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 pocket. Turtle WoW went further and built new raids, zones, races on top of all that. That's not modding, that's game development without any of the tools the original team had.
The "they made millions" framing is always misleading. You start as a hobby, players show up, hosting costs get real, you take donations to keep it running, and at some point your paypal has six figures running through it over a few years. None of that is profit, it's servers and bandwidth and people helping keep the thing alive. But in the lawsuit it gets presented as revenue from a commercial enterprise.
Blizzard is right to protect their IP. But calling this a simple piracy operation misses what actually happened.
show comments
Someone1234
Just background in case you don't know: Turtle WoW tried to turn Classic World of Warcraft into a Roguelike, but in doing so wound up creating a bunch of new mechanics, and a gameplay loop that was quite unique even relative to other Roguelikes.
So my position on this is; two things can be true at the same time:
- Turtle WoW violated Blizzard's copyright, tried to charge money for some services, and Blizzard are well within their legal (and moral) rights to shut that down.
- Turtle WoW is more compelling than anything Blizzard has done with Classic WoW in years, and they should be commended for that.
So it was foreseeable, just a shame for what was lost.
show comments
goolz
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 for like a decade, the races to world first are only two serious guilds competing against each other and in general both Classic and Retail are memes in the year of our lord 2026. Retail in particular is a lobby game, not really an RPG, where you just queue into things and barely have to explore. Perhaps I am just bitter and jaded but I feel like we lost something so special along the way, and that makes me really bummed, haha.
Lapra
I'm fairly certain there would be no Classic WoW without private servers to show Blizzard there was a demand. They seemed embarrassed about the entire concept.
Same with emulation, really; had that not been developed, I doubt Nintendo would care about their back catalogue.
show comments
zapnuk
Couldn't be more clear violation from a legal standpoint.
Though its quite sad that the community had more creativity (and engineering talent) to develop classic(+) wow.
Everything Blizzard now touches is bland, lacks soul, or is straight up bad.
show comments
gorgoiler
Plus ça change…
From October 2004: Vivendi (Blizzard) win a DMCA ruling over the authors of bnetd, a protocol clone of the StarCraft battle net servers:
Sounds very similar to The Heroes Journey, which was a heavily modified EverQuest emulation server that got destroyed in court by Daybreak Games, the current owners/operators of EQ.
THJ was sort of like arcade mode EQ and became wildly popular (relatively, for such an old game) and started making real money off donations and in-game transactions. They likely flew too close to the sun by making money off it, but it demonstrates that there is real creative opportunity with these old IPs if only given the chance. See also the rise of classic and progression servers for the likes of EQ & WoW, which also started as a community emu effort but have now been officially launched and monetized by the IP owners.
And now Daybreak is launching their own THJ-alike but without any of the community goodwill so we'll see how that goes.
codezero
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 even profit from these kinds of servers.
show comments
tommica
Sucks, turtle Wow sounded good. Wish they would release the server and its custom plugins, maybe people could play it offline with playerbots
PowerElectronix
Very sad that IP laws are once again wielded agains people that love more the IP than the IP owners.
I tried Twow, and the experience blew me away. Awesome community, TONS of new content that not only expanded the endgame, but the leveling experience as well (I don't have time for raiding, so I really appreciated what they did with new quests, new zones etc.) True Classic+ experience that Blizzard will never match, because if they could, they would already.
icar
I know I will be flagged, and it doesn't add anything of value to the conversation, but:
From every single private server WoW player out there, a sincerely Fuck You Blizzard is in place.
This sentiment is shared among all of us, and it's been there for decades. Keep shutting us down, more will come.
pfdietz
It's important to understand it's not just the Turtle WoW people who violated Blizzard's copyrights, it's also anyone who played on Turtle WoW. They don't have licenses to use the clients, and downloading and running those clients is in violation of Blizzard's copyrights.
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."
show comments
0xBA5ED
They're within their legal rights to keep soiling their own game and public image. The original version of the game is mostly in the wild though and players don't care who's IP it is. New servers emerge all the time.
ionwake
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 meetings and they took this course of action without thinking much about it.
show comments
yard2010
Ha facebbok can happily torrent every book written in the history while I can't have fun playing a private server. Copyright laws are just another way of herding the sheep.
mjamesaustin
I'm just over here holding out hope that some aspect of the agreement includes Blizzard taking control of the many assets the Turtle WoW devs created, and that they use those to make lots of new content for the upcoming Classic+, whatever that ends up being.
