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.
They should have just taken their binaries, trained on the outputs (frames may be) run a few simulations games, and produced WoW-GPT. Blizzard would be working out to acquihire them for millions. Wrong move Turtle WoW.
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).
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.
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
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 ability to do this or weaken copyright to prevent this
Totally agree with this. Blizzard nowadays is a giant, but nobody would have blamed them if they remained a small studio, trying to protect what they've worked hard for to create. Just because they have a lot of money now, doesn't legally change a thing. It sucks because Blizzard has become a shitty company, and I'd like these types of devs from Turtle WoW to be able to continue their work, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
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) ?
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.
One machine can handle over 15,000 players. There's very little to the 'scaling' and the costs are quite low. Low enough that larger projects have managed it without being funded.
Did you ever play Turtle? They did a lot more than just that, as per the top comment in this lineage, and were serving a subset of the community by listening to what people want. Turtle WoW was popular because Blizzard and the shareholders do not care about making a fun and engaging game. They care about you spending money in their store and finding ways to poison the economy with their own gold buying system. WoW died in December 2010, the true spirit at least. Makes me sad to say that, and I hope Classic+ is everything we dreamed, but framing Turtle as just another private server is disingenuous. They were on the wrong side of the law, and perhaps they did get some money for their efforts, but at least they tried harder than the entire WoW Classic team combined.
On the client side how did they do this? I worked with a team reverse engineering another MMO a few years ago and it was because of a plain XML config and game launch args that we could make the client connect to a private server easily without modifications. Blizzard could just implement DRM and put an end to all this, right?
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.
Each patch is essentially a mod on the previous version to limit the amount of bandwidth-WoW had a number of things like that that aren’t strictly necessary anymore.
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.
I could be wrong and being a bit naive, but what prevents them from creating an original game now?
The team have proven credentials at this point surely?
Not to mention at least some of their players must actually like what they do vs wow, unless I'm mistaken about that part and it's still mostly nostalgia
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.
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.
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.
It's not a small thing to create a team who's proven to ship a successful offering, trust me I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do it and hitting that bar is hard
Honestly as someone building a game right now, I'd love to meet some people who are trying things and are open to meeting
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 was hoping to try out Turtle last summer but didn't get around to it. And had looked into Azerothcore. I hope turtle open sources (if they haven't already and they are allowed to).
I do think part of the problem is payment to cover dev time is actually profit.
I profit from work, although they are just paying me for my time really.
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"
People need to learn to let go and build their own gaming worlds, instead of nuthugging and giving money to an evil entity, that is Blizzard. They deliberately shit on every player's head. During the heyday of WoW, they announced something very cool for a specific class, everyone was running amok seeing the new feature.... and then, after release, seeing that people loved it.... they removed it few weeks later, saying, oooh we couldn't make this work.
Bunch of scumbags, who shat on people. Don't give money to Blizzard, they stole almost all their ideas from somewhere else, and Kotick made the whole thing a fucking soulless money making machine that exploits people left and right.
Bobby Kotick announced it early and kept his promise that he made sure they ripped the fun part out of gaming. Well, mission completed. And the addicts keep giving their money to them. Ridiculous.
I can't believe people defending this, I already said and I will say it again, I'm ALL for private servers, but these fricking guys were using art and stuff Blizzard created and profiting from it, they fucked up and deserve to be down, get over it, stop defending the indefensible.
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.
Hosting a wow classic server cost almost nothing, it's a 30 years old game running on modern hardware and software. You need couple of dedicated servers and a single db.
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.
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.
I think you're confusing this with Ascension which is a different server. Turtle was more like Classic WoW but with additional content that fits in as if the official expansions had never existed. So basically it's like Old School Runescape for WoW.
That's one of the things that Blizzard does so bad and private servers try to solve, which is previous expansion content:
Let's say you loved playing Battle for Azeroth. Later Blizzard launches Shadowlands, the content for BfA gets irrelevant, the raids are not doable anymore at the same difficult, the power creep feeds in. Even if you buy the expansion just to get the “feel” on how it was, it's impossible.
MMOs like GW2 and even SWTOR does it way better, in GW2 content from Path of Fire is still relevant in the gameplay of the current expansion, while their PvE/PvP content is done by all players.
I feel Blizzard should just keep per expansion servers up and people can play “over and over again” the same expansion as much as they like.
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.
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
I found it very unfun. You end up in dungeons with a subset of the abilities you're used to. It felt especially bad, when leveling, if I queued for a random dungeon and got into a lower level one shortly after acquiring a new ability.
I don't know much about FF. But a thing with WoW is that new release often brings a significant rework of many game mechanics; they might squish everyone's level; edit stats for millions of items; rework class talents and abilities, sometimes even bringing up the whole new approach to the talents.
So while just scaling down characters is technically not hard to do and there's tech in WoW for that, it's never the same as playing previous expansion. And players want genuine experience.
And preserving all the old mechanics for 12 of expansions would present a whole new class of challenges to a team. WoW is a huge game. They already plagued by lots of bugs.
In FF, the system is very simple, and indeed is not trying in any way to give the original experience. You can sync to a level 30 dungeon, and your character will be scaled so it has the exact abilities it would have today as a level 30 class. Stats from gear are also scaled down by some formulas that still try to take into account the quality of your gear relative to the current best possible.
But this system exists for an entirely different purpose than a TBC server. It exists mostly to make sure low level content is still full of players, so that new players going through the story or players leveling up new classes can always find parties for dungeons. It also helps break the monotony of doing the same few current dungeons/raids all of the time
Note that in FF you have to do the huge main story quest on any new character before you can really access the latest content, regardless of how much you might level, and the main quest also involves runs through most dungeons. I should add that normally people only do this once on one character, since you can level all different classes (called jobs) on the same character - you can be a level 90 robe-wearing black mage if using a staff, and then you equip daggers and become a level 31 ninja in leather armor, or an axe and become a level 67 tank warrior.
