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Turtle WoW classic server announces shutdown after Blizzard wins injunction
- lousken 7mo agoWoW servers existed for years, it's funny blizzard still tries after this many years.
- celdon25 7mo agoIt’s almost as if their sales are plummeting and they’re desperate or something.
- Pay08 7mo agoDo they still exist? I remember spending a few weekends on them back when I was 13 or so and couldn't afford a subscription.
- somewhatgoated 7mo agoThere are still some (much less well known) around.
- zapnuk 7mo agoCouldn'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.
- reactordev 7mo agoThe 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.
- mjamesaustin 7mo agoI'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.
- Someone1234 7mo agoJust 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.
- x187463 7mo agoMany hit games originated as mods. If the Turtle WoW team really are on to something, they should pursue it as an independent game.
- charcircuit 7mo agoI 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.
- danschuller 7mo agoNo 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.
- Matl 7mo agoFamously Counter Strike as well.
- charcircuit 7mo agoLeague of Legends is its own game built on an engine Riot made from scratch.
- arctics 7mo agohobbyist server turned commercial enterprise, according to court documents Blizzard claims AFKCraft Ltd. (Turtle WoW) made millions of dollars over 2018–2026 period.
- mock-possum 7mo agoBlizzard should’ve just shut down. It’s lived long enough to see itself become a monster.
- somewhatgoated 7mo agoBlizzard died when it was acquired by Activision. To a lesser extent it died when they shut down Blizzard North
- zuzululu 7mo agobut 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.
- realjame 7mo agoNintendo/TPC just turns a blind eye, i suppose
- packetslave 7mo agoNintendo 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.
- weberer 7mo agoYet Pokemon Showdown and Advance Wars By Web have been running for over a decade.
- NekkoDroid 7mo agoI 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).
- stonecauldron 7mo agoExactly, so this means they're probably gaining something from it.
- RandomGerm4n 7mo agoPokeMMO 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.
- hhh 7mo agoPositioning for the Classic+ announcement in November.
- saadn92 7mo agoI 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.
- rustyhancock 7mo agoI 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.
- lachtan 7mo agoPayment 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"
- orphea 7mo agoI hope turtle open sources Have private servers shared their work at all? I have a feeling that everyone is redoing everyone's work and keep it private out of rivalry.
- surgical_fire 7mo agoThe 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.
- stavros 7mo agoNo, 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?
- tempaccount5050 7mo agoYou 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.
- jimbob45 7mo agoI’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.
- rincebrain 7mo agoIt 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.
- ptmcc 7mo agoSounds 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.
- polski-g 7mo agoI have no idea why it is shutting down if the operator is living in Russia.
- cbg0 7mo agoPerhaps 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.
- 0xBA5ED 7mo agoThey'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.
- time4tea 7mo agoSo 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.
- _nhh 7mo agoWhat keeps warmane alive?
- sammy2255 7mo agoWarmane doesn't operate within US jurisdiction. (Neither does Turtle Wow, but I guess they didn't want to tempt fate with the legal route)
- EGreg 7mo agoIs 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.
- codezero 7mo agoI 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.
- hnuser123456 7mo agoTheir business model is to lock you into a monthslong or yearslong grind, unfortunately.
- hhh 7mo agoMaNGOS, 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.
- codezero 7mo agoThe one I used was fully hosted by a third party. I don’t remember much in terms of tweaks except some client configuration changes, I think I had an account on some webapp or it just let me login with whatever.
- hsuduebc2 7mo agoOnce 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.
- KeplerBoy 7mo agoWhich idea? Offering someone else's product for free by copying 99% of the effort?
- Fokamul 7mo agoEverything 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 :) :) :)
- kigiri 7mo agoTurtleWoW 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
- pfdietz 7mo agoIt'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."
- Waterluvian 7mo agoYou don’t kill a competitor and then ban their customers from your product.
- pfdietz 7mo agoIf 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rincebrain 7mo agoIn 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.)
