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Blizzard Shuts Down Popular Fan-run 'Pirate' Server For Classic WoW (arstechnica.com) 266

An anonymous reader writes: Blizzard is threatening legal action against the popular "pirate" servers for World of Warcraft. The Nostalrius servers have been operating for nearly a year, running version 1.12 of the original World of Warcraft as it existed in 2006. Admins say that 800K registered accounts and 150K active players were working through quest progressions reproduced to precisely match the game of a decade ago. Nostalrius' team says its French hosting provider has been issued a formal letter asking it to shut down the servers or face a potential copyright infringement lawsuit as hosting private servers is explicitly against Blizzard's Terms of Use. Blizzard says the rule "isn't an issue because of 'lost' subscription fees from players choosing these illegitimate servers over the real WoW servers -- it simply boils down to the fact that private servers are illegal, and that's that." Nostalrius' servers will be shut down on April 10, but the team says it "will still be publicly providing everything needed in order to setup your own 'Nostalrius' if you are willing to."
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Blizzard Shuts Down Popular Fan-run 'Pirate' Server For Classic WoW

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    • by firesyde424 ( 1127527 ) on Thursday April 07, 2016 @04:47PM (#51863479)

      The 1st commandment of Capitalism: Thou shalt not piss off people with vastly more money than thyself...

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        1st Commandment of Capitalism Rebellion: If you or people you like have been screwed over by capitalism and have bugger all, pissing people off who have vastly more than you by taking steps to ensure they end up with less, is OK, as long as costs them far more than it costs you ie you might have to spend thousands but as long as it costs them billions, that's cool (consider it capital redistribution). So how much did the Panama papers person spend in order to cost others billions.

    • The only law they broke is to reduce the subscribers base for Blizzard online services. That's just cold, man.

      • by tnk1 ( 899206 )

        Which really wouldn't make too much sense. Most of the subscribers of WoW have been there for years. They already played vanilla in many cases. There may be new people who just wanted to experience WoW as it used to be, but if they have the client, they bought the game or got the client somewhere. And they will probably want to move on to new content when they are done with vanilla. There's only so many Molten Core runs you can make, after all.

        I'd think this would attract (a) people who did have a subs

        • It its the same logic used by Hollywood to attack piracy, really. It doesn't matter if those users would never have a Blizzard account; in their eyes, there's a chance they would.

        • by Rakarra ( 112805 )

          Which really wouldn't make too much sense. Most of the subscribers of WoW have been there for years. They already played vanilla in many cases. There may be new people who just wanted to experience WoW as it used to be, but if they have the client, they bought the game or got the client somewhere. And they will probably want to move on to new content when they are done with vanilla. There's only so many Molten Core runs you can make, after all.

          There's a further benefit as well -- it takes some of the rosiness off of those rose-tinted glasses that many oldtimers (myself included) use when talking about Vanilla. I've played on the Vanilla servers recently and it was kindof fun, but I realized quickly... the game really has improved since Vanilla. There are a lot of things that work a lot better, the combat is better paced, it gets boring walking slowly over lands with no actual content, and there is a lot of syntactic sugar that just makes the game

    • by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Thursday April 07, 2016 @06:00PM (#51864091) Homepage Journal

      My understanding is that Blizzard would say the server operators are inducing the users (the people playing the game: the clients) to commit copyright infringement.

      The Blizzard case way back was fascinating, and they won in court. That was the case where Blizzard essentially claimed they have never, ever sold a game. Not a single copy. "Title was not transferred" is how they put it, because the EULA was magically invoked and retroactively made the sale not have happened.

      You probably didn't follow the preceding sentence, because IT'S FUCKING INSANE so go read up. But anyway, from there, it goes like this:

      If a user connects to a non-Blizzard server, then the user is violating the EULA. If the user is violating the EULA, then they aren't authorized to possess a copy. If they aren't authorized to possess a copy, then they violated copyright when they installed the software.

      MPAA never did anything so evil. Please, people, don't ever pay Blizzard for anything, and if you ever meet an employee of that company, kick them in shin. There are thousands of other game makers.

  • And will the car manufacturers start pulling the same BS to lock out 3rd part repair shops?

  • On first read (as a non-player of the game) the headline looked like a severe weather event had caused the server to go down (leading to the thought that this might help the game's owners find it if the routes to it were somehow hidden, as with Tor).

    Did anybody else have this effect?

    It's yet another example of poorly-worded articles that assume the casual reader has deep background knowledge of the subject. I consider this to be an annoying property of Slashdot. It's not fatal.

    But it would be nice if post

    • Not one single bit, mostly because anyone who knows what WoW is knows who makes it.

      If you didn't know that, I wouldn't blame you. If you did, well then you're just an idiot (or masquerading as one). Seriously why else would "Blizzard, Fan-run, server, and WoW" be in same headline?
  • by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Thursday April 07, 2016 @05:06PM (#51863621) Homepage

    Blizzard Shuts Down Popular Fan-run 'Pirate' Server For Classic WoW

    I honestly thought it had been done in by freak weather conditions.

  • Because WHY? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Thursday April 07, 2016 @05:07PM (#51863623) Journal

    Players: "Why?"

    Blizzard: "Because FUCK YOU that's why"

    • over the skin-suit wearing Activision business Nazis. I didn't even know this was still a thing. I heard of pirate servers years ago and I thought they were all sued in to oblivion then.