WoW has been doing this for like a decade. A lot of the old expansion content gets level scaled for new players, many dungeon groups get scaled to the same level, some of their time travel events have scaled old dungeons up for current players, etc.
Why not just buy it then? It reminds me of Valve’s treatment of Black Mesa, which made the community love the company even more. It’d be hilariously easy for Blizzard to spend some money on the thing and just buy the devs out, fans love you for it and it builds good will with a fanbase. Corporations can’t see past the legal aspect of things I guess.
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.
Arrogant yes but don't forget greedy. Call of Duty is absolutely destroyed brand. Unplayable solely by ridiculous amount of battle passes and stupid fantasy skins.
Also don't forget that around a decade ago they also acquired King, the makers of Candy Crush Saga. They've been all-in on the "get players to pay for extra stuff" for a while now
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.
They used that argument for years to avoid doing WoW Classic, and then it was wildly successful when they finally did. Seems to me like the inability to consider how they could work this into their ecosystem is yet another indicator of how far they've fallen since the golden era.
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.
HL's engine GoldDrc was originally a mod for Quake. Team Fortress Classic was based on a quake mod. Counterstrike was a HL mod they bought out. Portal was a student game they bought. Dota 2 was based on a WC3 map. Left 4 Dead was a mod made by Turtle Rock while working on CS:CZ (so, yet again a mod, although a mod based on their own engine this time and build in house). Underlords was based on a Dota 2 mod.
Deadlock is original, but based on characters and lore from the game they made from the WC3 map.
Deadlock and L4D are arguably the only true original creations.
Valve knows their bread is buttered by outside creation using tools and platforms they can provide and then fold in if it catches their attention.
> HL's engine GoldDrc was originally a mod for Quake.
GoldSrc is based on Quake 1 code with valves own modifications and a little Quake 2 added in, if I remember correctly. I wouldn’t call that a “mod”, they bought a commercial license for the engine and made a game with it.
You’re trying to use this to say that valve are unoriginal? I really don’t think that’s a criticism you can lob at the half life series.
GoldSrc is a continuation of Q1 engine but it's development is of separate lineage even from Q2 and it was a fully licensed agreement. Setting and ideas are all original for HL.
TFC is a re-imaging of TF from Q1 but it's codebase is separate from Q1 TF.
TF2 is a sequel developed in-house.
HL2 is a series of sequels developed in-house.
EDIT: Portal has the same core developers and the same game mechanics, but both the setting and script are Valve original.
Sure, Steam pivoted their path of a game developer studio to a game publishing house but that's doesn't mean they never did anything themselves.
DOTA is an interesting reference here because it also was originally a modification of a Blizzard game. Maybe Valve should hire the TurtleWoW people to make a new MMO for them (maybe called TurtleWhoa"?)
I feel like every large public corporation inevitably turns into a rent seeking parasite. How do we build a system that has more calves and fewer blizzards? How do we incentivize that?
You gotta give capitalist first principles and ideals and policies the boot. When you can use money to buy anything and earn money without practical limits, gaining access to more and more capital at any and all costs, even at the cost of everybody else's life and freedom and rights, is the natural result.
Valve is very much a capitalist company though. Gabe Newell is a billionaire, he owns six yachts, and Valve practically invented the concept of the loot box. So if the question is "how do we get more Valves and fewer Blizzards," it doesn't seem clear to me how giving capitalism the boot helps.
Honestly I'm not sure, but I suspect it's because for Gabe, Valve is his iterated prisoners dilemma
He's got to take care of it or no more yachts
Though part of it just might be helpful knows and respects hit market, at least well enough to understand them, I vaguely recall he left Microsoft to start a game company after seeing how much people fell head over heels with games and thinking there was value there
And don't forget open source games. Before going for the indies, I'd suggest downloading and winning all the available major open source roguelikes. And after that, start creating mods/patches for those. Once you're done with that - and not too old of age - maybe think about spending some money on games again.
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.
That article on Investopedia is from 2021, before the Microsoft acquisition. Activision-Blizzard is no longer a publicly-traded company and instead a subsidiary of Microsoft. Whatever Microsoft wants under this arrangement is what they'll get from now on.
People played Turtle because it was a superior experience to the paid official classic offering. It had properly balanced classes, tons of new, high-quality content, real support staff instead of bots with sub-5 minute wait time for service, policing bots properly instead of ignoring them. Blizzard could offer this quality of service but chooses not to.
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.
It can work. Old School RuneScape runs almost entirely on nostalgia, but the community voting system they have for introducing new content keeps the game alive and fresh, even after 20 years.
if the main product is nostalgia then it’s a derived work and you don’t get to claim moral superiority.
if they created genuinely novel mechanics that can stand on their own then they should do that.
Like you said, DOTA2 was a 1:1 mechanical clone but built from scratch without relying on Blizzard IP. League of Legends was a spiritual sequel with new IP.
Almost all fan projects that get shut down are 99% derived IP and 1% original. That will never fly. Nor should it.
Instead we get every game reinventing the wheel a thousand times. They all end up similar, because the base takes all of the effort to create, so the innovation on top ends up essentially being noise.
No many hit games started as mods. League of Legends is the one that immediately jumps to mind, but I know there are many more coming from Quake and Doom mods etc.
League's Wikipedia page describes it as "inspired by Defense of the Ancients, a custom map for Warcraft III." I believe they also hired some of the core Dota devs to work on League. I guess if you want to be pedantic it was a custom map, but that was more a consequence of WC3 lacking support for mods. They ended up having to work around a lot of limitations to make Dota work in the custom map framework.
They hired a former dev, guinsoo. At the time when LoL was announced dota was being developed by icefrog for a few good solid years already. Most of dota's popularity happened during icefrog's years. Icefrog later joined valve and helped create Dora 2.
These games used the GoldSrc engine. Any game built on this engine gets called a mod. But this is not what most people actually think of when people are talking about mods. Rust is not a mod of Unity. These are game engines that people built a game using.
>DotA
This was a custom map. Not a mod.
>LoL, HoN
These were built on in house game engines and were not a mod.