Fokamul
Private server exists because Blizzard is full of idiots now. My whole friend
group would never touch anything managed by Blizzard, they're buffoons and all talented people left long ago after WotlK expansion.
Now Blizzard only milks current players(cows) and also let others to freely bot and sell gold for real money to people.
arctics
hobbyist server turned commercial enterprise, according to court documents Blizzard claims AFKCraft Ltd. (Turtle WoW) made millions of dollars over 2018–2026 period.
hhh
Positioning for the Classic+ announcement in November.
__w1kke___
They should use genAI to reprogram the whole client binary and move on.
show comments
lousken
WoW servers existed for years, it's funny blizzard still tries after this many years.
show comments
time4tea
So hard to read that article, with all the pop ups, scroll hijacks, and back button grabbing (soon to be illegal)
Why do they try to hide actual content with hateful tech?
Anyhow, no way I would give that company money.
_nhh
What keeps warmane alive?
show comments
polski-g
I have no idea why it is shutting down if the operator is living in Russia.
show comments
mock-possum
Blizzard should’ve just shut down. It’s lived long enough to see itself become a monster.
show comments
zuzululu
but then how is PokeMMO still operating ? Weren't they both using game assets and creating an emulator essentially? Or did Turtle step out of bounds? It's a legally gray area so hard to find more details.
show comments
EGreg
Is war2.ru next?
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.
dbg31415
Shenna will be back. Shenna always comes back. Ha.
Fokamul
All this C&Ds and shutdowns are possible, because whole WOW private servers community are against each other.
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.
------
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.
------
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
surgical_fire
The irony is that the Turtle team released what was probably the best version of WoW, ever. Blizzard had to get it shutdown because it was fucking embarrassing that a fan project more artistically cohesive and more fun to play than anything Blizzard could spit out in decades despite having virtually unlimited resources.
Obviously, the most competent people at Blizzard are lawyers. That Turtle would eventually shutdown was expected.
Hats off to them. I had fun.
show comments
hsuduebc2
Once again, someone is doing Blizzard’s work better than Blizzard, so naturally they have to be punished.
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.
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 pocket. Turtle WoW went further and built new raids, zones, races on top of all that. That's not modding, that's game development without any of the tools the original team had.
The "they made millions" framing is always misleading. You start as a hobby, players show up, hosting costs get real, you take donations to keep it running, and at some point your paypal has six figures running through it over a few years. None of that is profit, it's servers and bandwidth and people helping keep the thing alive. But in the lawsuit it gets presented as revenue from a commercial enterprise.
Blizzard is right to protect their IP. But calling this a simple piracy operation misses what actually happened.
Just background in case you don't know: Turtle WoW tried to turn Classic World of Warcraft into a Roguelike, but in doing so wound up creating a bunch of new mechanics, and a gameplay loop that was quite unique even relative to other Roguelikes.
So my position on this is; two things can be true at the same time:
- Turtle WoW violated Blizzard's copyright, tried to charge money for some services, and Blizzard are well within their legal (and moral) rights to shut that down.
- Turtle WoW is more compelling than anything Blizzard has done with Classic WoW in years, and they should be commended for that.
So it was foreseeable, just a shame for what was lost.
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 for like a decade, the races to world first are only two serious guilds competing against each other and in general both Classic and Retail are memes in the year of our lord 2026. Retail in particular is a lobby game, not really an RPG, where you just queue into things and barely have to explore. Perhaps I am just bitter and jaded but I feel like we lost something so special along the way, and that makes me really bummed, haha.
I'm fairly certain there would be no Classic WoW without private servers to show Blizzard there was a demand. They seemed embarrassed about the entire concept.
Same with emulation, really; had that not been developed, I doubt Nintendo would care about their back catalogue.
Couldn't be more clear violation from a legal standpoint.
Though its quite sad that the community had more creativity (and engineering talent) to develop classic(+) wow.
Everything Blizzard now touches is bland, lacks soul, or is straight up bad.
Plus ça change…
From October 2004: Vivendi (Blizzard) win a DMCA ruling over the authors of bnetd, a protocol clone of the StarCraft battle net servers:
https://lwn.net/Articles/104835/
Sounds very similar to The Heroes Journey, which was a heavily modified EverQuest emulation server that got destroyed in court by Daybreak Games, the current owners/operators of EQ.