    • Why shouldn't they? They created the product, spent the money investing into it, and brought it online. They marketed it and supported it and it got popular and they've continued support for it for over a decade. Do you believe you're not entitled to control how your work is used and by whom?
      • by Kinwolf ( 945345 )
        And they got money over years for all of that. So why block this community effort? It takes nothing away from the current version.
  • Nost != pirate (Score:5, Informative)

    by MalleusEBHC ( 597600 ) on Thursday April 07, 2016 @05:10PM (#51863649)

    Calling Nostalrius a pirate server is not accurate. Nostalrius is a reverse engineered server that works with the official Blizzard WoW 1.12 client. I've played on Nost for the past year, and the overwhelming majority of players I've played with paid for retail vanilla WoW subscriptions back in the day. Sure, I can't find my original discs and had to download a copy of the 1.12 client, but I still contend that I have both a legal and moral license to still use that client.

    If Blizzard were to offer a vanilla subscription, I would gladly sign up. (Well, maybe before they C&D'd Nost.) However, since they don't offer such a subscription, running a private server should be allowed as an exemption to the DMCA. The EFF previously petitioned the Library of Congress [eff.org] to add an exemption to the DMCA to allow users to reverse engineer server-side controls once games have been abandoned. The Library of Congress granted the exemption for simple matters like server-side authentication methods, but it was limited to allowing local, single-player gaming to continue. It does not apply for MMORPGs that require server-side interaction. However, this ignores the possibility of using a paid-for client with a reverse-engineered server, something I feel should be legal.

    • by sims 2 ( 994794 )

      The sims online was one of the first ones to shut down their server. I still have the original install discs but without a server i have no way to make use of them.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Thursday April 07, 2016 @05:20PM (#51863729)

    Blizzard does not care about private servers for an old game. They care about the 800k users which are not paying to play on their network.

    • Not entirely true. Blizzard very much hates PvPGN, which emulates battle.net for a number of their very old titles.

      Blizzard is like any other spoiled modern corporation. They feel they are entitled to change the terms of the agreements they make, darth vader style, and dont feel even the tiniest bit bad about it. But, should end users try any such thing, or try to weaken their supreme overlord position, even on properties that simply cannot be monetized any longer, and they react like you just fucked their

    • Blizzard does not care about private servers for an old game.

      Very true, but they're being short sighted here. If there are 800k users who still want to play the old version, Blizzard should bring back some servers to host the old-style game and rack in the subscription fees. In fact, if I owned stock in the company, I'd be at the next stockholder's meeting asking some pointed questions about why they're throwing this revenue stream away instead of taking advantage of it.
      • Possibly, but at the same time Blizzard has a strong investment in their new AAA titles. I assume they dont expect all 800k users to switch to their new games, but they do expect a good fraction of them to do so. MMORPG players are as close as you'll get to a meth addict in the online world.

        • I can't claim to understand the way compulsive MMORPG players think, but I'd have expected all of them who would want to switch to the newest titles to have done so by now. Clearly there are at least 800k players out there who don't want to switch.
          • Is not that simple. You're comparing an open gaming network vs a paid one.

            • I don't think so. My thought is that there's probably a large number of people who still want to play the old version of WoW and would be willing to pay a monthly subscription to do so. It might be worth Blizzard's while to find out if there are enough people out there that want to play the older game instead of the latest and greatest to make putting some servers back up for them profitable.
      • by vux984 ( 928602 ) on Thursday April 07, 2016 @06:45PM (#51864385)

        In fact, if I owned stock in the company, I'd be at the next stockholder's meeting asking some pointed questions about why they're throwing this revenue stream away instead of taking advantage of it.

        I'll save you a trip...

        "Thank you for your question.

        While there is an untapped revenue stream there; there are several associated costs to your proposal; and we are confident we can tap it without these costs.

        Maintaining a few larger groups of players is simply more cost effective than maintaining support and systems for more but smaller communities. Before we would open a new property we would need to show that it was substantially different enough that it would attract players not already on our existing properties.

        A classic WoW ruleset doesn't meet that criteria. Those players can be served by the existing WoW servers, and we are confident that if we shut down these criminal enterprises that many of the players will return to the existing official servers, requiring virtually no outlay of new resources."

    • They wouldn't be paying anyway. If they really wanted to play without paying for a subscription, they would be on a private server running an up to date version of the game.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, now they have 800k people that will not play on their network and are angry at them (and will spread that). How is that better? Apparently, the fatal combination of greed and stupidity (and lawyers as a booster to make it worse) has taken root at Blizzard as well.

    • Maybe instead they should consider firing up those old servers again. There's an obvious and large market for the outdated versions of their game. Should be easy profit for them, as they don't even have to reverse engineer the server software itself.

  • So which laws are they breaking?

    • None whatsoever.
      Their hosting service just probably cave in because of FUD

  • Time to move it to somewhere Blizzard can't sue.

  • "It simply boils down to private servers being illegal" is a lie and a cowardly cop-out. No, private servers are not "illegal". They may be forbidden by Blizzard, but there is no law that says Blizzard cannot allow or tolerate them.

    • They are when it's impossible to run a pirate server without utilising a lot of material to which Blizzard owns the copyright. Even if the software is entirely rewritten, it cannot function without the level maps.

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