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Comment on World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit

hisao@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Back in the day, people were so idealistic that they poured cosmic amounts of time into reverse-engineering games like WoW - rebuilding its systems, network stack, and filling massive databases by hand. By making the game accessible and endlessly customizable (to the point where private servers could even create entirely new content), they unintentionally boosted and cemented its popularity for decades.

But over time, the rose-colored view faded. People began to see that neither Blizzard nor the gaming industry at large were as benevolent as they once imagined. Notice how this never happened again with newer games? WoW was both one of the first and one of the last MMORPGs to inspire that kind of community-driven pirate server scene.

In the future, I hope we will see a truly open-source, modding-first MMORPG - one that makes corporate nonsense irrelevant. So that players and hobbyists could put their energy into something 100% open-source Instead of wasting time building content for companies that don’t value them and would crush them the moment the numbers dip.

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HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
You aren’t going to get corporate nonsense, but volunteer nonsense instead.

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- hisao@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Also true, but it’s manageable. Look at Godot for example - they had some huge drama regarding their moderation policies, also some drama regarding their development direction. People who were unhappy with one or the other created forks and continued there. It’s not perfect and problems are possible, but it’s far from being as disabling as corporate bs.
  
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  - HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    But even then, Godot is an engine instead of a game. For various reasons, it appears that the ratio of open source games to closed source games is orders of magnitude lower than other forms of software.
    
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    hisao@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    This is true, but in gaming, open-source projects often have huge, incredible impact, which often goes way beyond their original scope. For example Doom sourceport GZDoom is nowadays often used to create completely new indie pixelart or retro-style shooter games, Morrowind sourceport OpenMW is also to my knowledge have started being used in standalone projects. It will take just a single open-source project that covers MMORPG genre somewhat decently to become a solid foundation.
    
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teawrecks@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

rebuilding its systems, network stack, and filling massive databases by hand…making the game accessible and endlessly customizable (to the point where private servers could even create entirely new content)

That’s all reasons why the community was deliberately not dependent on blizzard IP. If they had roses tinted glasses, they would have never done any of that and just played the blizzard version.

IMO if Turtle WoW covered their bases correctly, they shouldn’t have anything legal to worry about (aside from corporate bullying). Their servers should be running original code, they shouldn’t be hosting any of blizzard’s binaries or assets, and they shouldn’t be charging money for any game content based on blizzard-owned IP.

If not, then they messed up…

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- hisao@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I would say being unable to legally create/distribute new content based on blizzard-owned IP is the worst kind of being dependent on blizzard IP. If they at least had their own game client with fully FOSS assets, upon which people could create more and more new content freely, then yeah, that I would call independent.
  
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  - teawrecks@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Again, if they’ve covered their bases, they don’t need to distribute any game client, blizzard assets, or blizzard-owned IP, they only need to run their own server code, and distribute a patcher for the official client (which could optionally add any of their own assets). But there was never any option that allowed them to charge money to use blizzard IP.
    
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    hisao@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Yeah, but that’s not cool. If you think about it harder, non-naive, you wouldn’t want to do any of this even at the point of realizing that you boost blizz/wow popularity for free, by doing a lot of hard work; you don’t even need to go deeper to the point of realizing you can’t build extended versions of wow this way legally, but this one is even worse.
    
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seralth@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Wow and Ragnarok online. The only two games to ever reach private servers of that scope and scale. Both owned by shit companies.

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- hisao@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Lineage 2 also.
  
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