THJ was sort of like arcade mode EQ and became wildly popular (relatively, for such an old game) and started making real money off donations and in-game transactions. They likely flew too close to the sun by making money off it, but it demonstrates that there is real creative opportunity with these old IPs if only given the chance. See also the rise of classic and progression servers for the likes of EQ & WoW, which also started as a community emu effort but have now been officially launched and monetized by the IP owners.
And now Daybreak is launching their own THJ-alike but without any of the community goodwill so we'll see how that goes.
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 even profit from these kinds of servers.
Sucks, turtle Wow sounded good. Wish they would release the server and its custom plugins, maybe people could play it offline with playerbots
Very sad that IP laws are once again wielded agains people that love more the IP than the IP owners.
There are 2 Tutle WoW forum posts worth sharing
* Open Letter to Blizzard Entertainment - https://forum.turtlecraft.gg/viewtopic.php?t=22444&sid=72e3e...
* A Journey's End - https://forum.turtlecraft.gg/viewtopic.php?t=24891&sid=72e3e...
Sad news, but expected.
I tried Twow, and the experience blew me away. Awesome community, TONS of new content that not only expanded the endgame, but the leveling experience as well (I don't have time for raiding, so I really appreciated what they did with new quests, new zones etc.) True Classic+ experience that Blizzard will never match, because if they could, they would already.
I know I will be flagged, and it doesn't add anything of value to the conversation, but: From every single private server WoW player out there, a sincerely Fuck You Blizzard is in place. This sentiment is shared among all of us, and it's been there for decades. Keep shutting us down, more will come.
It's important to understand it's not just the Turtle WoW people who violated Blizzard's copyrights, it's also anyone who played on Turtle WoW. They don't have licenses to use the clients, and downloading and running those clients is in violation of Blizzard's copyrights.
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."
They're within their legal rights to keep soiling their own game and public image. The original version of the game is mostly in the wild though and players don't care who's IP it is. New servers emerge all the time.
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 meetings and they took this course of action without thinking much about it.
Ha facebbok can happily torrent every book written in the history while I can't have fun playing a private server. Copyright laws are just another way of herding the sheep.
I'm just over here holding out hope that some aspect of the agreement includes Blizzard taking control of the many assets the Turtle WoW devs created, and that they use those to make lots of new content for the upcoming Classic+, whatever that ends up being.
Private server exists because Blizzard is full of idiots now. My whole friend group would never touch anything managed by Blizzard, they're buffoons and all talented people left long ago after WotlK expansion.
Now Blizzard only milks current players(cows) and also let others to freely bot and sell gold for real money to people.
hobbyist server turned commercial enterprise, according to court documents Blizzard claims AFKCraft Ltd. (Turtle WoW) made millions of dollars over 2018–2026 period.
Positioning for the Classic+ announcement in November.
They should use genAI to reprogram the whole client binary and move on.
WoW servers existed for years, it's funny blizzard still tries after this many years.
So hard to read that article, with all the pop ups, scroll hijacks, and back button grabbing (soon to be illegal)
Why do they try to hide actual content with hateful tech?
Anyhow, no way I would give that company money.
What keeps warmane alive?
I have no idea why it is shutting down if the operator is living in Russia.
Blizzard should’ve just shut down. It’s lived long enough to see itself become a monster.
but then how is PokeMMO still operating ? Weren't they both using game assets and creating an emulator essentially? Or did Turtle step out of bounds? It's a legally gray area so hard to find more details.
Is war2.ru next?
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.
Shenna will be back. Shenna always comes back. Ha.
All this C&Ds and shutdowns are possible, because whole WOW private servers community are against each other.
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.
------
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.
------
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
The irony is that the Turtle team released what was probably the best version of WoW, ever. Blizzard had to get it shutdown because it was fucking embarrassing that a fan project more artistically cohesive and more fun to play than anything Blizzard could spit out in decades despite having virtually unlimited resources.
Obviously, the most competent people at Blizzard are lawyers. That Turtle would eventually shutdown was expected.
Hats off to them. I had fun.
Once again, someone is doing Blizzard’s work better than Blizzard, so naturally they have to be punished.
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.