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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

#151

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 definitely wasn’t a roguelike it was “Classic Plus” experience with new class/race combinations, all new races, new zones, and new quests

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

#152

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…

Why not just buy it then? It reminds me of Valve’s treatment of Black Mesa, which made the community love the company even more. It’d be hilariously easy for Blizzard to spend some money on the thing and just buy the devs out, fans love you for it and it builds good will with a fanbase. Corporations can’t see past the legal aspect of things I guess.

I really think it is ego. Blizzard is the king of MMO makers, they can’t do anything wrong in their own eyes. They have the data that shows that people want to just play alone and care about the story above everything while completely refusing to acknowledge that the game never was about either of those and that game play style only rose up later as the MMO part got lost.

If Blizzard was to hire the turtle team and add all their content into a real classic plus experience that would be admitting that Blizzard is incapable of doing that faithfully and if it got popular then that raises even more questions about Blizzard and their C suites decisions

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

#153
post #25
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the things that Blizzard does so bad and private servers try to solve, which is previous expansion content: Let's say you loved playing Battle for Azeroth. Later Blizzard launches Shadowlands, the content for BfA gets irrelevant, the raids are not doable anymore at the same difficult, the power creep feeds in. Even if you buy the expansion just to get the “feel” on how it was, it's impossible. MMOs like…

FFXIV's level/stat sync system is also pretty cool for keeping the older stuff playable long past its original release, players get levels and stats and skills scaled down to the max level appropriate for the content 4-player dungeons still end up being a bit of a faceroll, but it's definitely possible to wipe on the 8-player bosses if mechanics are not observed

I don't know much about FF. But a thing with WoW is that new release often brings a significant rework of many game mechanics; they might squish everyone's level; edit stats for millions of items; rework class talents and abilities, sometimes even bringing up the whole new approach to the talents.

So while just scaling down characters is technically not hard to do and there's tech in WoW for that, it's never the same as playing previous expansion. And players want genuine experience.

And preserving all the old mechanics for 12 of expansions would present a whole new class of challenges to a team. WoW is a huge game. They already plagued by lots of bugs.

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

#154
post #29

I ran a private server years ago. Two things people in this thread are getting wrong: The engineering is way harder than anyone gives credit for. You're reverse engineering a server protocol from the client binary, writing your own spell systems (thousands of spells, each with edge cases), pathing, instancing, combat mechanics. Then scaling it for a few thousand concurrent players on hardware you're paying for out of…

I can't believe people defending this, I already said and I will say it again, I'm ALL for private servers, but these fricking guys were using art and stuff Blizzard created and profiting from it, they fucked up and deserve to be down, get over it, stop defending the indefensible.

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

#155
post #29

I ran a private server years ago. Two things people in this thread are getting wrong: The engineering is way harder than anyone gives credit for. You're reverse engineering a server protocol from the client binary, writing your own spell systems (thousands of spells, each with edge cases), pathing, instancing, combat mechanics. Then scaling it for a few thousand concurrent players on hardware you're paying for out of…

People need to learn to let go and build their own gaming worlds, instead of nuthugging and giving money to an evil entity, that is Blizzard. They deliberately shit on every player's head. During the heyday of WoW, they announced something very cool for a specific class, everyone was running amok seeing the new feature.... and then, after release, seeing that people loved it.... they removed it few weeks later, saying, oooh we couldn't make this work.

Bunch of scumbags, who shat on people. Don't give money to Blizzard, they stole almost all their ideas from somewhere else, and Kotick made the whole thing a fucking soulless money making machine that exploits people left and right.

Bobby Kotick announced it early and kept his promise that he made sure they ripped the fun part out of gaming. Well, mission completed. And the addicts keep giving their money to them. Ridiculous.

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

#157
post #29

I ran a private server years ago. Two things people in this thread are getting wrong: The engineering is way harder than anyone gives credit for. You're reverse engineering a server protocol from the client binary, writing your own spell systems (thousands of spells, each with edge cases), pathing, instancing, combat mechanics. Then scaling it for a few thousand concurrent players on hardware you're paying for out of…

I can't believe people defending this, I already said and I will say it again, I'm ALL for private servers, but these fricking guys were using art and stuff Blizzard created and profiting from it, they fucked up and deserve to be down, get over it, stop defending the indefensible.

How can you be all for private severs, but against them using “art and stuff”? Have you ever played a private server that didn’t use WoW assets? That would just be another game.

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

#158
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If it turns out the private server code was a greenfield reverse engineered effort - do you still think that's a copyright violation? Why?

There are multiple private server implementations. Blizzard does not hunt them. They are on github, you can run it in your basement and play with bots and some friends. I don't know if that presents a copyright violation, but as a matter of fact, Blizzard doesn't care enough to even submit a DMCA to GitHub.

Funny fact that both Blizzard and GitHub nowadays owned by Microsoft, so in the end, Microsoft hosts private server code for its own game.

But if you're taking this code, host it on a powerful server for everyone to join, integrate shop to extract money from players, advertise it as a separate game. That's basically running a company which extracts money from Blizzard IP. That crossed the line.

I'm not the one to protect Blizzard, but in my opinion they're doing the right thing here. Turtle WoW attracts players who could be paying subscription to Blizzard and play WoW Classic.

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

#159
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could be wrong and being a bit naive, but what prevents them from creating an original game now? The team have proven credentials at this point surely? Not to mention at least some of their players must actually like what they do vs wow, unless I'm mistaken about that part and it's still mostly nostalgia

If you just make “wow but with different graphics” how long until Blizzard sues you?

Wow but with different graphics is pretty much every MMO that has come out since 2004.

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

#160
post #29

I ran a private server years ago. Two things people in this thread are getting wrong: The engineering is way harder than anyone gives credit for. You're reverse engineering a server protocol from the client binary, writing your own spell systems (thousands of spells, each with edge cases), pathing, instancing, combat mechanics. Then scaling it for a few thousand concurrent players on hardware you're paying for out of…

I can't believe people defending this, I already said and I will say it again, I'm ALL for private servers, but these fricking guys were using art and stuff Blizzard created and profiting from it, they fucked up and deserve to be down, get over it, stop defending the indefensible.

Yes, give your money to the company of breast milk thiefs.
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