Turtle WoW classic server announces shutdown after Blizzard wins injunction

This is interesting point. I think lot of people assume that training gathers new "metadata" based on the original data and ignore what the training optimises for which is direct copy of the input. Training a model results in a fancy copy paste (unless incentivised differently).

You're naive thinking that Blizzard wants to make something new and creative.

They're just milking current players and they even let people to bot and RMT. Without banning anybody.

Not only content, but countless bug fixes and new features (such as the guild bank). There's also a related project (SuperWoW) that injected a dll to fix and extend the client (which is still Blizzard's old original client).

Turtle WOW is not a competition to the blizzard's in my point of view. I played on Turtle WOW from time to time with my kids, like once a month, because this is the amount of time I have.

I won't buy 4 subscriptions and pay them monthly, because there is no point of paying 63$ a month for one-a-month session. So obviously I am not interested in it. Also the new gameplay that is really crippled by a lot of un-skippable tutorials and too-much-experience first levels gameplay is appalling to me, so I won't teach my kids to play this new broken WoW version, sorry.

At the end of the day, copyright is a government-enforced monopoly. Crushing competition is literally the point.

Cases like this though make a good argument for copyright reform in my opinion. Video games probably don't need as long a copyright term as, say, books, and mods should legally protected (and copyrightable in their own right) as long as they don't function without a legal copy of the original game/program they're modifying.

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.

I mean, I don't disagree with you in this case, but if not this, then to a degree, what is IP for?

This just happens to be a positive example, IP still exists to restrict certain kinds of competition

I mean you can't get a clearer case of copycatting than this, as much as I'm a fan of pirate servers, assuming that they don't stifle the original game and considering calling Blizzard an 800 pound gorilla is quite an understatement in this case, I doubt this could

Infantile take. Here's a positive: creates incentive for people who want to compete to actually make something new.

If we could just freely clone generational hit games and make millions off them, only idiots would make new games.

In WoW specifically, I'll chime in with some things I know about: - the WoW client contains a lot of stuff in their DBC (DataBase Client) files (for example spells and their effects, talents, achievements, etc), which you can extract (the file formats used are basically unchanged and well known since first WoW came out) - the client also uses WDB Cache files which contain things the player has encountered (creatures, items, quests), and volunteer players then send these files to projects like TrinityCore (probably the best known server emulator), which use them to build databases - for dungeon/boss scripting specifically, there's a lot of guilds competing for "world firsts" on official servers who collect a ton of information about boss behaviour, they then use that to develop addons, which help their players when actually doing the boss. then, when you want to implement the boss scripting in TrinityCore (or other emulator), these addons provide a decent starting point for things like abilities and their times, boss phases, etc. afterwards, volunteers report differences they encounter on official servers vs emulators in boss behavior

Yes kind of. You have to differentiate between all the different kinds of data. A lot of data was already included in the client files, but for the rest you had to sniff packages, analyse combat logs, watch 360p videos of boss fights and try to figure out exactly how mechanics are working. It got very ugly after a new expansion has been released, because it was not possible anymore to sniff for the older expansion.

It was always a “best effort”, but also very rewarding if you got a specific fight “somewhat” close how it was on the official servers.

WoW (classic era through MoP) stores all game assets in MPQ archives. The client has a built-in override system it loads patch files in order (patch-1.mpq, patch-2.mpq, ... patch-A.mpq, patch-B.mpq etc...) and later patches override earlier ones. So to add custom content, you just drop a new patch-X.mpq into the Data/ folder with your modified files and the client picks them up automatically.

For something like Turtle WoW's custom races and zones that means shipping modified DBC files (the client-side database tables ChrRaces.dbc, CharBaseInfo.dbc, etc), new models/textures, modified Lua for the character creation UI, and map data for new zones. All packaged in an MPQ that players download alongside the client.

