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.
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.
This is interesting point. I think lot of people assume that training gathers new "metadata" based on the original data and ignore what the training optimises for which is direct copy of the input. Training a model results in a fancy copy paste (unless incentivised differently).
Turtle WOW is not a competition to the blizzard's in my point of view. I played on Turtle WOW from time to time with my kids, like once a month, because this is the amount of time I have.
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.
With AI coding tools, pretty easy to use Mangos or similar to run a private server locally. They even have versions that fill the world with fake players to make it feel more MMOish.
At the end of the day, copyright is a government-enforced monopoly. Crushing competition is literally the point.
Cases like this though make a good argument for copyright reform in my opinion. Video games probably don't need as long a copyright term as, say, books, and mods should legally protected (and copyrightable in their own right) as long as they don't function without a legal copy of the original game/program they're modifying.
Competition? From top to bottom, they stole IP for the purpose of selling it. If there was zero content in common and with no overlap in quests, locations, etc, then a fair use argument might make some sense. Instead, they chose to set up shop next to Barnes and Noble and offer to sell photocopied books that they go next door and steal, then call it competition.
In what way was anything "stolen"? The content you refer to came with the original client. They reverse engineered the protocol and let existing clients connect to that. There's as much "stealing" going on here as with the Samba team reverse-engineering the SMB1/2/3 protocols. They weren't deceptively tricking users into thinking they were the real Battle.net servers, were they?
In a sane economy and legal regime, this would be allowed under open competition rules, in the same way that car manufacturers cannot prevent aftermarket mods to be sold and installed on their models. All these online platforms have big digital moats, and projects like these are offering alternatives to an otherwise captive audience. That's why Big Platform doesn't like it, but nothing about this has anything to do with stealing.
Thinking about this some more, from now on I'm going to refer to cases like this as "user rustling". Because that's all it is: guiding users out of some corporation's paddock. And if that's seen as a crime, then that must mean that the corporation views those users as property.
Except that is not at all how the game works and your example is simply and fundamentally invalid. The content is not “included with the game”.
Every quest, every drop, every starting location, every single bit of what makes the game playable is server side. You do not get this by getting the game. This isn’t about the use of some 3d models and textures.
While they may have recreated their data item by item and quest by quest, they quite literally stole that copyrighted material (what is THAT item named, what is THAT NPC named, what is THAT quests text, what is THAT towns name) in order to replicate the classic Warcraft experience. That is, quite literally, copyright infringement for the sake of selling a competing product. I can’t steal your apples and then set up a store to sell them for a lower price next door.
If they came up with their entirely own universe and simply reused the assets but without a single reference to the Warcraft world, maybe your argument would make some sense.
The concept of IP is simply nonsensical to me, let alone the clear category error of trying to apply theft to it. Blizzard was deprived of nothing. Who cares?
For new developments, absolutely, but once something has been out for decades (plural), modifying and selling that isn't so unethical. Keep in mind that Turtle WoW built off and supported that original game client from over 20 years ago, they weren't just backporting a bunch of content from Blizzard's newer releases. It's the same as if someone wanted to sell a modded Super Nintendo game, society would not be worse off for this.
I mean, I don't disagree with you in this case, but if not this, then to a degree, what is IP for?
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
WoW classic has been fully reversed engineered way before Turtle WoW released, the thing they did better is to extend the game with a lot of content, but the core wow experience has been emulated for a long time.
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?
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) ?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Just background in case you don't know: Turtle WoW tried to turn Classic World of Warcraft into a Roguelike, but in doing so wound up creating a bunch of new mechanics, and a gameplay loop that was quite unique even relative to other Roguelikes.
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.
Self inflicted these incidents are. All Blizzard needs to do is follow the lead of the OSRS team, make the old game and add new breadth, listen to your players not your shareholders. For all the dumb mistakes Jagex has made at least you feel heard with their polling and it feels like their is progression.
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.
I'm fairly certain there would be no Classic WoW without private servers to show Blizzard there was a demand. They seemed embarrassed about the entire concept.
Same with emulation, really; had that not been developed, I doubt Nintendo would care about their back catalogue.
Sounds very similar to The Heroes Journey, which was a heavily modified EverQuest emulation server that got destroyed in court by Daybreak Games, the current owners/operators of EQ.
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.
I don't even remember the name of the server or software, but even back when WoW was contemporary I had a lot more fun playing on free servers with extended XP, even though pretty often bosses would be buggy or not quite the same as in the real game. It was so much more playable and casual compared to the early WoW (or worse, EverQuest which came before). It's a shame game companies can't find a way to embrace or even profit from these kinds of servers.