Counter-strike was definitively a mod, you had to install it in the same folder as Half-Life and start it with 'hl.exe -game cstrike'. It became a standalone game later with the retail release.
Calling DotA just a custom map is a bit of a stretch. That was merely the packaging. These "custom maps" had various scripting capabilities that made them more than just some terrain.
Also custom maps are mods by definitions anyways, with the exception of games where the creation of maps is a component of gameplay.
I mean, to those who played them, 'custom map' is basically just a term of art indicating the things you said. In the parlance of the mid-2000s WC3 scene, you would call them custom games or custom maps.
Or, if you were slightly older, you might call them UMS, as they were in Starcraft. Short for "Use Map Settings", indicating that the game logic should come from the scripts and triggers in the map file rather than the built-in logic for ladder games.
They all started out as mods to games. DotA specifically was a Warcraft 3 mod and ended up making Blizzard change their stance on such things because they lost such a massive IP to a different company. PUBG started as an Arma 2 mod and TF was a Quake mod. All the mendioned games effectively have their origins in mods for other games and likely wouldn't exist (at least in the form they are today) if that weren't for that, is what they presumably were indicating.
It was a "hit game" while it was still a mod. They were able to find investment to graduate to a standalone game because they already had a player base in the tens of thousands.
Rocket League was a sequel to Super Sonic Rocket Powered Battle Cars which was a totally new game but born from the studio building VehicleMod for Unreal Tournament.
We're talking about hit games created specifically as a sequel to a hit mod of another game, and communication to the community of the hit mod that this is where the developers are going, and that they should move to the standalone game if they want to thank the developers for all that unpaid work they did on the mod over the years.
So it's similar to Defence of the Ancients that resulted in DotA and other MOBAs. It wonder if they'll be able to create a version of this with the new mechanics/gameplay loop but with different art/assets.
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
> Blizzard are well within their legal (and moral) rights to shut that down.
Legal rights, sure. Moral rights, you're gonna have to explain yourself, because I see no moral objection here. Culture advances through remixes, and while we can grant artists some exclusive period to profit through their work, we're not morally obliged to let them have a stranglehold on culture forever. People of my generation might not want to hear this, but Classic WoW is a retro game. We, here in 2026, are as far from WoW vanilla as WoW vanilla was from Ultima II. A year from now, replace Ultima II with Ultima I. A year from then, replace that with motherfucking Rogue itself! Morally speaking, Blizzard^W Activision^W Microsoft can go eat their own ass.
Oh yeah, I remember when they abandoned it for years, third party servers revived it, Blizzard realized they can make money off it and shut the third party servers down.
I am curious, can you elaborate more on these Roguelike features and mechanics. Its up for 1 more month, i might be interested in trying them out before it shuts down.
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
Turtle WoW was also porting their fork to Unreal Engine 5 [1] but that got cancelled ~6 months ago due to a Blizzard lawsuit.
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.
WoW originally released in 2004 and has changed every ~2 years with an expansion and the game now is vastly different to what it was originally, which is now called "vanilla". In the 2010s there was a lot of people calling for what became "classic WoW". Most private servers used an early version of the game (either vanilla or one of the first 2 expansions). A lot of people argued that game was more fun at that time and all the changes since have made the game worse.
This issue just didn't die and the game director was famously asked (by a still unidifentied fan AFAIK) if there were any plans to re-release the original game and he famously responded with "you think you do but you don't" at Blizzcon 2013 [2].
This just wouldn't die. There was one particularly famous private server called Nostalrius that got shut down by Blizzard but Blizzard ended up bringing that team in and by 2017, Blizzard announced Classic WoW [3], which launched in 2019 and for several years seemed to have more players than the current version of the game (called "retail") although that's tapered off now.
So Turtle WoW fit into a long history of wanting to play the original game. There's also a movement called "Classic+", which is to fork from the vanilla version of the game and make changes from that. Turtle WoW probably fit into the Classic+ model.
>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.
Offline, the client knows movement, graphics, statics (the world mesh, excluding the location and functionality of npcs, doors, plants, etc.) and some localized text. Almost all the gameplay logic is server-side.
There are multiple private server implementations. Blizzard does not hunt them. They are on github, you can run it in your basement and play with bots and some friends. I don't know if that presents a copyright violation, but as a matter of fact, Blizzard doesn't care enough to even submit a DMCA to GitHub.
Funny fact that both Blizzard and GitHub nowadays owned by Microsoft, so in the end, Microsoft hosts private server code for its own game.
But if you're taking this code, host it on a powerful server for everyone to join, integrate shop to extract money from players, advertise it as a separate game. That's basically running a company which extracts money from Blizzard IP. That crossed the line.
I'm not the one to protect Blizzard, but in my opinion they're doing the right thing here. Turtle WoW attracts players who could be paying subscription to Blizzard and play WoW Classic.
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.
I mean they use the same game client and assets / quests on the server. It is stolen material. On top of that you can pay for it, they have a business model based on intelectual property from another compagny.
I'm all for private servers, I even started playing WoW on one before playing retail, but Turtle crossed the wrong line and fucked up bad, they deserved what happened. You don't fuck with an IP big as Warcraft like it or not.
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.
Blizzard has become a greedy and insidious org. I genuinely dislike the way they do business and implement systems to keep players playing their games as chores rather than for fun. They charge huge money for trivial things, and their support is entirely useless.
> Same with emulation, really; had that not been developed, I doubt Nintendo would care about their back catalogue.
I agree with the previous point (no WoW classic without private server), I'm a bit more doubtful about Nintendo. They did remakes before it was cool (see: Super Mario All Stars), and the Super Nintendo -> Gameboy Advance pipeline was well received.
The people who built Blizzard are no longer at Blizzard. Blizzard is a kin to Google now. Looks similar from the outside, completely different from the inside.
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.
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.
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.
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."