As for DRM Blizzard moved away from MPQ to CASC (their own proprietary archive forma) starting in WoD, which makes this kind of modding significantly harder on modern clients. But the classic-era client binaries have been in the wild for 15+ years, so that ship sailed.

When I played on a private server, you used an old version of the client binary. So even if Blizzard implemented DRM now, it wouldn’t impact these old versions.

Similar to the XML config you mentioned, WoW uses/used a plaintext config file where a realmlist URL can be set.

Yes, exactly.

How expensive is this:

Download opensource wow server from github

Rent a server VM.

Come up with very cool name, like MurlocWOW

Create Discord for it.

Post AD to reddit/wowservers

Run server

Day 1, several thousands of players will join by themselves. Because everyone looks for something "new" for free.

Profit?

  I hope turtle open sources

Have private servers shared their work at all? I have a feeling that everyone is redoing everyone's work and keep it private out of rivalry.

Payment to devs could be considered profit, but profit for the actual people, not the project as a whole and its owners. Also, remember, it's still work, even if it's work on a game. There are reasons not to call pay you get from work "profit"

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 manage that but nothing compared to making an original IP from scratch.

There is no shortage of game dev talent or adjacent creatives. It’s doubtful they will go on to find roles in the industry given the current climate and they presumably don’t have the capital to gamble on multiple years of game dev for potentially no return.

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.

If you just make “wow but with different graphics” how long until Blizzard sues you?

Part of the settlement might prevent them from launching a similar game for X years. Wouldn't be unheard of.

I'll answer myself - there are some projects available on github so nothing scarce, really. I just wonder how much does it take to set it up. And also the loneliness there would be unbearable (turtle wow was quite populated, so Auction House would pose some value)

I had to get a job and I just stopped working on it as time flew by. Fun times though

How can you be all for private severs, but against them using “art and stuff”? Have you ever played a private server that didn’t use WoW assets? That would just be another game.

Yes, give your money to the company of breast milk thiefs.

Former RuneScape private server[0] hoster here. Our infra costs would be about 200$/mo, but for a high quality server like in the OP, if you ever wanted to compensate any developer a respectable amount for their work, you would instantly be in the millions. We had about 20,000 hours of professional dev work put in over 5 years for our game.

[0] https://2009scape.org

Turtle WoW also attempted to rebuild the entire game client from scratch in Unreal Engine, using Blizzard's art, textures and maps.

FFXIV's level/stat sync system is also pretty cool for keeping the older stuff playable long past its original release, players get levels and stats and skills scaled down to the max level appropriate for the content

4-player dungeons still end up being a bit of a faceroll, but it's definitely possible to wipe on the 8-player bosses if mechanics are not observed

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 forever” sounds nice until you think through what that actually means for an MMO like WoW. You would either fragment the player base across twenty years of content or turn gearing and balance into a complete circus.

Imagine your best-in-slot trinkets from the current raid and Siege of Orgrimmar, your tier set from Dragon Soul, the weapon from Hellfire Citadel. Try organizing a group when other classes need gear from Icecrown Citadel, The Everbloom, Argus and Ahn'Qiraj.

The point of "current expansion content is relevant" is that it funnels the player base into a fairly narrow area of the theme park. That is important, because if you spread out the population over 20 years worth of content, you risk making the world feel incredibly empty, which is a death sentence for a theme park MMORPG.

Blizzard’s actual approach is much more sane: older content comes back in controlled ways. Timewalking reopens older expansion content with scaling and relevant rewards, and Mythic+ seasons already rotate older dungeons into the current endgame pool. Midnight's Season One, for example, features dungeons from Wrath of the Lich King, Warlords of Draenor, Legion, and Dragonflight.

  Blizzard’s actual approach is much more sane: older content comes back in controlled ways.

> Let's say you loved playing Battle for Azeroth.

Well, here’s your problem. You need to fix that and eat whatever shit they throw your way, pay the money and say thanks.

