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.

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.

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.

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.

Same with emulation, really; had that not been developed, I doubt Nintendo would care about their back catalogue.

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.

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/

Obviously, the most competent people at Blizzard are lawyers. That Turtle would eventually shutdown was expected.

Hats off to them. I had fun.

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."

* Open Letter to Blizzard Entertainment - https://forum.turtlecraft.gg/viewtopic.php?t=22444&sid=72e3e...

* A Journey's End - https://forum.turtlecraft.gg/viewtopic.php?t=24891&sid=72e3e...

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.

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.

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.

Why do they try to hide actual content with hateful tech?

Anyhow, no way I would give that company money.

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.

Now Blizzard only milks current players(cows) and also let others to freely bot and sell gold for real money to people.

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.

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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.

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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