They're within their legal rights to keep soiling their own game and public image. The original version of the game is mostly in the wild though and players don't care who's IP it is. New servers emerge all the time.
The irony is that the Turtle team released what was probably the best version of WoW, ever. Blizzard had to get it shutdown because it was fucking embarrassing that a fan project more artistically cohesive and more fun to play than anything Blizzard could spit out in decades despite having virtually unlimited resources.
Obviously, the most competent people at Blizzard are lawyers. That Turtle would eventually shutdown was expected.
Private server exists because Blizzard is full of idiots now. My whole friend
group would never touch anything managed by Blizzard, they're buffoons and all talented people left long ago after WotlK expansion.
Now Blizzard only milks current players(cows) and also let others to freely bot and sell gold for real money to people.
It's important to understand it's not just the Turtle WoW people who violated Blizzard's copyrights, it's also anyone who played on Turtle WoW. They don't have licenses to use the clients, and downloading and running those clients is in violation of Blizzard's copyrights.
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."
I'm just over here holding out hope that some aspect of the agreement includes Blizzard taking control of the many assets the Turtle WoW devs created, and that they use those to make lots of new content for the upcoming Classic+, whatever that ends up being.
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.
hobbyist server turned commercial enterprise, according to court documents Blizzard claims AFKCraft Ltd. (Turtle WoW) made millions of dollars over 2018–2026 period.
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 know I will be flagged, and it doesn't add anything of value to the conversation, but:
From every single private server WoW player out there, a sincerely Fuck You Blizzard is in place.
This sentiment is shared among all of us, and it's been there for decades. Keep shutting us down, more will come.
Ha facebbok can happily torrent every book written in the history while I can't have fun playing a private server. Copyright laws are just another way of herding the sheep.
Why not just create a WoW-like game that doesn't infringe on the IP? Surely there are enough people following the project that at some point, they could have pivoted into a wholly unique IP.
I was extremely skeptical that Blizzard would bother with something like Classic Vanilla+ where they add additional content to Vanilla Azeroth, but now it seems like a real possibility.
All this C&Ds and shutdowns are possible, because whole WOW private servers community are against each other.
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 then how is PokeMMO still operating ? Weren't they both using game assets and creating an emulator essentially? Or did Turtle step out of bounds? It's a legally gray area so hard to find more details.
Once again, someone is doing Blizzard’s work better than Blizzard, so naturally they have to be punished.
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.
293 comments
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.
They're just milking current players and they even let people to bot and RMT. Without banning anybody.
> Blizzard is right to protect their IP
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.
Cases like this though make a good argument for copyright reform in my opinion. Video games probably don't need as long a copyright term as, say, books, and mods should legally protected (and copyrightable in their own right) as long as they don't function without a legal copy of the original game/program they're modifying.
In a sane economy and legal regime, this would be allowed under open competition rules, in the same way that car manufacturers cannot prevent aftermarket mods to be sold and installed on their models. All these online platforms have big digital moats, and projects like these are offering alternatives to an otherwise captive audience. That's why Big Platform doesn't like it, but nothing about this has anything to do with stealing.
Every quest, every drop, every starting location, every single bit of what makes the game playable is server side. You do not get this by getting the game. This isn’t about the use of some 3d models and textures.
While they may have recreated their data item by item and quest by quest, they quite literally stole that copyrighted material (what is THAT item named, what is THAT NPC named, what is THAT quests text, what is THAT towns name) in order to replicate the classic Warcraft experience. That is, quite literally, copyright infringement for the sake of selling a competing product. I can’t steal your apples and then set up a store to sell them for a lower price next door.
If they came up with their entirely own universe and simply reused the assets but without a single reference to the Warcraft world, maybe your argument would make some sense.
> they stole IP for the purpose of selling it.
The concept of IP is simply nonsensical to me, let alone the clear category error of trying to apply theft to it. Blizzard was deprived of nothing. Who cares?
> but once something has been out for decades (plural), modifying and selling that isn't so unethical
Yep, copyright used to last only 14-28 years.
It was fine then, and I believe that same term should be fine now.
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
If we could just freely clone generational hit games and make millions off them, only idiots would make new games.
20 years ago I was already using Mangos to play wow classic. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marenkay
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.
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.
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
> Blizzard is right to protect their IP.
By what standard?
How does this action promote the progress of science and the useful arts?
> ran a private server years ago.
Do you share any code then?
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.
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.
* 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...
Now Blizzard only milks current players(cows) and also let others to freely bot and sell gold for real money to people.
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."
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.
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
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.