Because they're arrogant, and have critical stakeholders. The fact that someone else took their assets and made a better game runs counter to the story that they're the best in the business.

In blizzards case, mmo's are a huge time sink and not many have people have time to commit to multiple titles. Acquiring a competitior and maintaining it would see subscribers leave their main offering (which has been optimised for microtransactions and engagement) and splitting the player base.

I really think it is ego. Blizzard is the king of MMO makers, they can’t do anything wrong in their own eyes. They have the data that shows that people want to just play alone and care about the story above everything while completely refusing to acknowledge that the game never was about either of those and that game play style only rose up later as the MMO part got lost.

If Blizzard was to hire the turtle team and add all their content into a real classic plus experience that would be admitting that Blizzard is incapable of doing that faithfully and if it got popular then that raises even more questions about Blizzard and their C suites decisions

Also with Valve. Pretty much everyone who was going to buy the game already had it. So allowing something new really didn't impact their revenue in any significant way. With subscription games this is really not true.

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)

Valve is run by one guy (so far as I know) and he's only accountable to himself. Since he's got pretty much everything he wants from the arrangement, he has no problem with spending money on what most companies would consider cost centers and turning them into something bigger.

Activision Blizzard is run as a publicly-traded company. 86% of it is held by institutional investors [0] who are never satisfied. Most are managing portfolios of assets which are, in turn, often backing retirement accounts held by individuals. There is no ceiling because of factors like inflation, "executive incentives" that the board proposes, and the ever-increasing demands of retirees. If they can get another nickel out of the business, they'll absolutely go for it.

So really, it's about the mindset of the people making the decisions.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/activision-blizzard-top-shareho...

I can imagine naked licensing being a factor.

I don't think we needed any more proofs that blizzard is ran by actual assholes, but here be are.

You understand that the people playing Turtle don't pay for it, they don't use the official game because they don't want to pay.

How is that supposed to work when the main product is nostalgia? It's a mod for people who think the first-party expansions aren't true to the core of the original game - how could an independent game with completely new IP ever have the same draw?

You really can't compare this to something like DotA, where the original engine and IP was basically set dressing for the new game built within it. People were primarily interested in the mechanics - which is why DotA-the-game and League of Legends were able to become so popular.

I don't think this is true. I think what you may be thinking of is many hit games did not create their own game engine.

There's 3 scenarios they could follow:

1) Create a new IP with the knowledge they have from Turtle WoW, create a similar game and market it 2) Contact Blizzard, apologise and maybe be brought into the team to develop updates for Classic or Retail 3) Drop the whole thing, leave the project and disappear

Would be great to see #1, but I'm more expecting #3

It is not similar at all. DotA was a completely different game from Warcraft 3, Turtle WoW is just Vanilla WoW with extra content. The core gameplay is the same.

Yeah, that seems like the logical next step here.

WoW vanilla is being sold right now by Blizzard themselves, under a subscription model.

The comment above is completely wrong, and Im not sure how they got that misconception unless it's an AI fabrication (although it doesnt read like AI)...

Turtle WoW had nothing rougelike about it at all. It was the normal classic WoW experience with added content. I suppose you could say it did a lot different from other roguelikes... because it wasn't one at all

>For anyone unfamiliar with WoW, private servers have been a thing for most of WoW's history. It's unclear to me where the source code came from. I've heard different stories (eg from Chinese servers) and also that it was a greenfield development reverse-engineered from the client. All of this was a copyright violation of course and Blizzard have shut down such servers in waves.

It was explained to me, a long time ago, that WoW's traffic was originally unencrypted and a lot of it was reverse engineered from packet captures. Thats now roughly a standard and while people cant sniff modern games, they can just go back to the old mechanics and the old netcode clones are still good.

That was something an old WoW guy told me while he was setting up a local WoW server in college but it feels good.

Implementing a WoW classic server is actually fairly easy. The game client comes with the entire engine, art, music, and quest content. The server is basically a fancy IRC server, taking client events and rebroadcasting them to other clients.

