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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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'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.
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
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
hobbyist server turned commercial enterprise, according to court documents Blizzard claims AFKCraft Ltd. (Turtle WoW) made millions of dollars over 2018–2026 period.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, it's inevitable. There's nothing positive about using the law to crush competition.
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
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
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.
Also, I'm not sure they have to start by creating an MMO
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 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.
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.
[0] https://2009scape.org
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 mean, thats basically what OpenRA is. Or OpenMW. Or many other indie games where they build a modern engine for old assets.
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.
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
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.
Well, here’s your problem. You need to fix that and eat whatever shit they throw your way, pay the money and say thanks.
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
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...
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)
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.
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.
Support indie devs, and indie publishers, with your money.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Warcraft 3, the birthplace of so many amazing genres.
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.
edit:
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Counter-Strike#Vers...
Also custom maps are mods by definitions anyways, with the exception of games where the creation of maps is a component of gameplay.
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.
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
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.
Lol what.
Turtle WoW had nothing rougelike about it at all. It was the normal classic WoW experience with added content. I suppose you could say it did a lot different from other roguelikes... because it wasn't one at all
For anyone unfamiliar with WoW, private servers have been a thing for most of WoW's history. It's unclear to me where the source code came from. I've heard different stories (eg from Chinese servers) and also that it was a greenfield development reverse-engineered from the client. All of this was a copyright violation of course and Blizzard have shut down such servers in waves.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately blizzard is not Valve.
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.
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 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."
Why do they try to hide actual content with hateful tech?
Anyhow, no way I would give that company money.
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.
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.
Obviously, the most competent people at Blizzard are lawyers. That Turtle would eventually shutdown was expected.
Hats off to them. I had fun.
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.
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.