I don't really get this logic. Why would they want to permanently ban someone paying them money because they also played on TurtleWoW? Isn't the entire argument they're making that TurtleWoW could be hurting their own sales? And given that Blizzard doesn't still distribute their old clients anymore from what I understand, how would you prove that people running the old clients ever even saw the licensing agreement? People can't violate an agreement they never agreed to in the first place. You might be able to make a case for people distributing the client, but in this case that's probably just the same people who ran the server.
There is no customer list. The only thing Blizzard could do is ban anyone using the same IP address as someone on Turtle WoW. However since NAT is widespread in many countries and many people don’t have their own IPv4 address this would result in an extremely high number of false positives. Not to mention that multiple people could be sharing the same internet connection. Besides there’s no reason to do that. Someone who also plays on the official server is paying for a subscription. Banning that person now would just mean less revenue for Blizzard.
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.
In general, "you are never allowed to use our products again" is a horrible idea in any industry where all the focus is around trying to get _more_ people to try them.
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.)
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 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.
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 certain) will join our server which gives 260k usd a month. Nobody can prove we're wrong, so we pay 260k for lawyers and poof - there goes the 'pirate' server.
Next year we'll find another way, but for now, just drink and dance.
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.
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.
hobbyist server turned commercial enterprise, according to court documents Blizzard claims AFKCraft Ltd. (Turtle WoW) made millions of dollars over 2018–2026 period.
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.
Perhaps they want to leave Russia at some point in the future and being wanted by the US government for not respecting a judge's order would make that problematic.
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.
PokeMMO does not include any game assets itself. It is also not an emulator but its own engine. You’ll need to obtain the ROMs from elsewhere and place them in the appropriate folder so that the PokeMMO client can extract the files. In many countries it is legal to recreate a game as long as you do not use any code or assets from the original. The player is the one committing copyright infringement if they do not dump the ROM from their own cartridge.
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.
I am p sure Showdown only still exists because it would crater their official VGC league if they'd shut it down. And with Champions out now it is slightly more likely they would go after it, but they know that it isn't possible to iterate and test teams as fast in it as it is in Showdown (and I doubt they plan on changing that considering the limitations seem very intentional).
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.
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.
I’m pretty sure the myriad WoW Classics are money-laundering operations. I’ve known several guilds over the Classic revivals since 2019 and every single member is buying gold. The bots are egregiously obvious and Blizzard only patches the game if people are making too much gold, not if the bots are spoiling the experience.
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.
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.
No, Blizzard had to get it shut down because they're greedy bean counters. They could have spent less money than they spent on legal fees to hire the team and had them produce an even better version, but why do that when you can destroy things and replace them with mediocre slop instead?
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.
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.
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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
I agree with your first statement, this match what I've witness when I learned coding by doing my own private sever.
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.
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.
> Blizzard is right to protect their IP.
They should have just taken their binaries, trained on the outputs (frames may be) run a few simulations games, and produced WoW-GPT. Blizzard would be working out to acquihire them for millions. Wrong move Turtle WoW.
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.
> Blizzard is right to protect their IP
No, it's inevitable. There's nothing positive about using the law to crush competition.
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.
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
> I mean you can't get a clearer case of copycatting than this
I'm pretty sure Turtle WoW has its own storyline, quests, etc. The story focuses heavily on extending Vanilla.
In other words, it's not a simple copycat but a fan project.
Rather than hiring and vying for talent, Blizzard is CnD their fans away.
So why didn’t they just make a game with their own IP and avoid this whole issue in the first place?
Oh yeah, because people didn’t want a new game, they wanted free WoW.
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 ability to do this or weaken copyright to prevent this
That's the reality of the situation
Totally agree with this. Blizzard nowadays is a giant, but nobody would have blamed them if they remained a small studio, trying to protect what they've worked hard for to create. Just because they have a lot of money now, doesn't legally change a thing. It sucks because Blizzard has become a shitty company, and I'd like these types of devs from Turtle WoW to be able to continue their work, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
> but if not this, then to a degree, what is IP for?
The same thing other state-granted monopolies are for.
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) ?
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.
Crazily misleading comment. It's absolutely profit.
One machine can handle over 15,000 players. There's very little to the 'scaling' and the costs are quite low. Low enough that larger projects have managed it without being funded.
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?
Did you ever play Turtle? They did a lot more than just that, as per the top comment in this lineage, and were serving a subset of the community by listening to what people want. Turtle WoW was popular because Blizzard and the shareholders do not care about making a fun and engaging game. They care about you spending money in their store and finding ways to poison the economy with their own gold buying system. WoW died in December 2010, the true spirit at least. Makes me sad to say that, and I hope Classic+ is everything we dreamed, but framing Turtle as just another private server is disingenuous. They were on the wrong side of the law, and perhaps they did get some money for their efforts, but at least they tried harder than the entire WoW Classic team combined.
On the client side how did they do this? I worked with a team reverse engineering another MMO a few years ago and it was because of a plain XML config and game launch args that we could make the client connect to a private server easily without modifications. Blizzard could just implement DRM and put an end to all this, right?
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.
Thanks. That architecture lends itself to modding so well you'd think it's intentional.
Each patch is essentially a mod on the previous version to limit the amount of bandwidth-WoW had a number of things like that that aren’t strictly necessary anymore.
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.
thank you for the optics. i curse all c-level employees at blizzard to stub their toes on a daily basis.
I could be wrong and being a bit naive, but what prevents them from creating an original game now?
The team have proven credentials at this point surely?
Not to mention at least some of their players must actually like what they do vs wow, unless I'm mistaken about that part and it's still mostly nostalgia
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.
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’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.
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.
It's not a small thing to create a team who's proven to ship a successful offering, trust me I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do it and hitting that bar is hard
Honestly as someone building a game right now, I'd love to meet some people who are trying things and are open to meeting
If you just make “wow but with different graphics” how long until Blizzard sues you?
Wow but with different graphics is pretty much every MMO that has come out since 2004.
> ran a private server years ago.
Do you share any code then?
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 was hoping to try out Turtle last summer but didn't get around to it. And had looked into Azerothcore. I hope turtle open sources (if they haven't already and they are allowed to).