Even many of the events are implied, like how regular attacks continue at a fixed frequency once started, so other clients only need to know when the player started attacking and whether they are still in range, and player run speed is a constant so a player running in a straight line doesn't generate additional events.

I even suspect the dice rolls are coming from a shared RNG that each client maintains independently, but haven't researched it.

This is how WoW classic was playable over a 33K modem.

If it turns out the private server code was a greenfield reverse engineered effort - do you still think that's a copyright violation? Why?

I think Blizzard did offer some jobs to the devs behind Nostalrius to work on then-upcoming Classic?

Honestly, the weakness of most game corporations today is the fact that they are indeed not Valve.

By that logic, I should be able to sell Taylor Swift merchandise and music without asking her, but only if I make it myself. I'll call it Turtle Taylor Swift and charge a little bit less than official Taylor Swift merchandise and music. I'll record a mix tape with her songs on it and sell it as a 'new' album.

> using tricky IP laws.

Lol what.

For me the biggest draw of Turtle WoW was not the custom content, their custom content was mediocre and their class balance patches were disastrous for PvP.

The best things about Turtle WoW for me:

- They actively banned real money traders, i e cheaters, buying in-game currency for real money from third parties, and bots generating said in-game currency to be sold for real money. In my experience this is simply not done, at least not to the extent that Turtle WoW did as on WoW Anniversary. On multiple occasions I discovered bots farming gold (it's easy to recognize them by how they play, even easier if you try to interact with them) and reported them to the game masters, all of them were banned within hours on Turtle WoW.

- They disallowed "boosting" and "GDKP". "Boosting" is the act of a high level player rushing lower level players through lower dungeons to level them up at a much much faster rate than what they can achieve by themselves. The global chat in WoW Anniversary was being spammed non-stop with "boosting" advertisements from other players, selling their boosting services for in-game currency. "GDKP" is the act of buying gear from raids with in-game currency. Both of these activities incentivizes buying in-game currency for real money i e cheating. Besides that, having those kinds of player services banned, the global chat in Turtle WoW was actually just a chat where people could have conversations and not just a spam dump of advertisements.

The overall atmosphere and the social aspects on Turtle WoW were much better than that of WoW Anniversary. I believe that is partly due to the two points above. Despite their custom content, Turtle WoW feels more like WoW felt in its initial state over 20 years ago, than Blizzard's Anniversary servers ever did for me.

Why would they ban people who violate other terms of the EULA? And yet they do.

Presumably Turtle WoW also had payment details. If those match up with the IP of someone playing WoW, Blizzard has a very good case for action.

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.

If you can scare the hell out of other people from using pirate servers in the future, you could come out ahead. And the money from shakedowns could be quite lucrative, if the volume could be made high enough.

There are still some (much less well known) around.

Best way to solve that is to waste more money on lawsuits

I see. What about modifying a memory of a loaded ROM with like hex codes? Is that what PokeMMO is doing as well to change gameplay like show another player's location and inventory?

>if they do not dump the ROM from their own cartridge

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.

Nintendo is probably THE most aggressive company in the industry in terms of going after people for using their IP in unauthorized ways. They don't have a blind eye.

It might be true that that's how most of the money gets made on them now, but famously for many years they refused to try to make such a thing officially, so I doubt that was the nominal reason to start them.

I wonder what makes botting that much more trivial/productive on Classic.

You could hire a lawyer straight out of law school. Litigating this would cost almost nothing, it's cut and dried obvious copyright/trademark infringement and turtle wow would be incredibly stupid to fight it. But Blizzard already has a legal team so it cost them literally nothing.

Yes, sorry.

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.

TurtleWoW wasn't a simple copy of the original game, you can see this as a legit extension it's a lot of work.

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

Everything what Blizzard did in the last 20 years is just big pile of steaming BS.

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 :) :) :)