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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

#261

Post by RandomGerm4n »

pfdietz wrote: post #244
RandomGerm4n wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no customer list. The only thing Blizzard could do is ban anyone using the same IP address as someone on Turtle WoW. However since NAT is widespread in many countries and many people don’t have their own IPv4 address this would result in an extremely high number of false positives. Not to mention that multiple people could be sharing the same internet connection. Besides there’s no reason to do that. Someone…

Presumably Turtle WoW also had payment details. If those match up with the IP of someone playing WoW, Blizzard has a very good case for action. And yes there's a good reason: playing on a pirate server directly and explicitly violates the EULA. Blizzard bans people for violating the EULA all the time.

Only a very small percentage of players purchase microtransactions. In addition Turtle doesn't have any payment information because the transaction went through a third-party service. So Blizzard would have to take legal action against that service first. Also the server itself is not “piracy.” The server is based on VMaNGOS which is open source and contains no Blizzard code. VMaNGOS can be downloaded legally from GitHub. Turtle WoW created its own content for the server some of which runs on the server side and some on the client side. The only thing that is actually "piracy" is the distribution of the game client (which they unfortunately did) as it belongs to Blizzard.

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

#262

Post by lenerdenator »

zythyx wrote: post #135
lenerdenator wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve is run by one guy (so far as I know) and he's only accountable to himself. Since he's got pretty much everything he wants from the arrangement, he has no problem with spending money on what most companies would consider cost centers and turning them into something bigger. Activision Blizzard is run as a publicly-traded company. 86% of it is held by institutional investors [0] who are never satisfied. Most are m…

That article on Investopedia is from 2021, before the Microsoft acquisition. Activision-Blizzard is no longer a publicly-traded company and instead a subsidiary of Microsoft. Whatever Microsoft wants under this arrangement is what they'll get from now on.

I forgot about that. Fair point.

Though the ownership of most large publicly traded companies more-or-less follows the same pattern. You have:

* the people who got in on the ground floor (typically executives) who are given stock options as their compensation, who have a plurality of the shares. Maybe majority holders, maybe not.

* institutional investors who typically use shares to back retirement accounts, whether they be acting for individuals or larger clients like pension funds

* retail bag holde... I mean... retail investors.

This also holds for Microsoft.

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

#263

Post by dirtikiti »

goolz wrote: post #220
Fokamul wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly. How expensive is this: Download opensource wow server from github Rent a server VM. Come up with very cool name, like MurlocWOW Create Discord for it. Post AD to reddit/wowservers Run server Day 1, several thousands of players will join by themselves. Because everyone looks for something "new" for free. Profit?

Did you ever play Turtle? They did a lot more than just that, as per the top comment in this lineage, and were serving a subset of the community by listening to what people want. Turtle WoW was popular because Blizzard and the shareholders do not care about making a fun and engaging game. They care about you spending money in their store and finding ways to poison the economy with their own gold buying system. WoW di…

So Blizzard is supposed to make a game that's fun specifically for a subset of players who think WoW died in 2010?

I hate to break it to you, but WoW is still the most played MMO on the planet, even after 20 years.

So it would seem like the MMO playerbase on the whole would disagree with you.

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

#264

Post by mjamesaustin »

Dusseldorf wrote: post #88
ikr678 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In blizzards case, mmo's are a huge time sink and not many have people have time to commit to multiple titles. Acquiring a competitior and maintaining it would see subscribers leave their main offering (which has been optimised for microtransactions and engagement) and splitting the player base.

They used that argument for years to avoid doing WoW Classic, and then it was wildly successful when they finally did. Seems to me like the inability to consider how they could work this into their ecosystem is yet another indicator of how far they've fallen since the golden era.

They still hate Classic and can't stand that players prefer it, because it is less profitable per user. This is why they've done almost nothing with Classic+ despite players clamoring for it very loudly.

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

#265

Post by saghm »

pfdietz wrote: post #251
saghm wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get this logic. Why would they want to permanently ban someone paying them money because they also played on TurtleWoW? Isn't the entire argument they're making that TurtleWoW could be hurting their own sales? And given that Blizzard doesn't still distribute their old clients anymore from what I understand, how would you prove that people running the old clients ever even saw the licensing agreement? P…

Why would they ban people who violate other terms of the EULA? And yet they do.

Ostensibly because the terms are supposed to avoid making the game actively worse for other players like farming resources in a way that warps the in-game economy for regular players, or being blatantly antisocial in a way that discourages other people from playing (although it's kind of a common complaint that they're generally pretty sloppy at this and could do a much better job). Someone playing TurtleWow doesn't inherently make anything worse for the people who play on retail though, so I don't see how you can compare the two.