- RandomGerm4n 7mo ago
- tommica 7mo agoSucks, turtle Wow sounded good. Wish they would release the server and its custom plugins, maybe people could play it offline with playerbots
- __w1kke___ 7mo agoThey should use genAI to reprogram the whole client binary and move on.
- WD-42 7mo agoThat wouldn’t help with the art assets, which is genuinely where most of the value is.
- dbg31415 7mo agoShenna will be back. Shenna always comes back. Ha.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- gorgoiler 7mo agoPlus 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/ https://lwn.net/Articles/104835/
- PowerElectronix 7mo agoVery sad that IP laws are once again wielded agains people that love more the IP than the IP owners.
- Lapra 7mo agoI'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.
- nusl 7mo agoBlizzard 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.
- PetitPrince 7mo ago> 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.
- yard2010 7mo agoHa 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.
- wolvesechoes 7mo agoSad 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.
- svag 7mo agoThere are 2 Tutle WoW forum posts worth sharing * Open Letter to Blizzard Entertainment - https://forum.turtlecraft.gg/viewtopic.php?t=22444&sid=72e3e149ea3dbaa6b261972927c81e78 https://forum.turtlecraft.gg/viewtopic.php?t=22444&sid=72e3e... * A Journey's End - https://forum.turtlecraft.gg/viewtopic.php?t=24891&sid=72e3e149ea3dbaa6b261972927c81e78 https://forum.turtlecraft.gg/viewtopic.php?t=24891&sid=72e3e...
- ionwake 7mo agoI 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.
- p0w3n3d 7mo agoI'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.
- ionwake 7mo agogood insight thanks
- Fokamul 7mo agoPrivate 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.
- icar 7mo agoI 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.
- Fokamul 7mo agoAll 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. ------ 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. ------ 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
- kigiri 7mo agoI 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.
- goolz 7mo agoSelf 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.
- robrtsql 7mo agoI'm not a WoW player (never had the PC required to play it, until I did, and now I'm busy with other things), and I don't care about Blizzard's rights as IP holder, but what exactly is Blizzard failing to deliver which makes Turtle WoW's success self-inflicted? Sounds like Retail is no good, but don't they have 4 or 5 different versions of "WoW Classic" to choose from?
- cowsign 7mo agoFor me the biggest draw of Turtle WoW was not the custom content, their custom content was mediocre and their class balance patches were disastrous for PvP. The best things about Turtle WoW for me: - They actively banned real money traders, i e cheaters, buying in-game currency for real money from third parties, and bots generating said in-game currency to be sold for real money. In my experience this is simply not done, at least not to the extent that Turtle WoW did as on WoW Anniversary. On multiple occasions I discovered bots farming gold (it's easy to recognize them by how they play, even easier if you try to interact with them) and reported them to the game masters, all of them were banned within hours on Turtle WoW. - They disallowed "boosting" and "GDKP". "Boosting" is the act of a high level player rushing lower level players through lower dungeons to level them up at a much much faster rate than what they can achieve by themselves. The global chat in WoW Anniversary was being spammed non-stop with "boosting" advertisements from other players, selling their boosting services for in-game currency. "GDKP" is the act of buying gear from raids with in-game currency. Both of these activities incentivizes buying in-game currency for real money i e cheating. Besides that, having those kinds of player services banned, the global chat in Turtle WoW was actually just a chat where people could have conversations and not just a spam dump of advertisements. The overall atmosphere and the social aspects on Turtle WoW were much better than that of WoW Anniversary. I believe that is partly due to the two points above. Despite their custom content, Turtle WoW feels more like WoW felt in its initial state over 20 years ago, than Blizzard's Anniversary servers ever did for me.
- linuxftw 7mo agoWhy not just create a WoW-like game that doesn't infringe on the IP? Surely there are enough people following the project that at some point, they could have pivoted into a wholly unique IP.
- izzydata 7mo agoI was extremely skeptical that Blizzard would bother with something like Classic Vanilla+ where they add additional content to Vanilla Azeroth, but now it seems like a real possibility.
- ting0 7mo agoWell this sucks. It's funny that Blizzard with its vast empire of wealth can't even compete with TurtleWoW.