Comment on World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit
hisao@ani.social 3 weeks agoI 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.
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.
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.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
So I take it you’re also not a fan of modding or fan art?
hisao@ani.social 3 weeks ago
I’m fan of modding, but I wouldn’t want to waste my own time doing modding in cases like this. Outside of opensource projects, modding works well for old, effectively abandonware games, running on custom sourceports. Where almost everything is allowed and corpos don’t blatantly abuse peoples free work. I do mapping for Doom and Heretic. I play Minecraft mods occasionally but I pity developers for spending their time and not getting what they deserve in return and I wouldn’t want to waste my time doing Minecraft mods myself to support Microsoft Mojang mismanaging this game so bad. Theoretically Luanti could have been the solution, but it’s just damn bad because that particular kind of top-down approach to extensibility didn’t work well. Fan art is in much better place because it’s a mutual benefit: artists benefit from working with popular franchise because it draws attention to them.