(www.pcgamer.com)
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.
20 years ago I was already using Mangos to play wow classic. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marenkay
They should have just taken their binaries, trained on the outputs (frames may be) run a few simulations games, and produced WoW-GPT. Blizzard would be working out to acquihire them for millions. Wrong move Turtle WoW.
They're just milking current players and they even let people to bot and RMT. Without banning anybody.
No, it's inevitable. There's nothing positive about using the law to crush competition.
I won't buy 4 subscriptions and pay them monthly, because there is no point of paying 63$ a month for one-a-month session. So obviously I am not interested in it. Also the new gameplay that is really crippled by a lot of un-skippable tutorials and too-much-experience first levels gameplay is appalling to me, so I won't teach my kids to play this new broken WoW version, sorry.
This just happens to be a positive example, IP still exists to restrict certain kinds of competition
I mean you can't get a clearer case of copycatting than this, as much as I'm a fan of pirate servers, assuming that they don't stifle the original game and considering calling Blizzard an 800 pound gorilla is quite an understatement in this case, I doubt this could
I'm pretty sure Turtle WoW has its own storyline, quests, etc. The story focuses heavily on extending Vanilla.
In other words, it's not a simple copycat but a fan project.
Rather than hiring and vying for talent, Blizzard is CnD their fans away.
Oh yeah, because people didn’t want a new game, they wanted free WoW.
> Oh yeah, because people didn’t want a new game, they wanted free WoW.
That's an error; Turtle WoW isn't a free WoW. It's WoW fixed to classic, with 2 new races, extra content. It's basically their flavor of WoW.
Free WoW exists and it's called a pirate server. This isn't it chief.
Sounds like they’re talented game designers and they sunk their whole project because they stole art and assets. Sounds like they could have made a cool, new game with their own assets and been successful if it stands so well on its own merits.
It's substantially different from a pirate server.
> Sounds like they’re talented game designers and they sunk their whole project because they stole art and assets.
At the end of the day, they are in essence WoW modders. Plus, a new game with own assets and engine is a different beast compared to modding an existing engine.
A fan project still encroaches and Blizzard as many have pointed out is well within their rights to do this
In case I wasn't clear enough, I'm not a fan of this move, I don't think it's a good thing they're doing, however I can't deny they can choose to do it
If we want their behaviour to be constrained, then we've got to either convince them otherwise, regulate away their ability to do this or weaken copyright to prevent this
That's the reality of the situation
Sure, but I'm sure that IP laws don't demand you send CnD any fan project[1]. In the past, they were way more lenient. I guess they got scarred by their DotA experience. And honestly DotA mismanagement was their own fault.
Stuff like that has a hugely detrimental effect; see Games Workshop and Warhammer 40k fan projects.
[1] As far as I know the law doesn't prohibit to giving the server a license to run as a non-profit or giving them a cheap, short term license.
The same thing other state-granted monopolies are for.
It was always a “best effort”, but also very rewarding if you got a specific fight “somewhat” close how it was on the official servers.
For something like Turtle WoW's custom races and zones that means shipping modified DBC files (the client-side database tables ChrRaces.dbc, CharBaseInfo.dbc, etc), new models/textures, modified Lua for the character creation UI, and map data for new zones. All packaged in an MPQ that players download alongside the client.
As for DRM Blizzard moved away from MPQ to CASC (their own proprietary archive forma) starting in WoD, which makes this kind of modding significantly harder on modern clients. But the classic-era client binaries have been in the wild for 15+ years, so that ship sailed.
One machine can handle over 15,000 players. There's very little to the 'scaling' and the costs are quite low. Low enough that larger projects have managed it without being funded.
How expensive is this:
Download opensource wow server from github
Rent a server VM.
Come up with very cool name, like MurlocWOW
Create Discord for it.
Post AD to reddit/wowservers
Run server
Day 1, several thousands of players will join by themselves. Because everyone looks for something "new" for free.
Profit?
The team have proven credentials at this point surely?
Not to mention at least some of their players must actually like what they do vs wow, unless I'm mistaken about that part and it's still mostly nostalgia
The foldingideas videos about decentraland talks about this. "Dead" mmorpgs work on a small skeleton crew despite the original game having taken 100s of people years to make. Looking it up the turtle wow server was like 5-10k concurrent players? A lot for sure but bordering on that category.
It takes a lot of work to manage that but nothing compared to making an original IP from scratch.
Also, I'm not sure they have to start by creating an MMO
Honestly as someone building a game right now, I'd love to meet some people who are trying things and are open to meeting
Instead of just building something you own.
this wasn't the goal of modding.
