard shutting down Nostalrius, popular WoW private server

#117

Post by bitwize » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 5:44 PM UTC

Margh wrote: post #81

bitwize wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blizzard isn't interested in "building a living world" and never has been. From its inception the purpose of WoW has been to farm the likes of you for gold.

And how do they continue to "farm" you for gold if you unsubscribe because you no longer feel a part of the world?

Ultimately, you don't matter to them. For every subscriber like you they lose because of a change, if they get two more, more casual players to sign up, they're in the black and sacrificing your membership is rational from a financial perspective.

Re: Blizzard shutting down Nostalrius, popular WoW private server

#118

Post by Hortinstein » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 7:38 PM UTC

Meekro wrote: post #4

I used to be involved with this sort of thing, and it's actually pretty interesting stuff. There are enormous open source projects, operating largely out of public sight, that have recreated the WoW server backend in most of its glory. The lower-level content works quite well these days, though a lot of complex raid scripts are missing or broken. This one is probably the most popular: https://github.com/TrinityCore/T…

Do you have any good reads on how someone would go about starting a TrinityCore like project and the approach it takes to emulation?

Re: Blizzard shutting down Nostalrius, popular WoW private server

#119

Post by clevernickname » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 7:46 PM UTC

victorp13 wrote: post #62

clevernickname wrote: post #55

Suddenly Blizzard's April Fools tweet seems cruel. Re-Live the old worlds of warcraft with our legacy servers coming this june! Starting with vanilla! https://twitter.com/Blizzard_EN/status/716004308043624448

That's a fake account.

I've been had. Ironic timing on their part, at least.

Re: Blizzard shutting down Nostalrius, popular WoW private server

#120

Post by Kiro » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 8:16 PM UTC

aetherson wrote: post #89

Kiro wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe they actually re-create the backend. Seems harder than actually making a MMORPG from scratch. Where do you even begin?

The thing to understand is that MMORPGs create the illusion that they're kind of like browsers -- all the content is on the server, the client is little more than a window into a shared world. That's not the case. The bandwidth would be crippling if it were. Most of the game is in the client. Clients know how to do actions, cast spells, count cooldowns, etc. The server has some maps that tell the clients "put this im…

> but the clients know what those resources and mobs look and act like, the server just tells them to instantiate a mob of this id there

Are you saying the clients decide how a mob moves and behaves?

> sanity-checks and synchronizes the clients

Which in practice means the whole game logic must live on the server as well, right? How else would they validate the client's input?