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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

#271

Post by cosmic_cheese »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #194
Folcon wrote: 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

I’ll never understand modding in this day and age, I got it back in the quake and half-life 1 days when teenagers didn’t have access to commercial game engines but modding total seems crazy to invest time into building on infrastructure you don’t own, you can’t successfully monetize and will likely be taken from you if you do. Instead of just building something you own.

So much has to go right for a new game to see even moderate success. In addition to the programming, you need an art director to give your game a coherent style, 2D texture artists, 3D model and terrain artists, UI designers, music composers, narrative writers, etc, and on top of that you need a compelling universe and concepts for all of these people to work from. And then once that's all done, you need competent marketing so people actually know about this game so they can want to play it.

By comparison, with a pre-existing game much of this is already out of the way and amateurs can get pretty far by just kitbashing existing assets and occasionally mimicking them when creating new assets. Marketing can be as simple as, "this thing you liked, but more, in the way you want it". It's a much smaller lift.

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

#272

Post by cosmic_cheese »

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…

As a current (albeit casual) player of mainline WoW, I think its biggest problem is how hard it's locked itself into the idea of what an expansion should be. Every expansion has more or less followed the TBC playbook: higher level cap, new landmasses and instanced content, total gear reset.

Of course it's going to become impossible to keep everything relevant when they keep stacking the tower higher for decades.

There's no reason why an expansion couldn't expand on what's already there instead of throwing everything out. They could for example do an expansion that fleshes out current zones that could use more love and expands the game horizontally. That doesn't mean they have to abandon the TBC model, but even if they'd just gone with a repeating pattern of "horizontal-vertical" with expansion releases they'd have a lot less content to try to juggle.

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

#273

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#274

Post by tremon »

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.

In what way was anything "stolen"? The content you refer to came with the original client. They reverse engineered the protocol and let existing clients connect to that. There's as much "stealing" going on here as with the Samba team reverse-engineering the SMB1/2/3 protocols. They weren't deceptively tricking users into thinking they were the real Battle.net servers, were they?

In a sane economy and legal regime, this would be allowed under open competition rules, in the same way that car manufacturers cannot prevent aftermarket mods to be sold and installed on their models. All these online platforms have big digital moats, and projects like these are offering alternatives to an otherwise captive audience. That's why Big Platform doesn't like it, but nothing about this has anything to do with stealing.

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

#275

Post by robrtsql »

goolz wrote: post #223

Self inflicted these incidents are. All Blizzard needs to do is follow the lead of the OSRS team, make the old game and add new breadth, listen to your players not your shareholders. For all the dumb mistakes Jagex has made at least you feel heard with their polling and it feels like their is progression. The team running WoW just care that you buy the new mount bundle every season. It is no wonder PvP has been dead…

I'm not a WoW player (never had the PC required to play it, until I did, and now I'm busy with other things), and I don't care about Blizzard's rights as IP holder, but what exactly is Blizzard failing to deliver which makes Turtle WoW's success self-inflicted? Sounds like Retail is no good, but don't they have 4 or 5 different versions of "WoW Classic" to choose from?

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

#276

Post by joquarky »

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…

> Blizzard is right to protect their IP.

By what standard?

How does this action promote the progress of science and the useful arts?

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

#277

Post by joquarky »

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.

Stolen? Why would a huge company not back up their IP?

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

#278

Post by NonHyloMorph »

idiotsecant wrote: post #41
breakfastduck wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve aren't owned by private equity and other giant corporations so they make good decisions and do things fans like. A lot of their entire platform is built on mods they've bought and turned into proper 1st class games (cs, dota, Garys mod etc)

I feel like every large public corporation inevitably turns into a rent seeking parasite. How do we build a system that has more calves and fewer blizzards? How do we incentivize that?

More calves less cylcles!

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

#279

Post by joquarky »

Salgat wrote: post #268
therealpygon wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> but once something has been out for decades (plural), modifying and selling that isn't so unethical

Yep, copyright used to last only 14-28 years.

It was fine then, and I believe that same term should be fine now.

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

#280

Post by marklar423 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #158
marklar423 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but GP called it a copyright violation and my understanding is a "clean room" reverse engineering for interoperability was fair use and not a copyright violation.

Yes this does threaten Blizzard's business model so I understand why they'll go after Turtle, but that doesn't mean we have to care or let them prosecute Turtle for Contempt of Business Model.

Now, if Turtle used Blizzard's WoW trademarks to advertise and make money, I fully agree that violates their _trademarks_ and can be litigated as such. But if Turtle somehow didn't do that (and still sold access to their compatible WoW backend), I'd be interested to hear if that is somehow still a copyright violation.

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