<- Back
Comments (66)
- Someone1234Just 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.
- saadn92I 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.
- zapnukCouldn'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.
- ptmccSounds 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.
- time4teaSo 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.
- 0xBA5EDThey'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.
- hhhPositioning for the Classic+ announcement in November.
- _nhhWhat keeps warmane alive?
- mjamesaustinI'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.
- arcticshobbyist server turned commercial enterprise, according to court documents Blizzard claims AFKCraft Ltd. (Turtle WoW) made millions of dollars over 2018–2026 period.
- zuzululubut 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.
- louskenWoW servers existed for years, it's funny blizzard still tries after this many years.
- polski-gI have no idea why it is shutting down if the operator is living in Russia.
- mock-possumBlizzard should’ve just shut down. It’s lived long enough to see itself become a monster.
- surgical_fireThe 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.