Do you share any code then?
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.
I hope turtle open sources
Bunch of scumbags, who shat on people. Don't give money to Blizzard, they stole almost all their ideas from somewhere else, and Kotick made the whole thing a fucking soulless money making machine that exploits people left and right.
Bobby Kotick announced it early and kept his promise that he made sure they ripped the fun part out of gaming. Well, mission completed. And the addicts keep giving their money to them. Ridiculous.
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.
I mean, thats basically what OpenRA is. Or OpenMW. Or many other indie games where they build a modern engine for old assets.
Let's say you loved playing Battle for Azeroth. Later Blizzard launches Shadowlands, the content for BfA gets irrelevant, the raids are not doable anymore at the same difficult, the power creep feeds in. Even if you buy the expansion just to get the “feel” on how it was, it's impossible.
MMOs like GW2 and even SWTOR does it way better, in GW2 content from Path of Fire is still relevant in the gameplay of the current expansion, while their PvE/PvP content is done by all players.
I feel Blizzard should just keep per expansion servers up and people can play “over and over again” the same expansion as much as they like.
> Even if you buy the expansion just to get the "feel" on how it was, it's impossible.
You don't buy previous expansions after a new one launches - they roll into the base subscription. After Shadowlands released, buying BfA separately wasn't even an option.
> MMOs like GW2 and even SWTOR do it way better
“Keep every expansion fully relevant forever” sounds nice until you think through what that actually means for an MMO like WoW. You would either fragment the player base across twenty years of content or turn gearing and balance into a complete circus.
Imagine your best-in-slot trinkets from the current raid and Siege of Orgrimmar, your tier set from Dragon Soul, the weapon from Hellfire Citadel. Try organizing a group when other classes need gear from Icecrown Citadel, The Everbloom, Argus and Ahn'Qiraj.
The point of "current expansion content is relevant" is that it funnels the player base into a fairly narrow area of the theme park. That is important, because if you spread out the population over 20 years worth of content, you risk making the world feel incredibly empty, which is a death sentence for a theme park MMORPG.
Blizzard’s actual approach is much more sane: older content comes back in controlled ways. Timewalking reopens older expansion content with scaling and relevant rewards, and Mythic+ seasons already rotate older dungeons into the current endgame pool. Midnight's Season One, for example, features dungeons from Wrath of the Lich King, Warlords of Draenor, Legion, and Dragonflight.
Blizzard’s actual approach is much more sane: older content comes back in controlled ways.
4-player dungeons still end up being a bit of a faceroll, but it's definitely possible to wipe on the 8-player bosses if mechanics are not observed
So while just scaling down characters is technically not hard to do and there's tech in WoW for that, it's never the same as playing previous expansion. And players want genuine experience.
And preserving all the old mechanics for 12 of expansions would present a whole new class of challenges to a team. WoW is a huge game. They already plagued by lots of bugs.
But this system exists for an entirely different purpose than a TBC server. It exists mostly to make sure low level content is still full of players, so that new players going through the story or players leveling up new classes can always find parties for dungeons. It also helps break the monotony of doing the same few current dungeons/raids all of the time
Note that in FF you have to do the huge main story quest on any new character before you can really access the latest content, regardless of how much you might level, and the main quest also involves runs through most dungeons. I should add that normally people only do this once on one character, since you can level all different classes (called jobs) on the same character - you can be a level 90 robe-wearing black mage if using a staff, and then you equip daggers and become a level 31 ninja in leather armor, or an axe and become a level 67 tank warrior.
Well, here’s your problem. You need to fix that and eat whatever shit they throw your way, pay the money and say thanks.
If Blizzard was to hire the turtle team and add all their content into a real classic plus experience that would be admitting that Blizzard is incapable of doing that faithfully and if it got popular then that raises even more questions about Blizzard and their C suites decisions
A lot of their entire platform is built on mods they've bought and turned into proper 1st class games (cs, dota, Garys mod etc)
HL's engine GoldDrc was originally a mod for Quake. Team Fortress Classic was based on a quake mod. Counterstrike was a HL mod they bought out. Portal was a student game they bought. Dota 2 was based on a WC3 map. Left 4 Dead was a mod made by Turtle Rock while working on CS:CZ (so, yet again a mod, although a mod based on their own engine this time and build in house). Underlords was based on a Dota 2 mod.
Deadlock is original, but based on characters and lore from the game they made from the WC3 map.
Deadlock and L4D are arguably the only true original creations.
