Back in the day, people were so idealistic that they poured cosmic amounts of time into reverse-engineering games like WoW - rebuilding its systems, network stack, and filling massive databases by hand. By making the game accessible and endlessly customizable (to the point where private servers could even create entirely new content), they unintentionally boosted and cemented its popularity for decades.
But over time, the rose-colored view faded. People began to see that neither Blizzard nor the gaming industry at large were as benevolent as they once imagined. Notice how this never happened again with newer games? WoW was both one of the first and one of the last MMORPGs to inspire that kind of community-driven pirate server scene.
In the future, I hope we will see a truly open-source, modding-first MMORPG - one that makes corporate nonsense irrelevant. So that players and hobbyists could put their energy into something 100% open-source Instead of wasting time building content for companies that don’t value them and would crush them the moment the numbers dip.
Wow and Ragnarok online. The only two games to ever reach private servers of that scope and scale. Both owned by shit companies.
Lineage 2 also.
rebuilding its systems, network stack, and filling massive databases by hand…making the game accessible and endlessly customizable (to the point where private servers could even create entirely new content)
That’s all reasons why the community was deliberately not dependent on blizzard IP. If they had roses tinted glasses, they would have never done any of that and just played the blizzard version.
IMO if Turtle WoW covered their bases correctly, they shouldn’t have anything legal to worry about (aside from corporate bullying). Their servers should be running original code, they shouldn’t be hosting any of blizzard’s binaries or assets, and they shouldn’t be charging money for any game content based on blizzard-owned IP.
If so, then they messed up…
I would say being unable to legally create/distribute new content based on blizzard-owned IP is the worst kind of being dependent on blizzard IP. If they at least had their own game client with fully FOSS assets, upon which people could create more and more new content freely, then yeah, that I would call independent.
Again, if they’ve covered their bases, they don’t need to distribute any game client, blizzard assets, or blizzard-owned IP, they only need to run their own server code, and distribute a patcher for the official client (which could optionally add any of their own assets). But there was never any option that allowed them to charge money to use blizzard IP.
Yeah, but that’s not cool. If you think about it harder, non-naive, you wouldn’t want to do any of this even at the point of realizing that you boost blizz/wow popularity for free, by doing a lot of hard work; you don’t even need to go deeper to the point of realizing you can’t build extended versions of wow this way legally, but this one is even worse.
So I take it you’re also not a fan of modding or fan art?
I’m fan of modding, but I wouldn’t want to waste my own time doing modding in cases like this. Outside of opensource projects, modding works well for old, effectively abandonware games, running on custom sourceports. Where almost everything is allowed and corpos don’t blatantly abuse peoples free work. I do mapping for Doom and Heretic. I play Minecraft mods occasionally but I wouldn’t want to waste my time doing Minecraft mods myself to support Microsoft Mojang mismanaging this game so bad. Theoretically Luanti could have been the solution, but it’s just damn bad because that particular kind of top-down approach to extensibility didn’t work well. Fan art is in much better place because it’s a mutual benefit: artists benefit from working with popular franchise because it draws attention to them.
I wouldn’t want to waste my time doing…mods myself to support [corpos]…
Fan art is in much better place because it’s a mutual benefit: artists benefit from working with popular franchise because it draws attention to them.
Doesn’t that seem like a double standard? Mods that support “corpos” are a waste of time, but somehow fan art is mutually beneficial? But “mods” are literally “fan art”, the only difference is the word you’re using using. Fan art is limited in all the same ways Turtle WoW is and vice versa.
You aren’t going to get corporate nonsense, but volunteer nonsense instead.
Also true, but it’s manageable. Look at Godot for example - they had some huge drama regarding their moderation policies, also some drama regarding their development direction. People who were unhappy with one or the other created forks and continued there. It’s not perfect and problems are possible, but it’s far from being as disabling as corporate bs.
But even then, Godot is an engine instead of a game. For various reasons, it appears that the ratio of open source games to closed source games is orders of magnitude lower than other forms of software.
This is true, but in gaming, open-source projects often have huge, incredible impact, which often goes way beyond their original scope. For example Doom sourceport GZDoom is nowadays often used to create completely new indie pixelart or retro-style shooter games, Morrowind sourceport OpenMW is also to my knowledge have started being used in standalone projects. It will take just a single open-source project that covers MMORPG genre somewhat decently to become a solid foundation.
just tells me they didn’t sell enough wow subscriptions and instead of blaming their overly complex too many things to do game that’s constantly changing, and instead blaming people who are making it fun again.
deleted by creator
While you are correct, I understand what they’re trying to say.
WoW suffers massively from adding new systems every patch, that feel like a full-time job. That never made any sense to me, given that an average WoW player already spends an abnormal amount of time playing the game, but they’re trying to fomo you into logging in even more.
It all probably just comes out to corporate metrics, because the people in Microsoft/Blizzard leadership don’t play their own games
deleted by creator
with wow, there’s TOO MUCH. it’s honestly overwhelming to a new player, or someone that is returning after missing 1 or 2 xpacs.
half the stuff in bags are useless and must be discarded, or it’s just deleted and gold is given. sure, that’s fine.
roll a new toon. more then half the main map is level 1-30 and rendered 'why bother going there’s once you hit lvl 30.
wow is just X-Pac crunch on xpac crunch on xpac crunch. it’s overwhelming. there’s a lot more too it, but that’s the main thing really.
what I feel would ‘fix’ wow, is wow 2.0…rebuild everything from scratch and build all systems properly, not layering them on-top of preexisting. the whole game needs a crunch and rerelease.
deleted by creator
Lol toon
They’ve been going after private server farms for years, so this is nothing new really. For example, Blizzard forced Nostralrius (sp?) servers to shut down about 10 years ago.
All private servers will see the same end if they become popular enough.
Regarding turtle specifically, although I knew it would never actually release, I loved the idea of unreal wow.
This was always going to happen.
Did Cata Classic ever exit beta?
Or did they release straight to Panda Classic beta?
It was an abbreviated content release but they went through all of cata and just recently released MoP.
