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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

#291

Post by mnmalst »

Folcon wrote: post #149
b0in wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the prebuilt client and art assets you hack and change on saves you million of up front cost. The foldingideas videos about decentraland talks about this. "Dead" mmorpgs work on a small skeleton crew despite the original game having taken 100s of people years to make. Looking it up the turtle wow server was like 5-10k concurrent players? A lot for sure but bordering on that category. It takes a lot of work to…

Don't disagree, just thinking it's a shame as it's non-trivial to create a good team that creates something new, even if it is on top of something old Also, I'm not sure they have to start by creating an MMO

I wouldn't be surprised if this is not the last we hear from them. The server itself is not based on proprietary Blizzard code so they could keep using it and they already started developing their UE5 client. Maybe they will go the full way, create their own art assets and relaunch as TurtleMMO in the future.

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

#292

Post by tremon »

tremon wrote: post #274
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.

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, th…

Thinking about this some more, from now on I'm going to refer to cases like this as "user rustling". Because that's all it is: guiding users out of some corporation's paddock. And if that's seen as a crime, then that must mean that the corporation views those users as property.

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

#293

Post by ionwake »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #213
ionwake wrote: post #195

I find it almost comic how large companies make terrible decisions. I dont need to have played Turtle Wow to know how bad this looks for optics. Game company with lots of money tries to take money of a few people who are make a mod for their game, breaking it in the process. It doesn't matter how you try to spin this, "ACHTUALLY Blizzard has the right..." etc Its almost like some MSC Business intern started the meeti…

I'd say it's this 'constant growth' coercion, and 'optimise without measure' thing. We must report another 10% growth so we find that some guys are playing for free (it's 20k of them). We write in excel the newly found "amount of freebies", then make a plan and show on a Powerpoint presentation, that this 20k players (the number 100% we're certain about - or at least we're trying to lie to ourselves that it is certai…

good insight thanks

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

#294

Post by dpoloncsak »

Ygg2 wrote: post #237
Folcon wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I mean by a positive example A fan project still encroaches and Blizzard as many have pointed out is well within their rights to do this In case I wasn't clear enough, I'm not a fan of this move, I don't think it's a good thing they're doing, however I can't deny they can choose to do it If we want their behaviour to be constrained, then we've got to either convince them otherwise, regulate away their abi…

> A fan project still encroaches and Blizzard as many have pointed out is well within their rights to do this Sure, but I'm sure that IP laws don't demand you send CnD any fan project[1]. In the past, they were way more lenient. I guess they got scarred by their DotA experience. And honestly DotA mismanagement was their own fault. Stuff like that has a hugely detrimental effect; see Games Workshop and Warhammer 40k f…

IANAL but from what I understand, failure to enforce your IP in situations like this is often legally interpreted as a forfeit of your IP, and creates much more friction if you ever need to enforce it down the line

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

#295

Post by saadn92 »

Subdivide8452 wrote: post #179
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…

Out of curiosity, as a fellow dev I'm interested in how you go about reverse engineering these types of things. I assume for networking, you keep track of what goes in and out of the live game. How do you go about pathing? How do you reverse engineer spells, how they scale over levels, and how bosses work, when they spawn, and how they spawn (based on non time based factors) ?

Networking was the most straightforward part actually. You run the real client and then point it at your server, and use a packet sniffer to capture everything.

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

#296

Post by therealpygon »

tremon wrote: post #274
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.

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, th…

Except that is not at all how the game works and your example is simply and fundamentally invalid. The content is not “included with the game”.

Every quest, every drop, every starting location, every single bit of what makes the game playable is server side. You do not get this by getting the game. This isn’t about the use of some 3d models and textures.

While they may have recreated their data item by item and quest by quest, they quite literally stole that copyrighted material (what is THAT item named, what is THAT NPC named, what is THAT quests text, what is THAT towns name) in order to replicate the classic Warcraft experience. That is, quite literally, copyright infringement for the sake of selling a competing product. I can’t steal your apples and then set up a store to sell them for a lower price next door.

If they came up with their entirely own universe and simply reused the assets but without a single reference to the Warcraft world, maybe your argument would make some sense.

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

#297

Post by whywhywhywhy »

zorked wrote: post #196
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you can’t successfully monetize this wasn't the goal of modding.

but there will be a point you'll wish you did.

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

#298

Post by codezero »

hhh wrote: post #176
codezero wrote: post #100

I don't even remember the name of the server or software, but even back when WoW was contemporary I had a lot more fun playing on free servers with extended XP, even though pretty often bosses would be buggy or not quite the same as in the real game. It was so much more playable and casual compared to the early WoW (or worse, EverQuest which came before). It's a shame game companies can't find a way to embrace or eve…

MaNGOS, ARCEMU are the two that come to mind. I was really young and it took me so long to figure out how to use svn to get the code and then to compile it, so i always used repacks. Some guy on MMOWNED helped teach me all this stuff, he still makes private server content today.

The one I used was fully hosted by a third party. I don’t remember much in terms of tweaks except some client configuration changes, I think I had an account on some webapp or it just let me login with whatever.

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

#299

Post by Folcon »

Ygg2 wrote: post #249
nkrisc wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s WoW but it’s not WoW? Sounds like they’re talented game designers and they sunk their whole project because they stole art and assets. Sounds like they could have made a cool, new game with their own assets and been successful if it stands so well on its own merits.

> It’s WoW but it’s not WoW? It's substantially different from a pirate server. > Sounds like they’re talented game designers and they sunk their whole project because they stole art and assets. At the end of the day, they are in essence WoW modders. Plus, a new game with own assets and engine is a different beast compared to modding an existing engine.

Yes, and talented modders sometimes become a new studio, that's all I was wondering, if that was going to happen here

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

#300

Post by Ygg2 »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #294
Ygg2 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A fan project still encroaches and Blizzard as many have pointed out is well within their rights to do this Sure, but I'm sure that IP laws don't demand you send CnD any fan project[1]. In the past, they were way more lenient. I guess they got scarred by their DotA experience. And honestly DotA mismanagement was their own fault. Stuff like that has a hugely detrimental effect; see Games Workshop and Warhammer 40k f…

IANAL but from what I understand, failure to enforce your IP in situations like this is often legally interpreted as a forfeit of your IP, and creates much more friction if you ever need to enforce it down the line

Sure, but giving them a generous IP license isn't considered a forfeit of your IP.

Blizzard actually went a step beyond and asked for your forfeit of any IP that you make with their tools. Not that any of those tools was used for Turtle WoW.

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