I do think part of the problem is payment to cover dev time is actually profit.
I profit from work, although they are just paying me for my time really.
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"
Why did u stop?
I had to get a job and I just stopped working on it as time flew by. Fun times though
People need to learn to let go and build their own gaming worlds, instead of nuthugging and giving money to an evil entity, that is Blizzard. They deliberately shit on every player's head. During the heyday of WoW, they announced something very cool for a specific class, everyone was running amok seeing the new feature.... and then, after release, seeing that people loved it.... they removed it few weeks later, saying, oooh we couldn't make this work.
Bunch of scumbags, who shat on people. Don't give money to Blizzard, they stole almost all their ideas from somewhere else, and Kotick made the whole thing a fucking soulless money making machine that exploits people left and right.
Bobby Kotick announced it early and kept his promise that he made sure they ripped the fun part out of gaming. Well, mission completed. And the addicts keep giving their money to them. Ridiculous.
I can't believe people defending this, I already said and I will say it again, I'm ALL for private servers, but these fricking guys were using art and stuff Blizzard created and profiting from it, they fucked up and deserve to be down, get over it, stop defending the indefensible.
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.
It’s not like the actual creators/artists have the IP they were all nickel and dimed by blizzard (now microsoft) as well.
Hosting a wow classic server cost almost nothing, it's a 30 years old game running on modern hardware and software. You need couple of dedicated servers and a single db.
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
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.
I think you're confusing this with Ascension which is a different server. Turtle was more like Classic WoW but with additional content that fits in as if the official expansions had never existed. So basically it's like Old School Runescape for WoW.
Turtle WoW also attempted to rebuild the entire game client from scratch in Unreal Engine, using Blizzard's art, textures and maps.
Cool and Good.
I mean, thats basically what OpenRA is. Or OpenMW. Or many other indie games where they build a modern engine for old assets.
Except OpenMW and OpenRA don't charge players for access/extra content, they only accept donations and give everything away for free otherwise.
That's one of the things that Blizzard does so bad and private servers try to solve, which is previous expansion content:
Let's say you loved playing Battle for Azeroth. Later Blizzard launches Shadowlands, the content for BfA gets irrelevant, the raids are not doable anymore at the same difficult, the power creep feeds in. Even if you buy the expansion just to get the “feel” on how it was, it's impossible.
MMOs like GW2 and even SWTOR does it way better, in GW2 content from Path of Fire is still relevant in the gameplay of the current expansion, while their PvE/PvP content is done by all players.
I feel Blizzard should just keep per expansion servers up and people can play “over and over again” the same expansion as much as they like.
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.
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
I found it very unfun. You end up in dungeons with a subset of the abilities you're used to. It felt especially bad, when leveling, if I queued for a random dungeon and got into a lower level one shortly after acquiring a new ability.
I don't know much about FF. But a thing with WoW is that new release often brings a significant rework of many game mechanics; they might squish everyone's level; edit stats for millions of items; rework class talents and abilities, sometimes even bringing up the whole new approach to the talents.
So while just scaling down characters is technically not hard to do and there's tech in WoW for that, it's never the same as playing previous expansion. And players want genuine experience.
And preserving all the old mechanics for 12 of expansions would present a whole new class of challenges to a team. WoW is a huge game. They already plagued by lots of bugs.
In FF, the system is very simple, and indeed is not trying in any way to give the original experience. You can sync to a level 30 dungeon, and your character will be scaled so it has the exact abilities it would have today as a level 30 class. Stats from gear are also scaled down by some formulas that still try to take into account the quality of your gear relative to the current best possible.
But this system exists for an entirely different purpose than a TBC server. It exists mostly to make sure low level content is still full of players, so that new players going through the story or players leveling up new classes can always find parties for dungeons. It also helps break the monotony of doing the same few current dungeons/raids all of the time
Note that in FF you have to do the huge main story quest on any new character before you can really access the latest content, regardless of how much you might level, and the main quest also involves runs through most dungeons. I should add that normally people only do this once on one character, since you can level all different classes (called jobs) on the same character - you can be a level 90 robe-wearing black mage if using a staff, and then you equip daggers and become a level 31 ninja in leather armor, or an axe and become a level 67 tank warrior.
WoW has been doing this for like a decade. A lot of the old expansion content gets level scaled for new players, many dungeon groups get scaled to the same level, some of their time travel events have scaled old dungeons up for current players, etc.
> 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.
Turtle wow definitely wasn’t a roguelike it was “Classic Plus” experience with new class/race combinations, all new races, new zones, and new quests
Why not just buy it then? It reminds me of Valve’s treatment of Black Mesa, which made the community love the company even more. It’d be hilariously easy for Blizzard to spend some money on the thing and just buy the devs out, fans love you for it and it builds good will with a fanbase. Corporations can’t see past the legal aspect of things I guess.
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.
Arrogant yes but don't forget greedy. Call of Duty is absolutely destroyed brand. Unplayable solely by ridiculous amount of battle passes and stupid fantasy skins.
Also don't forget that around a decade ago they also acquired King, the makers of Candy Crush Saga. They've been all-in on the "get players to pay for extra stuff" for a while now
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.
They used that argument for years to avoid doing WoW Classic, and then it was wildly successful when they finally did. Seems to me like the inability to consider how they could work this into their ecosystem is yet another indicator of how far they've fallen since the golden era.
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)
Their entire company owes its history to mods.
HL's engine GoldDrc was originally a mod for Quake. Team Fortress Classic was based on a quake mod. Counterstrike was a HL mod they bought out. Portal was a student game they bought. Dota 2 was based on a WC3 map. Left 4 Dead was a mod made by Turtle Rock while working on CS:CZ (so, yet again a mod, although a mod based on their own engine this time and build in house). Underlords was based on a Dota 2 mod.
Deadlock is original, but based on characters and lore from the game they made from the WC3 map.
Deadlock and L4D are arguably the only true original creations.
Valve knows their bread is buttered by outside creation using tools and platforms they can provide and then fold in if it catches their attention.
