I ran a private server years ago. Two things people in this thread are getting wrong:

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.

> Blizzard is right to protect their IP.

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.

Out of curiosity, as a fellow dev I'm interested in how you go about reverse engineering these types of things. I assume for networking, you keep track of what goes in and out of the live game. How do you go about pathing? How do you reverse engineer spells, how they scale over levels, and how bosses work, when they spawn, and how they spawn (based on non time based factors) ?

> Blizzard is right to protect their IP

No, it's inevitable. There's nothing positive about using the law to crush competition.

On the client side how did they do this? I worked with a team reverse engineering another MMO a few years ago and it was because of a plain XML config and game launch args that we could make the client connect to a private server easily without modifications. Blizzard could just implement DRM and put an end to all this, right?

I could be wrong and being a bit naive, but what prevents them from creating an original game now?

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

thank you for the optics. i curse all c-level employees at blizzard to stub their toes on a daily basis.

I was hoping to try out Turtle last summer but didn't get around to it. And had looked into Azerothcore. I hope turtle open sources (if they haven't already and they are allowed to).

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.

Why did u stop?

People need to learn to let go and build their own gaming worlds, instead of nuthugging and giving money to an evil entity, that is Blizzard. They deliberately shit on every player's head. During the heyday of WoW, they announced something very cool for a specific class, everyone was running amok seeing the new feature.... and then, after release, seeing that people loved it.... they removed it few weeks later, saying, oooh we couldn't make this work.

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.

I can't believe people defending this, I already said and I will say it again, I'm ALL for private servers, but these fricking guys were using art and stuff Blizzard created and profiting from it, they fucked up and deserve to be down, get over it, stop defending the indefensible.

Hosting a wow classic server cost almost nothing, it's a 30 years old game running on modern hardware and software. You need couple of dedicated servers and a single db.