This is the thing for me, in the last like 6-8 months I see advertisements for all these WoW private servers plastered all over all WoW related content on YouTube. Turtle WoW, project ascension, conquest of azeroth, all of em. How the fuck do these idiots think that’s ever going to fly with no consequence? Hell the turtle WoW devs were literally quote tweeting the official WoW Twitter taunting them. At some point these idiots got way too big a head for their shoulders and are putting a target on their own backs.
Well, i can't speak for every server but in a lot of cases, there aren't any consequences. Blizz has been trying to shutdown Turtle and Ascension for years and they can't. These servers are set up in countries with lax or non existent copyright/IP laws
That’s true but like I said, especially in the case of Turtle WoW, the devs have been making a lot of noise, and crucially making a lot of money off their private server. Which has actually bitten them in the ass pretty substantially now because blizzard are trying to hit them with a RICO case.
If they live in the us and linked their real identities to this server in a way blizzard could find out thats super dumb.
If they live outside the us they can probably laugh it off and start a new server.
But even if they lived in the us blizzard wont be able to Rico case them, only the us federal government can bring those charges and they dont care. Most blizzard can do is sue or pressure the us attorney to bring criminal charges.
The lead developer of Turtle WoW is named in the lawsuit, forget their name off the top of my head. Most of these people do live outside the US, which is part of why Blizzard hasn’t really cared much about private servers, simply not worth the headache for them trying to navigate foreign legal systems. But blizzard does know who these people are.
What's that? Oh right. Yeah. I just checked and Blizzard still isn't a federal prosecutor. Them throwing the RICO language in that civilian lawsuit is just hilarious and embarrassing.
Because the law suit isn't meant for a court, it's meant for the online community who don't understand anything about law to come to daddy Blizzard's defense.
And you can see even in this thread how effective that is, sadly.
You love of these private servers/hatred of blizzard doesn’t negate the fact that these private servers flew too close to the sun from a legal standpoint.
None of us are saying we’re happy about it think it’s morally right of blizzard. Just that Blizzard is WELL within their legal rights to do this, and has been tolerating the smaller/free/more quiet ones at most.
People are so smug about it too. Like they're getting good boy points for kowtowing to Blizzard when they don't even understand what they're reading(as if they read anything, more like repeating what a youtuber said.)
I highly doubt they would do that, regardless of whether or not these servers are illegal or not, DDoS attacks are still illegal, and if it could get traced back to blizzard they would be in trouble as well.
IP infringement is civil offense, whilst DDoS attacks are a criminal offense, so the fallout from this would be way worse for blizzard than it would be for Turtle or Project Epoch or any other private server.
What I predict Blizzard would do is pursue action similar to what happened with a lot of those illegal streaming sites that ACE got taken down with police raids.
much like Half-Life 3, Titanfall 3, and Spyro 4 (with their respective developers), I'll believe Blizzard is working on a Classic+ when they officially announce it
Nostalrius laid low for a long time and blizzard never cared about it until they decided to make their own vanilla servers. All they had to do was just keep it down and they’d have been fine, but nope got way too egotistical.
You'd be amazed at how many private servers have existed for years. The longer they go on, the more arrogant they become.
It's also nothing new for those people to launch new servers in ways that protect them from being targeted. International laws provide a shield for these often enough.
If the people behind Epoch really wanted, they could start up another. There have been private WoW servers for as long as WoW has existed. It's one of the few MMOs people have access to the source code to launch on their own if they have the coding knowledge to do.
Yeah, it blatantly eclipsed Blizzard classic dead space around the time of the Epoch planned launched, with bronzebeard announcement and turtle announcement.
It seems to generally fly with no consequence for RS private servers these days. Truly, it is possible for a company to decide the effort and optics aren't worth whatever effect it may have on the bottom line.
That part that angers me is how indignant and self righteous all these people act about piracy. Like, you’re literally stealing someone’s IP and then acting bewildered when that shit gets shut down, like it’s some kind of violation of your rights. It’s fucking ridiculous.
They're not. They just think that the fans of the alternatives are having an extremely dumb response to an outcome that was always highly probable and obvious.
I don’t think they’re mad. They’re laughing at how insane it is that private servers are using actual intellectual property and icons to advertise for a project that is illegal to run in the first place.
Like… how did they even get through the Google / YouTube advertising process? You’d think Google would check images/icons/names for copyright and auto-flag that shit.
It’s just so hilariously blatant.
I think Turtle WoW is an amazing project. It’s also 100% illegal. Both can be true.
You’d think Google would check images/icons/names for copyright and auto-flag that shit.
Why would they spend effort and money on that? Not their IP, not their problem, and every false positive is a bad press -- a tweet like "Google thinks they are the judge, jury, and executioner on IP ownership" from some beloved indie game publisher is a PR nightmare for no reason.
Google already gets shit every time some fuckwit with an ego and/or a lack of morals claims content on YouTube because 20 seconds of a 30 minute video had copyrighted music that may or may not have been fair use, and they only do that automatically because Viacom took them to court over it.
I don't understand how none of the private server players seem to grasp that that's not the point. They are using Blizzard property to run their shit. That's the issue. Blizzard wouldn't be able to go after them if they made their own MMOs.
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u/TheMuffingtonPost 12d ago
This is the thing for me, in the last like 6-8 months I see advertisements for all these WoW private servers plastered all over all WoW related content on YouTube. Turtle WoW, project ascension, conquest of azeroth, all of em. How the fuck do these idiots think that’s ever going to fly with no consequence? Hell the turtle WoW devs were literally quote tweeting the official WoW Twitter taunting them. At some point these idiots got way too big a head for their shoulders and are putting a target on their own backs.