Comment on World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 2 days agoOk, so then what is your criticism of Turtle WoW? You’re ok with fan-made art, you don’t care about the legality of IP law, they are more than likely pulling players (and profits) away from blizzard, so are you just critical of the fact that they’re not profiting as much as they could/should be?
On the note of “morally good”, consider Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson had the integrity and legal protection to say that Calvin and Hobbes should exist as a set of comic strips and nothing else. He refused to do what every other comic creator did, selling their IP to mass produce toys, and movies, and clothes etc. He didn’t want to monetization to taint people’s experience with the characters.
So if i understand your position correctly, it is “morally good” that people regularly violate his copyright by creating those bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on various brands and sell them for their own profit, a profit that Watterson himself refuses to enjoy for the good of the art. But you disagree, and profits of others is more important?
hisao@ani.social 2 days ago
It’s not only Turtle WoW, it’s more criticism of the whole Mangos / WoW server emulation community. They were too naive and positive-thinking to jump into developing extremely-high-effort projects like this without planning ahead how exactly it will allow them personally and creators who build upon this to benefit/profit from their work, while also avoiding legal issues. Maybe they put too much trust into Blizzard being good guys and not moving forward with any lawsuits, maybe they were simply enthusiastic about technical side of things and ignored the big picture for too long. If they realized those points sooner, it could have become a general-purpose open-source MMORPG platform, not something that only works for WoW and makes people legally wrecked the moment they try to go further.
It is “morally good” for people being able to freely do this. Whether you like it or not - it’s subjective. I personally most likely wouldn’t produce derivative works if author asked not to, especially with a stance like this, but that’s just a personal choice, and it’s case-by-case thing. If author is a massive retard like J. K. Rowling - it’s morally good for people to be able to ignore author wishes and opinions regarding their work/characters. And whether author is retard or not is also subjective. In the end, author should not dictate what other people do, including what other people do with their work.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Turtle WoW is a direct response to years of blizzard ignoring players’ request to embrace what people liked about vanilla WoW. They are well aware that blizzard is a shell if its former self and is entirely profit driven. If they thought blizzard were good guys, they wouldn’t need to exist in the first place.
So first off, telling someone who made a game that they should have made a general purpose engine instead completely misunderstands the intention or relative complexity involved.
A general purpose MMO platform is a holy grail that’s really easy to ask for, but really complex to actually implement. Even for-profit general purpose MMO tooling (ex. Spatial OS, Spacetime DB) are struggling to establish themselves. This is because, one does not simply write a general purpose MMO backend. Every cycle matters because it represents costs in the form of electricity, bandwidth, and latency that scales with the number of connected users. So historically, MMO servers are written specifically for the requirements of the gameplay they are supporting.
And then there’s the actual content, which takes an army of devs and artists.
Turtle WoW devs (if they did any of the coding themselves) are doing something much simpler: approximate existing behavior of the server to support an existing client with existing content. Only then did they attempt to recreate the existing content in UE, and add a bit of extra content.
What you’re asking for is for a handful of volunteers to do with a shoestring budget what an army of professionals did with millions. But you want it to be even better, because it needs to be able to be general purpose, capable of doing anything any MMO would ever want to do.
To make such a leap is, to put it bluntly, incredibly naive.
And yet, my guess is you would feel the exact opposite the moment it’s blizzard taking some small artist’s content and putting it in their games without compensation, no? Is an AI trained on every artist’s content in order to generate new art and sell it for a profit “morally good” to you?
I agree, what you’re saying is subjective, in that it’s not an actual thought out, ethical framework. It’s just a case where you’re losing a game of Monopoly, so on your turn you yell “new rule, my hotels get to take over your hotels!” Thing is, on their turn they take them back and then some. If you want to play that game, corpos will beat you at it, not because they’re capable of being so much more ethical than you, but because they have the resources to be far more unethical. And that’s what stealing an artist’s IP is: unethical.
Instead, I suggest not making rash blanket statements for unethical behaviors and doing mental gymnastics to convince yourself you’re some kind of robin hood. Robin hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, he didn’t say “stealing is morally good”. Just call it what it is, and say you’re ok with it as long as the people you approve of are the ones benefiting.
hisao@ani.social 2 days ago
I’m talking about Mangos and its forks here, they didn’t make a game, they made a server emulator. And by “general purpose MMORPG” I meant “general purpose WoW-like MMORPG”. When people develop sourceports for old games for example, those sourceports often work as general purpose platforms for similar games. Countless games based on GZDoom as example. Yet WoW emulator projects failed at this.
They definitely did some scripting, but sure they didn’t implement their own server emulator, that’s monumental work. That’s been going on for decades. Unpaid work with no way to benefit from it for community, unpaid work that only makes rich people richer and poor people poorer. If emu devs looked at it this way, maybe they would have also set a goal of making their own frontend as well instead of depending on WoW client and assets. And this would ultimately enable this whole ecosystem becoming a platform for “general purpose WoW-like MMORPGs”.
I hear this happening occasionally. Currently it’s uncomfortable because of unfairness with corpos being able to defend themselves legally better than individuals. But I don’t see this as a problem if anyone’s allowed to freely do and sell derivative works of anyone’s else content.
Yes, I’m totally good with AI and even though I used to think about myself as skeptic, at current point I’m more like heavily pro-AI. And I consider AI generations derivative work.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
I don’t follow how reverse engineering blizzard’s server makes the rich richer here. Blizzard doesn’t want that information to be public.
This is the “deregulation” argument that Elon and the rich keep perpetuating. “Just let everyone do everything and let the free market figure it out”. But we already know how it ends: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. They have the resources to be more unethical than you.
Specifically training it on content without permission? Well AI capabilities are directly proportional to energy costs, so that’s another pro “rich get richer” stance.
Less than 5 years ago people were saying that they weren’t afraid of AI because it always looked like easily identifiable slop, always had extra fingers, sounded robotic. Now we’re at the point where it can generate really high quality content indistinguishable from high quality artwork on the first try. The expressed goal of AI companies is to create AGI capable of doing everything itself, not as a tool. So what makes you believe everything will suddenly reverse course and just settle as a tool?