Posted by Brajeshwar 4 days ago
Obviously, the most competent people at Blizzard are lawyers. That Turtle would eventually shutdown was expected.
Hats off to them. I had fun.
It’s possible that Blizzard just happens to be incompetent in the exact way that would perfectly support money laundering but…big coincidence if so.
I wonder what makes botting that much more trivial/productive on Classic.
Now Blizzard only milks current players(cows) and also let others to freely bot and sell gold for real money to people.
I wonder if Blizzard got a customer list from Turtle WoW as a result of the settlement. At the least, they could permanently ban any WoW player who also played on the pirate servers. Beyond that, they might even engage in large scale legal action, of the kind copyright trolls used in the past. "Pay us $5K and this lawsuit, which might cost you $100K plus your legal fees, will go away."
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.
It's part of why a lot of places might ban your account but they won't ban you-the-person if you make a new one, necessarily - even if every ban was accurately assessed, shrinking your potential player base permanently by even 0.5% annually compounds really badly over time.
(The notable exceptions usually include things where they're banning you for exposing them to legal liability in some fashion, because the risk of you doing it again is so large.)
I'm glad Blizzard doesn't mess with servers of its older games. Warcraft 2 was such a classic! Even more than Starcraft. The original granddaddy that people play 25 years later. That, and Myth 2 TFL was my favorite.