> HL's engine GoldDrc was originally a mod for Quake.
GoldSrc is based on Quake 1 code with valves own modifications and a little Quake 2 added in, if I remember correctly. I wouldn’t call that a “mod”, they bought a commercial license for the engine and made a game with it.
You’re trying to use this to say that valve are unoriginal? I really don’t think that’s a criticism you can lob at the half life series.
I think we'll see some more creativity with S&box soon as well!
You are confusing an engine and an idea.
GoldSrc is a continuation of Q1 engine but it's development is of separate lineage even from Q2 and it was a fully licensed agreement. Setting and ideas are all original for HL.
TFC is a re-imaging of TF from Q1 but it's codebase is separate from Q1 TF.
TF2 is a sequel developed in-house.
HL2 is a series of sequels developed in-house.
EDIT: Portal has the same core developers and the same game mechanics, but both the setting and script are Valve original.
Sure, Steam pivoted their path of a game developer studio to a game publishing house but that's doesn't mean they never did anything themselves.
DOTA is an interesting reference here because it also was originally a modification of a Blizzard game. Maybe Valve should hire the TurtleWoW people to make a new MMO for them (maybe called TurtleWhoa"?)
I feel like every large public corporation inevitably turns into a rent seeking parasite. How do we build a system that has more calves and fewer blizzards? How do we incentivize that?
You gotta give capitalist first principles and ideals and policies the boot. When you can use money to buy anything and earn money without practical limits, gaining access to more and more capital at any and all costs, even at the cost of everybody else's life and freedom and rights, is the natural result.
Valve is very much a capitalist company though. Gabe Newell is a billionaire, he owns six yachts, and Valve practically invented the concept of the loot box. So if the question is "how do we get more Valves and fewer Blizzards," it doesn't seem clear to me how giving capitalism the boot helps.
And what about when Gabe is gone? Because he is certainly the exception and not the standard for ultra wealthy capitalists.
Honestly I'm not sure, but I suspect it's because for Gabe, Valve is his iterated prisoners dilemma
He's got to take care of it or no more yachts
Though part of it just might be helpful knows and respects hit market, at least well enough to understand them, I vaguely recall he left Microsoft to start a game company after seeing how much people fell head over heels with games and thinking there was value there
Valve is literally the capitalist utopia, they have pretty much unlimited money for their size and can spend it on anything they want.
That's why you'd never see a company like Valve in a capitalist system... wait...
[flagged]
Stop buying/playing AAA games.
Support indie devs, and indie publishers, with your money.
And don't forget open source games. Before going for the indies, I'd suggest downloading and winning all the available major open source roguelikes. And after that, start creating mods/patches for those. Once you're done with that - and not too old of age - maybe think about spending some money on games again.
If this is rent-seeking, it presumably makes them less money than being thoughtful and well-liked would.
No more billionaires.
Gabe Newell is literally a billionaire.
And Buzz Aldrin was an alcoholic, doesn't mean preventing alcoholism is bad for society.
This whole thread is pointing out Valve is the _exception_.
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...
That article on Investopedia is from 2021, before the Microsoft acquisition. Activision-Blizzard is no longer a publicly-traded company and instead a subsidiary of Microsoft. Whatever Microsoft wants under this arrangement is what they'll get from now on.
Microsoft itself is 73% owned by institutional investors, so more of the same really.
see: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/msft/instituti...
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.
People played Turtle because it was a superior experience to the paid official classic offering. It had properly balanced classes, tons of new, high-quality content, real support staff instead of bots with sub-5 minute wait time for service, policing bots properly instead of ignoring them. Blizzard could offer this quality of service but chooses not to.
That seems to conflict with the idea that Turtle's problem was that they charged money for services related to the game.
They will could have shut down the free service but brought the new gameplay to retail.
Many hit games originated as mods. If the Turtle WoW team really are on to something, they should pursue it as an independent game.
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.
It can work. Old School RuneScape runs almost entirely on nostalgia, but the community voting system they have for introducing new content keeps the game alive and fresh, even after 20 years.
Yes, but Jagex owns all of the IP there. Turtle can't use Warcraft's... world.
if the main product is nostalgia then it’s a derived work and you don’t get to claim moral superiority.
if they created genuinely novel mechanics that can stand on their own then they should do that.
Like you said, DOTA2 was a 1:1 mechanical clone but built from scratch without relying on Blizzard IP. League of Legends was a spiritual sequel with new IP.
Almost all fan projects that get shut down are 99% derived IP and 1% original. That will never fly. Nor should it.
Instead we get every game reinventing the wheel a thousand times. They all end up similar, because the base takes all of the effort to create, so the innovation on top ends up essentially being noise.
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.
No many hit games started as mods. League of Legends is the one that immediately jumps to mind, but I know there are many more coming from Quake and Doom mods etc.
Famously Counter Strike as well.
League of Legends is its own game built on an engine Riot made from scratch.
League's Wikipedia page describes it as "inspired by Defense of the Ancients, a custom map for Warcraft III." I believe they also hired some of the core Dota devs to work on League. I guess if you want to be pedantic it was a custom map, but that was more a consequence of WC3 lacking support for mods. They ended up having to work around a lot of limitations to make Dota work in the custom map framework.
They hired a former dev, guinsoo. At the time when LoL was announced dota was being developed by icefrog for a few good solid years already. Most of dota's popularity happened during icefrog's years. Icefrog later joined valve and helped create Dora 2.
And some hijacking of the old DotA forums to advertise LoL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13439036
Counter-Strike
Every MOBA that exists (DotA, LoL, HoN, etc)
Team Fortress
Killing Floor
PUBG
Natural Selection
Undoubtedly, many more that I can't recall off the top of my head.
The autochess genre (Teamfight Tactics) is basically a mod of a mod since it started as a custom game in Dota 2.
Yeah, that's the big one that escaped my memory
Tower defense games.
Warcraft 3, the birthplace of so many amazing genres.
>Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Natural Selection
These games used the GoldSrc engine. Any game built on this engine gets called a mod. But this is not what most people actually think of when people are talking about mods. Rust is not a mod of Unity. These are game engines that people built a game using.
>DotA
This was a custom map. Not a mod.
>LoL, HoN
These were built on in house game engines and were not a mod.
>PUBG
This game used UE4 and was not a mod.
Counter-strike was definitively a mod, you had to install it in the same folder as Half-Life and start it with 'hl.exe -game cstrike'. It became a standalone game later with the retail release.
edit:
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Counter-Strike#Vers...
Are we getting so old that people are forgetting cs was a mod.
Calling DotA just a custom map is a bit of a stretch. That was merely the packaging. These "custom maps" had various scripting capabilities that made them more than just some terrain.
Also custom maps are mods by definitions anyways, with the exception of games where the creation of maps is a component of gameplay.
I mean, to those who played them, 'custom map' is basically just a term of art indicating the things you said. In the parlance of the mid-2000s WC3 scene, you would call them custom games or custom maps.
Or, if you were slightly older, you might call them UMS, as they were in Starcraft. Short for "Use Map Settings", indicating that the game logic should come from the scripts and triggers in the map file rather than the built-in logic for ladder games.
I like how you keep doubling down, and people keep destroying you. Please keep going. It is very informative for me to watch people correct you.
Dota is a wc3 map but, pendanticism aside, there is no distinction between a "map" and a mod in this context.
>This was a custom map. Not a mod.
This is even better. Because it's a map you can start it without modifying your game installation.
There were "real" WC3 mods, but it was always cumbersome and worked reliably only in singleplayer.
Gameplay-wise it's a mod obviously.
Ever heard of Dota 2? PUBG? Team Fortress 2?
None of those are mods. Dota 2 is its own game built on Source 2. PUBG used UE4. TF2 used Source.
They all started out as mods to games. DotA specifically was a Warcraft 3 mod and ended up making Blizzard change their stance on such things because they lost such a massive IP to a different company. PUBG started as an Arma 2 mod and TF was a Quake mod. All the mendioned games effectively have their origins in mods for other games and likely wouldn't exist (at least in the form they are today) if that weren't for that, is what they presumably were indicating.
Having gameplay originate in a mod is different from a hit game being a mod.
It was a "hit game" while it was still a mod. They were able to find investment to graduate to a standalone game because they already had a player base in the tens of thousands.
Just semantics - DotA 2 and LoL like 90% the same game as the wc3 dota “mod” ( we called them funmaps or custom maps)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyonix
Rocket League was a sequel to Super Sonic Rocket Powered Battle Cars which was a totally new game but born from the studio building VehicleMod for Unreal Tournament.
We are talking about hit games. Mods previously made by people who released a hit game are out of scope.
We're talking about hit games created specifically as a sequel to a hit mod of another game, and communication to the community of the hit mod that this is where the developers are going, and that they should move to the standalone game if they want to thank the developers for all that unpaid work they did on the mod over the years.
You don't need to make your own engine to make a hot game from a mod though?
So it's similar to Defence of the Ancients that resulted in DotA and other MOBAs. It wonder if they'll be able to create a version of this with the new mechanics/gameplay loop but with different art/assets.
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
Yeah, that seems like the logical next step here.
> Turtle WoW tried to turn Classic World of Warcraft into a Roguelike,
Can you expand on this a bit? Examples on its new mechanics, etc?
> Blizzard are well within their legal (and moral) rights to shut that down.
Legal rights, sure. Moral rights, you're gonna have to explain yourself, because I see no moral objection here. Culture advances through remixes, and while we can grant artists some exclusive period to profit through their work, we're not morally obliged to let them have a stranglehold on culture forever. People of my generation might not want to hear this, but Classic WoW is a retro game. We, here in 2026, are as far from WoW vanilla as WoW vanilla was from Ultima II. A year from now, replace Ultima II with Ultima I. A year from then, replace that with motherfucking Rogue itself! Morally speaking, Blizzard^W Activision^W Microsoft can go eat their own ass.
WoW vanilla is being sold right now by Blizzard themselves, under a subscription model.
Oh yeah, I remember when they abandoned it for years, third party servers revived it, Blizzard realized they can make money off it and shut the third party servers down.
I am curious, can you elaborate more on these Roguelike features and mechanics. Its up for 1 more month, i might be interested in trying them out before it shuts down.
What did they do that was different from other roguelikes?
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
Turtle WoW was also porting their fork to Unreal Engine 5 [1] but that got cancelled ~6 months ago due to a Blizzard lawsuit.
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.
WoW originally released in 2004 and has changed every ~2 years with an expansion and the game now is vastly different to what it was originally, which is now called "vanilla". In the 2010s there was a lot of people calling for what became "classic WoW". Most private servers used an early version of the game (either vanilla or one of the first 2 expansions). A lot of people argued that game was more fun at that time and all the changes since have made the game worse.
This issue just didn't die and the game director was famously asked (by a still unidifentied fan AFAIK) if there were any plans to re-release the original game and he famously responded with "you think you do but you don't" at Blizzcon 2013 [2].
This just wouldn't die. There was one particularly famous private server called Nostalrius that got shut down by Blizzard but Blizzard ended up bringing that team in and by 2017, Blizzard announced Classic WoW [3], which launched in 2019 and for several years seemed to have more players than the current version of the game (called "retail") although that's tapered off now.
So Turtle WoW fit into a long history of wanting to play the original game. There's also a movement called "Classic+", which is to fork from the vanilla version of the game and make changes from that. Turtle WoW probably fit into the Classic+ model.
[1]: https://turtlecraft.gg/remastered
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghnLIc8EFIM
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUSRkBwQdc8
>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.
Offline, the client knows movement, graphics, statics (the world mesh, excluding the location and functionality of npcs, doors, plants, etc.) and some localized text. Almost all the gameplay logic is server-side.
If it turns out the private server code was a greenfield reverse engineered effort - do you still think that's a copyright violation? Why?
