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>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.

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.

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Completely backwards. The server is where the real logic happens, with the client mostly just doing what it's told.

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.

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Implementing a WoW classic server is actually fairly easy. The game client comes with the entire engine, art, music, and quest content. The server is basically a fancy IRC server, taking client events and rebroadcasting them to other clients.

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.

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Offline, the client knows movement, graphics, statics (the world mesh, excluding the location and functionality of npcs, doors, plants, etc.) and some localized text. Almost all the gameplay logic is server-side.
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If it turns out the private server code was a greenfield reverse engineered effort - do you still think that's a copyright violation? Why?
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There are multiple private server implementations. Blizzard does not hunt them. They are on github, you can run it in your basement and play with bots and some friends. I don't know if that presents a copyright violation, but as a matter of fact, Blizzard doesn't care enough to even submit a DMCA to GitHub.

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.

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