Turtle WoW also attempted to rebuild the entire game client from scratch in Unreal Engine, using Blizzard's art, textures and maps.

FFXIV's level/stat sync system is also pretty cool for keeping the older stuff playable long past its original release, players get levels and stats and skills scaled down to the max level appropriate for the content

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

> Let's say you loved playing Battle for Azeroth.

Well, here’s your problem. You need to fix that and eat whatever shit they throw your way, pay the money and say thanks.

Because they're arrogant, and have critical stakeholders. The fact that someone else took their assets and made a better game runs counter to the story that they're the best in the business.

I really think it is ego. Blizzard is the king of MMO makers, they can’t do anything wrong in their own eyes. They have the data that shows that people want to just play alone and care about the story above everything while completely refusing to acknowledge that the game never was about either of those and that game play style only rose up later as the MMO part got lost.

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

In blizzards case, mmo's are a huge time sink and not many have people have time to commit to multiple titles. Acquiring a competitior and maintaining it would see subscribers leave their main offering (which has been optimised for microtransactions and engagement) and splitting the player base.

Valve is run by one guy (so far as I know) and he's only accountable to himself. Since he's got pretty much everything he wants from the arrangement, he has no problem with spending money on what most companies would consider cost centers and turning them into something bigger.

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...

Valve aren't owned by private equity and other giant corporations so they make good decisions and do things fans like.

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)

I can imagine naked licensing being a factor.

I don't think we needed any more proofs that blizzard is ran by actual assholes, but here be are.

You understand that the people playing Turtle don't pay for it, they don't use the official game because they don't want to pay.

How is that supposed to work when the main product is nostalgia? It's a mod for people who think the first-party expansions aren't true to the core of the original game - how could an independent game with completely new IP ever have the same draw?

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.

I don't think this is true. I think what you may be thinking of is many hit games did not create their own game engine.

There's 3 scenarios they could follow:

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

Yeah, that seems like the logical next step here.

By that logic, I should be able to sell Taylor Swift merchandise and music without asking her, but only if I make it myself. I'll call it Turtle Taylor Swift and charge a little bit less than official Taylor Swift merchandise and music. I'll record a mix tape with her songs on it and sell it as a 'new' album.

> using tricky IP laws.

Lol what.

The comment above is completely wrong, and Im not sure how they got that misconception unless it's an AI fabrication (although it doesnt read like AI)...

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

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.

>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.

If it turns out the private server code was a greenfield reverse engineered effort - do you still think that's a copyright violation? Why?

Honestly, the weakness of most game corporations today is the fact that they are indeed not Valve.

WoW vanilla is being sold right now by Blizzard themselves, under a subscription model.