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Turtle WoW classic server announces shutdown after Blizzard wins injunction

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Re: Turtle WoW classic server announces shutdown after Blizzard wins injunction

#13

Just background in case you don't know: Turtle WoW tried to turn Classic World of Warcraft into a Roguelike, but in doing so wound up creating a bunch of new mechanics, and a gameplay loop that was quite unique even relative to other Roguelikes. So my position on this is; two things can be true at the same time: - Turtle WoW violated Blizzard's copyright, tried to charge money for some services, and Blizzard are well…

I think you're confusing this with Ascension which is a different server. Turtle was more like Classic WoW but with additional content that fits in as if the official expansions had never existed. So basically it's like Old School Runescape for WoW.

Re: Turtle WoW classic server announces shutdown after Blizzard wins injunction

#14
post #5

WoW servers existed for years, it's funny blizzard still tries after this many years.

It’s almost as if their sales are plummeting and they’re desperate or something.

Best way to solve that is to waste more money on lawsuits

Re: Turtle WoW classic server announces shutdown after Blizzard wins injunction

#15

Just background in case you don't know: Turtle WoW tried to turn Classic World of Warcraft into a Roguelike, but in doing so wound up creating a bunch of new mechanics, and a gameplay loop that was quite unique even relative to other Roguelikes. So my position on this is; two things can be true at the same time: - Turtle WoW violated Blizzard's copyright, tried to charge money for some services, and Blizzard are well…

I am curious, can you elaborate more on these Roguelike features and mechanics. Its up for 1 more month, i might be interested in trying them out before it shuts down.

Re: Turtle WoW classic server announces shutdown after Blizzard wins injunction

#16

Just background in case you don't know: Turtle WoW tried to turn Classic World of Warcraft into a Roguelike, but in doing so wound up creating a bunch of new mechanics, and a gameplay loop that was quite unique even relative to other Roguelikes. So my position on this is; two things can be true at the same time: - Turtle WoW violated Blizzard's copyright, tried to charge money for some services, and Blizzard are well…

Blizzard should’ve offered the team making Turtle a job, and payed them to develop the next big WoW game.

Unfortunately blizzard is not Valve.

Re: Turtle WoW classic server announces shutdown after Blizzard wins injunction

#18
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blizzard are well within their legal (and moral) rights to shut that down. Legal rights, sure. Moral rights, you're gonna have to explain yourself, because I see no moral objection here. Culture advances through remixes, and while we can grant artists some exclusive period to profit through their work, we're not morally obliged to let them have a stranglehold on culture forever. People of my generation might not wa…

WoW vanilla is being sold right now by Blizzard themselves, under a subscription model.

Oh yeah, I remember when they abandoned it for years, third party servers revived it, Blizzard realized they can make money off it and shut the third party servers down.

Re: Turtle WoW classic server announces shutdown after Blizzard wins injunction

#20

Just background in case you don't know: Turtle WoW tried to turn Classic World of Warcraft into a Roguelike, but in doing so wound up creating a bunch of new mechanics, and a gameplay loop that was quite unique even relative to other Roguelikes. So my position on this is; two things can be true at the same time: - Turtle WoW violated Blizzard's copyright, tried to charge money for some services, and Blizzard are well…

Turtle WoW was also porting their fork to Unreal Engine 5 [1] but that got cancelled ~6 months ago due to a Blizzard lawsuit.

For anyone unfamiliar with WoW, private servers have been a thing for most of WoW's history. It's unclear to me where the source code came from. I've heard different stories (eg from Chinese servers) and also that it was a greenfield development reverse-engineered from the client. All of this was a copyright violation of course and Blizzard have shut down such servers in waves.

WoW originally released in 2004 and has changed every ~2 years with an expansion and the game now is vastly different to what it was originally, which is now called "vanilla". In the 2010s there was a lot of people calling for what became "classic WoW". Most private servers used an early version of the game (either vanilla or one of the first 2 expansions). A lot of people argued that game was more fun at that time and all the changes since have made the game worse.

This issue just didn't die and the game director was famously asked (by a still unidifentied fan AFAIK) if there were any plans to re-release the original game and he famously responded with "you think you do but you don't" at Blizzcon 2013 [2].

This just wouldn't die. There was one particularly famous private server called Nostalrius that got shut down by Blizzard but Blizzard ended up bringing that team in and by 2017, Blizzard announced Classic WoW [3], which launched in 2019 and for several years seemed to have more players than the current version of the game (called "retail") although that's tapered off now.

So Turtle WoW fit into a long history of wanting to play the original game. There's also a movement called "Classic+", which is to fork from the vanilla version of the game and make changes from that. Turtle WoW probably fit into the Classic+ model.

[1]: https://turtlecraft.gg/remastered

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghnLIc8EFIM

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUSRkBwQdc8

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