There are multiple private server implementations. Blizzard does not hunt them. They are on github, you can run it in your basement and play with bots and some friends. I don't know if that presents a copyright violation, but as a matter of fact, Blizzard doesn't care enough to even submit a DMCA to GitHub.
Funny fact that both Blizzard and GitHub nowadays owned by Microsoft, so in the end, Microsoft hosts private server code for its own game.
But if you're taking this code, host it on a powerful server for everyone to join, integrate shop to extract money from players, advertise it as a separate game. That's basically running a company which extracts money from Blizzard IP. That crossed the line.
I'm not the one to protect Blizzard, but in my opinion they're doing the right thing here. Turtle WoW attracts players who could be paying subscription to Blizzard and play WoW Classic.
Blizzard should’ve offered the team making Turtle a job, and payed them to develop the next big WoW game.
Unfortunately blizzard is not Valve.
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.
>and Blizzard are well within their legal (and moral) rights to shut that down.
Moral? Nah. They had done work, and they should be able to charge for that work.
Its not Moral to shut a competitor down using tricky IP laws.
If anything this is yet another great example of how immoral IP actually is.
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.
I mean they use the same game client and assets / quests on the server. It is stolen material. On top of that you can pay for it, they have a business model based on intelectual property from another compagny.
I'm all for private servers, I even started playing WoW on one before playing retail, but Turtle crossed the wrong line and fucked up bad, they deserved what happened. You don't fuck with an IP big as Warcraft like it or not.
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.
Blizzard has become a greedy and insidious org. I genuinely dislike the way they do business and implement systems to keep players playing their games as chores rather than for fun. They charge huge money for trivial things, and their support is entirely useless.
> Same with emulation, really; had that not been developed, I doubt Nintendo would care about their back catalogue.
I agree with the previous point (no WoW classic without private server), I'm a bit more doubtful about Nintendo. They did remakes before it was cool (see: Super Mario All Stars), and the Super Nintendo -> Gameboy Advance pipeline was well received.
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.
The people who built Blizzard are no longer at Blizzard. Blizzard is a kin to Google now. Looks similar from the outside, completely different from the inside.
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.
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.
Their business model is to lock you into a monthslong or yearslong grind, unfortunately.
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.
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."
I don't really get this logic. Why would they want to permanently ban someone paying them money because they also played on TurtleWoW? Isn't the entire argument they're making that TurtleWoW could be hurting their own sales? And given that Blizzard doesn't still distribute their old clients anymore from what I understand, how would you prove that people running the old clients ever even saw the licensing agreement? People can't violate an agreement they never agreed to in the first place. You might be able to make a case for people distributing the client, but in this case that's probably just the same people who ran the server.
There is no customer list. The only thing Blizzard could do is ban anyone using the same IP address as someone on Turtle WoW. However since NAT is widespread in many countries and many people don’t have their own IPv4 address this would result in an extremely high number of false positives. Not to mention that multiple people could be sharing the same internet connection. Besides there’s no reason to do that. Someone who also plays on the official server is paying for a subscription. Banning that person now would just mean less revenue for Blizzard.
You don’t kill a competitor and then ban their customers from your product.
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.
In general, "you are never allowed to use our products again" is a horrible idea in any industry where all the focus is around trying to get _more_ people to try them.
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.)
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 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.
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.
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 certain) will join our server which gives 260k usd a month. Nobody can prove we're wrong, so we pay 260k for lawyers and poof - there goes the 'pirate' server.
Next year we'll find another way, but for now, just drink and dance.
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.
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.
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.
That wouldn’t help with the art assets, which is genuinely where most of the value is.
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.
WoW servers existed for years, it's funny blizzard still tries after this many years.
Do they still exist? I remember spending a few weekends on them back when I was 13 or so and couldn't afford a subscription.
There are still some (much less well known) around.
It’s almost as if their sales are plummeting and they’re desperate or something.
Best way to solve that is to waste more money on lawsuits
Oracle strategy.
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?
Warmane doesn't operate within US jurisdiction. (Neither does Turtle Wow, but I guess they didn't want to tempt fate with the legal route)
I have no idea why it is shutting down if the operator is living in Russia.
Perhaps they want to leave Russia at some point in the future and being wanted by the US government for not respecting a judge's order would make that problematic.
Blizzard should’ve just shut down. It’s lived long enough to see itself become a monster.
Blizzard died when it was acquired by Activision. To a lesser extent it died when they shut down Blizzard North
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.
PokeMMO does not include any game assets itself. It is also not an emulator but its own engine. You’ll need to obtain the ROMs from elsewhere and place them in the appropriate folder so that the PokeMMO client can extract the files. In many countries it is legal to recreate a game as long as you do not use any code or assets from the original. The player is the one committing copyright infringement if they do not dump the ROM from their own cartridge.
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?
They aren't modifying the ROM. They've rebuilt all the mechanics from scratch. The ROMs are only there for the graphical assets.
>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/TPC just turns a blind eye, i suppose
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.
Exactly, so this means they're probably gaining something from it.
Yet Pokemon Showdown and Advance Wars By Web have been running for over a decade.
I am p sure Showdown only still exists because it would crater their official VGC league if they'd shut it down. And with Champions out now it is slightly more likely they would go after it, but they know that it isn't possible to iterate and test teams as fast in it as it is in Showdown (and I doubt they plan on changing that considering the limitations seem very intentional).
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.
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.
I’m pretty sure the myriad WoW Classics are money-laundering operations. I’ve known several guilds over the Classic revivals since 2019 and every single member is buying gold. The bots are egregiously obvious and Blizzard only patches the game if people are making too much gold, not if the bots are spoiling the experience.
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.
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.
No, Blizzard had to get it shut down because they're greedy bean counters. They could have spent less money than they spent on legal fees to hire the team and had them produce an even better version, but why do that when you can destroy things and replace them with mediocre slop instead?
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.
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.
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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
I agree with your first statement, this match what I've witness when I learned coding by doing my own private sever.
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.
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.
Which idea? Offering someone else's product for free by copying 99% of the effort?
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 :) :) :)