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.