Posted by Brajeshwar 4 days ago
Turtle WOW owners have long history of scams (gold selling) and DDOSing other servers then buying them or something like that.
Warmane uses unpatched RCE in 335a client for their own Anticheat (yes, rofl) and their custom content changes.
Project Ascension, worst Pay2Win there is. Someone said they have more employees than there is Blizzard employees working on Wow Classic.
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Wow private servers run for decades now and nobody ever did something to "fix" copyright infringement. Every private server linked or hosted Wow clients directly on their websites.
Servers emulators (which are not emulators, wow community just call them like that) are ok, since they're re-implemented only from packet communication between clients and official servers.
Problem is copying dungeons (raids, scripting) behavior and other things.
There wasn't any motivation to fund development of opensource wow client, this way only players would broke copyright, if they would be required to provide client copyrighted data by themselves. And over time, it could be also redone more even now, with LLM.
Hosting private WOW servers always was about making huge money and very quickly, I know people with multiple houses and cars only from hosting one server and they never ever did something custom like Turtle Wow. You could just download opensource wow server implementation, rent a server, setup payment gateway and the hardest thing was to come up with the cool name for your server :D
It's easy, because players have no problem to start on new server several times per year, since that's all they do on their main private server. There is reset each year and they're usually waiting when some raid will open etc.
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Nobody sane would player on official Wow servers, Blizzard is openly supporting botting and real money trading.
There is even opensource bot coded by Microsoft employee :D
But I can ensure you that my motivation wasn't money, and I don't think it's the case for most starting projects. How ever, with success come temptation, also if you can easily justify getting some cash
I could hire some dev, I could get a better server, do some promotion, etc...
And then when money arrive it's hard not to feel all your hard work doesn't deserve a bit of the share.
To me the main issue is that there is no legitimate way to license blizz IP and give back a share.
TurtleWoW wasn't a simple "recycle the content and don't pay for retail" type, and those are actually a lot of work interesting take on the classic game.
It's a shame there are no good legal way to make a legit business to explore those ideas more seriously and for the "private server scene" to grow up in it.
I didn't mean that it was cashgrab for everyone hosting own wow server.
Many was great and great people.
Yes, Blizzard didn't want a hassle with licenses or maybe because they were toxic company from beginning. Remember lawsuits for sexual attacks in their offices, suicide on their meetings etc.
Ridiculous company.
If I can compare it with let's say, Ultima Online.
Dev community is cooperative to highest levels. People are making opensource servers and multiple opensource or free clients. And plugins.
And most played Ultima Online server has some type of licensing agreement with current IP owners.
That is a common myth. It can even be more illegal in the case of DS games as you also break the DMCA by circumventing the DS's protection scheme of their games.
(i) Video games in the form of computer programs embodied in physical or downloaded formats that have been lawfully acquired as complete games, when the copyright owner or its authorized representative has ceased to provide access to an external computer server necessary to facilitate an authentication process to enable gameplay, solely for the purpose of: (A) Permitting access to the video game to allow copying and modification of the computer program to restore access to the game for personal, local gameplay on a personal computer or video game console; or (B) Permitting access to the video game to allow copying and modification of the computer program to restore access to the game on a personal computer or video game console when necessary to allow preservation of the game in a playable form by an eligible library, archives, or museum, where such activities are carried out without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage and the video game is not distributed or made available outside of the physical premises of the eligible library, archives, or museum.
It's a bit of a stretch, but one that would be enough of a headache that it wouldn't be worth pursuing against a particularly stubborn person.
Last time, they even shut down a few major Classic servers before realizing that people had gone there because they did not want to play Blizzard’s shit mutilated version of the game they loved.
All we can do is hope Blizzard copies this idea in time as well. Activision Blizzard is, without a doubt, one of the worst gaming companies out there.
Sure it's no way comparable to the initial work of the original game but it's short sighted to think it's just a rip-off
So your idea, they copied their recent work is just ...
Other than that, I'm fan of Blizzard, mainly because of their relation to botting :) :) :)