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

#266

Post by Xunjin »

sReinwald wrote: post #184
Xunjin wrote: 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…

You clearly haven't played WoW in a decade, judging from this comment. > Even if you buy the expansion just to get the "feel" on how it was, it's impossible. You don't buy previous expansions after a new one launches - they roll into the base subscription. After Shadowlands released, buying BfA separately wasn't even an option. > MMOs like GW2 and even SWTOR do it way better “Keep every expansion fully relevant forev…

> You clearly haven't played WoW in a decade, judging from this comment.

Funny you say that, my Alunira[0] mount took me almost 50 played hours to farm.

0.https://www.wowhead.com/item=223270/alunira

> You don't buy previous expansions after a new one launches - they roll into the base subscription. After Shadowlands released, buying BfA separately wasn't even an option.

They took so long to make that decision, at least they did right?

> “Keep every expansion fully relevant forever” sounds nice until you think through what that actually means for an MMO like WoW. You would either fragment the player base across twenty years of content or turn gearing and balance into a complete circus.[...]

That's your opinion and you are free to have them, but not your "own facts". GW2 do an horizontal progression that you do not need to farm gears between expansions or even major patches, if you play high-end content in WoW, you must know that with every new raid launch in the same expansion, players need to grind a lot to still be relevant.

You also already know, if you really play the retail currently, that how much "services" are offered for people to get like "AOTC" with gold because it's inhuman how much gear grinding to be able to do that achievement and collect it's rewards.

> Blizzard’s actual approach is much more sane: older content comes back in controlled ways. Timewalking reopens older expansion content with scaling and relevant rewards, and Mythic+ seasons already rotate older dungeons into the current endgame pool. Midnight's Season One, for example, features dungeons from Wrath of the Lich King, Warlords of Draenor, Legion, and Dragonflight.

Have you ever question yourself why are there so many private servers? As someone who plays them on and off an argument that always come is "I just want to play that expansion over and over again, and choose which one". And not play a "mix of retail and classic content in a timed gated window".

My "wow credentials" so you stop assuming wrongly: Mythic Raider (never really got Cutting Edge, what I did most was in BfA) and Mythic+ Dungeons (multiples KSM) ;)

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

#267

Post by Salgat »

Thaxll wrote: post #238
saadn92 wrote: 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…

WoW classic has been fully reversed engineered way before Turtle WoW released, the thing they did better is to extend the game with a lot of content, but the core wow experience has been emulated for a long time. 20 years ago I was already using Mangos to play wow classic. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marenkay

Not only content, but countless bug fixes and new features (such as the guild bank). There's also a related project (SuperWoW) that injected a dll to fix and extend the client (which is still Blizzard's old original client).

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

#268

Post by Salgat »

therealpygon wrote: post #247
throwaway27448 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blizzard is right to protect their IP No, it's inevitable. There's nothing positive about using the law to crush competition.

Competition? From top to bottom, they stole IP for the purpose of selling it. If there was zero content in common and with no overlap in quests, locations, etc, then a fair use argument might make some sense. Instead, they chose to set up shop next to Barnes and Noble and offer to sell photocopied books that they go next door and steal, then call it competition.

For new developments, absolutely, but once something has been out for decades (plural), modifying and selling that isn't so unethical. Keep in mind that Turtle WoW built off and supported that original game client from over 20 years ago, they weren't just backporting a bunch of content from Blizzard's newer releases. It's the same as if someone wanted to sell a modded Super Nintendo game, society would not be worse off for this.

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

#269

Post by Salgat »

Folcon wrote: post #141
throwaway27448 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blizzard is right to protect their IP No, it's inevitable. There's nothing positive about using the law to crush competition.

I mean, I don't disagree with you in this case, but if not this, then to a degree, what is IP for? This just happens to be a positive example, IP still exists to restrict certain kinds of competition I mean you can't get a clearer case of copycatting than this, as much as I'm a fan of pirate servers, assuming that they don't stifle the original game and considering calling Blizzard an 800 pound gorilla is quite an un…

Turtle WoW built off a 20 year old client with their own original content. After how many decades do you think it is acceptable for people to be allowed to mod and sell their own version of it? 75 years like with Disney? Would you feel that society would be worse off if people were allowed to sell modded N64 games?

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

#270

Post by Salgat »

tsimionescu wrote: post #164
protocolture wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool and Good. I mean, thats basically what OpenRA is. Or OpenMW. Or many other indie games where they build a modern engine for old assets.

Except OpenMW and OpenRA don't charge players for access/extra content, they only accept donations and give everything away for free otherwise.

I wish for multiple-decades old content the laws did allow for charging, that way more projects like this could be funded to keep alive old content.
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