Valve knows their bread is buttered by outside creation using tools and platforms they can provide and then fold in if it catches their attention.
GoldSrc is based on Quake 1 code with valves own modifications and a little Quake 2 added in, if I remember correctly. I wouldn’t call that a “mod”, they bought a commercial license for the engine and made a game with it.
You’re trying to use this to say that valve are unoriginal? I really don’t think that’s a criticism you can lob at the half life series.
GoldSrc is a continuation of Q1 engine but it's development is of separate lineage even from Q2 and it was a fully licensed agreement. Setting and ideas are all original for HL.
TFC is a re-imaging of TF from Q1 but it's codebase is separate from Q1 TF.
TF2 is a sequel developed in-house.
HL2 is a series of sequels developed in-house.
EDIT: Portal has the same core developers and the same game mechanics, but both the setting and script are Valve original.
Sure, Steam pivoted their path of a game developer studio to a game publishing house but that's doesn't mean they never did anything themselves.
He's got to take care of it or no more yachts
Though part of it just might be helpful knows and respects hit market, at least well enough to understand them, I vaguely recall he left Microsoft to start a game company after seeing how much people fell head over heels with games and thinking there was value there
Support indie devs, and indie publishers, with your money.
This whole thread is pointing out Valve is the _exception_.
Activision Blizzard is run as a publicly-traded company. 86% of it is held by institutional investors [0] who are never satisfied. Most are managing portfolios of assets which are, in turn, often backing retirement accounts held by individuals. There is no ceiling because of factors like inflation, "executive incentives" that the board proposes, and the ever-increasing demands of retirees. If they can get another nickel out of the business, they'll absolutely go for it.
So really, it's about the mindset of the people making the decisions.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/activision-blizzard-top-shareho...
see: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/msft/instituti...
You really can't compare this to something like DotA, where the original engine and IP was basically set dressing for the new game built within it. People were primarily interested in the mechanics - which is why DotA-the-game and League of Legends were able to become so popular.
if they created genuinely novel mechanics that can stand on their own then they should do that.
Like you said, DOTA2 was a 1:1 mechanical clone but built from scratch without relying on Blizzard IP. League of Legends was a spiritual sequel with new IP.
Almost all fan projects that get shut down are 99% derived IP and 1% original. That will never fly. Nor should it.
Every MOBA that exists (DotA, LoL, HoN, etc)
Team Fortress
Killing Floor
PUBG
Natural Selection
Undoubtedly, many more that I can't recall off the top of my head.
Warcraft 3, the birthplace of so many amazing genres.
These games used the GoldSrc engine. Any game built on this engine gets called a mod. But this is not what most people actually think of when people are talking about mods. Rust is not a mod of Unity. These are game engines that people built a game using.
>DotA
This was a custom map. Not a mod.
>LoL, HoN
These were built on in house game engines and were not a mod.
>PUBG
This game used UE4 and was not a mod.
edit:
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Counter-Strike#Vers...
Also custom maps are mods by definitions anyways, with the exception of games where the creation of maps is a component of gameplay.
Or, if you were slightly older, you might call them UMS, as they were in Starcraft. Short for "Use Map Settings", indicating that the game logic should come from the scripts and triggers in the map file rather than the built-in logic for ladder games.
This is even better. Because it's a map you can start it without modifying your game installation.
There were "real" WC3 mods, but it was always cumbersome and worked reliably only in singleplayer.
Gameplay-wise it's a mod obviously.
Rocket League was a sequel to Super Sonic Rocket Powered Battle Cars which was a totally new game but born from the studio building VehicleMod for Unreal Tournament.
1) Create a new IP with the knowledge they have from Turtle WoW, create a similar game and market it 2) Contact Blizzard, apologise and maybe be brought into the team to develop updates for Classic or Retail 3) Drop the whole thing, leave the project and disappear
Would be great to see #1, but I'm more expecting #3
Can you expand on this a bit? Examples on its new mechanics, etc?
Legal rights, sure. Moral rights, you're gonna have to explain yourself, because I see no moral objection here. Culture advances through remixes, and while we can grant artists some exclusive period to profit through their work, we're not morally obliged to let them have a stranglehold on culture forever. People of my generation might not want to hear this, but Classic WoW is a retro game. We, here in 2026, are as far from WoW vanilla as WoW vanilla was from Ultima II. A year from now, replace Ultima II with Ultima I. A year from then, replace that with motherfucking Rogue itself! Morally speaking, Blizzard^W Activision^W Microsoft can go eat their own ass.
Turtle WoW had nothing rougelike about it at all. It was the normal classic WoW experience with added content. I suppose you could say it did a lot different from other roguelikes... because it wasn't one at all
For anyone unfamiliar with WoW, private servers have been a thing for most of WoW's history. It's unclear to me where the source code came from. I've heard different stories (eg from Chinese servers) and also that it was a greenfield development reverse-engineered from the client. All of this was a copyright violation of course and Blizzard have shut down such servers in waves.
WoW originally released in 2004 and has changed every ~2 years with an expansion and the game now is vastly different to what it was originally, which is now called "vanilla". In the 2010s there was a lot of people calling for what became "classic WoW". Most private servers used an early version of the game (either vanilla or one of the first 2 expansions). A lot of people argued that game was more fun at that time and all the changes since have made the game worse.
This issue just didn't die and the game director was famously asked (by a still unidifentied fan AFAIK) if there were any plans to re-release the original game and he famously responded with "you think you do but you don't" at Blizzcon 2013 [2].
This just wouldn't die. There was one particularly famous private server called Nostalrius that got shut down by Blizzard but Blizzard ended up bringing that team in and by 2017, Blizzard announced Classic WoW [3], which launched in 2019 and for several years seemed to have more players than the current version of the game (called "retail") although that's tapered off now.
So Turtle WoW fit into a long history of wanting to play the original game. There's also a movement called "Classic+", which is to fork from the vanilla version of the game and make changes from that. Turtle WoW probably fit into the Classic+ model.
[1]: https://turtlecraft.gg/remastered
It was explained to me, a long time ago, that WoW's traffic was originally unencrypted and a lot of it was reverse engineered from packet captures. Thats now roughly a standard and while people cant sniff modern games, they can just go back to the old mechanics and the old netcode clones are still good.
That was something an old WoW guy told me while he was setting up a local WoW server in college but it feels good.
It's a lot of work to replicate and no, dice rolls and quests are not client-side.
Beyond the graphics, pretty much everything in your post is wrong.
Even many of the events are implied, like how regular attacks continue at a fixed frequency once started, so other clients only need to know when the player started attacking and whether they are still in range, and player run speed is a constant so a player running in a straight line doesn't generate additional events.
I even suspect the dice rolls are coming from a shared RNG that each client maintains independently, but haven't researched it.
This is how WoW classic was playable over a 33K modem.
Funny fact that both Blizzard and GitHub nowadays owned by Microsoft, so in the end, Microsoft hosts private server code for its own game.
But if you're taking this code, host it on a powerful server for everyone to join, integrate shop to extract money from players, advertise it as a separate game. That's basically running a company which extracts money from Blizzard IP. That crossed the line.
I'm not the one to protect Blizzard, but in my opinion they're doing the right thing here. Turtle WoW attracts players who could be paying subscription to Blizzard and play WoW Classic.
Unfortunately blizzard is not Valve.
Moral? Nah. They had done work, and they should be able to charge for that work.
Its not Moral to shut a competitor down using tricky IP laws.
If anything this is yet another great example of how immoral IP actually is.
Lol what.
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.
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.
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.
From October 2004: Vivendi (Blizzard) win a DMCA ruling over the authors of bnetd, a protocol clone of the StarCraft battle net servers:
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.
* 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 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 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."
And yes there's a good reason: playing on a pirate server directly and explicitly violates the EULA. Blizzard bans people for violating the EULA all the time.
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.)
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.
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.
Why do they try to hide actual content with hateful tech?
Anyhow, no way I would give that company money.
Now Blizzard only milks current players(cows) and also let others to freely bot and sell gold for real money to people.
That is a common myth. It can even be more illegal in the case of DS games as you also break the DMCA by circumventing the DS's protection scheme of their games.
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.
Obviously, the most competent people at Blizzard are lawyers. That Turtle would eventually shutdown was expected.
Hats off to them. I had fun.
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.
I wonder what makes botting that much more trivial/productive on Classic.
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
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.
I didn't mean that it was cashgrab for everyone hosting own wow server.
Many was great and great people.
Yes, Blizzard didn't want a hassle with licenses or maybe because they were toxic company from beginning. Remember lawsuits for sexual attacks in their offices, suicide on their meetings etc.
Ridiculous company.
If I can compare it with let's say, Ultima Online.
Dev community is cooperative to highest levels. People are making opensource servers and multiple opensource or free clients. And plugins.
And most played Ultima Online server has some type of licensing agreement with current IP owners.
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.
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
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 :) :) :)