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.
dinckelman@lemmy.world
on 31 Aug 17:52
nextcollapse
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
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.
humanoidchaos@lemmy.cif.su
on 07 Sep 01:54
collapse
Really? It tells me that Turtle WoW became too popular, so Actiblizz needs to remind everyone who is in charge.
I have a feeling that once these scumbags personally hear of someone else playing something for free, then they get very angry.
ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
on 31 Aug 16:54
nextcollapse
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.
Eeyore_Syndrome@sh.itjust.works
on 31 Aug 17:28
nextcollapse
Did Cata Classic ever exit beta?
Or did they release straight to Panda Classic beta?
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.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club
on 31 Aug 20:49
nextcollapse
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s very different, in multiple ways. Artists earn money from commissions, the main mechanic to get more commissions is to become more popular. Algorithms on main platforms work by association. It’s as simple as this:
I draw my OCs, I want to do commissions.
Very few people are viewing my posts and are aware of me.
What do I do to attract more people, who will in turn buy more commissions?
Draw a fanart of popular character and/or a trending gimmick (your version of new Sonic x Miku meme, Miku birthday, you OC wearing Asuka cloth, you OC in Ghibli style, etc).
This posts gets pushed by algorithm into the feeds of people who like certain popular character or shown interest in current gimmick/meme/trend thing.
Some of those people enjoying post go to artist’s page and view their other works.
If they like what they see they might subscribe and order commissions later.
And the whole copyright thing is way less of an issue in fan arts, I regularly see a lot of people freely taking money for doing commissions of popular characters like Hatsune Miku for example, or characters from popular animes.
the main mechanic to get more commissions is to become more popular
Similarly, there are many popular games who started as a mod for another mainstream title, gained support, and pivoted to their own independent game.
And the whole copyright thing is way less of an issue in fan arts, I regularly see a lot of people freely taking money for doing commissions of popular characters like Hatsune Miku
But you recognize that is always illegal, right? The only reason it happens is because they’re too small and distributed for lawyers to go after every single one. But if one started gaining traction selling custom work featuring copyrighted IP, they should expect a lawsuit just like Turtle WoW. Mods are fan art, Turtle WoW is fan art, they just got popular enough that blizzard lawyers now care.
The only difference here is that, as I said before, technically if Turtle WoW did it right they would never have to distribute any blizzard assets, and never make money from blizzard IP. They could theoretically be completely independent from blizzard and still distribute the exact same content. Meanwhile fan art is always dependent on the IP it references. So ironically, all your criticisms of about work being dependent on the corpos always applies to fan art, but only maybe apply to Turtle WoW if they messed up.
Similarly, there are many popular games who started as a mod for another mainstream title, gained support, and pivoted to their own independent game.
The scale is not comparable at all. 100% of artists hugely benefit from fan arts, while maybe 0.01% of modders of popular games benefit from their mods.
This is basically what I’m saying:
creator profit & no corpo profit = good <- this where people building upon opensource gaming projects are
no creator profit & no corpo profit = good <- this is where most of the modding for old/abandonware games is
creator profit & corpo profit = good <- this is where most of fanart is
no creator profit & corpo profit = bad <- this is where most of the modding for popular and live games like WoW and Minecraft is
Totally agree, but a dozen apples and a bushel of apples are both a bunch of apples. Scale doesn’t really change what I’m saying.
creator profit & corpo profit = good <- this is where most of fanart is
If I understand your point correctly, it’s not the profit from the fan art that the creator gets, it’s that the fan art drives profit of their original artwork, right? Because we both agree that profiting from someone else’ IP is illegal, right?
no creator profit & corpo profit = bad <- this is where most of the modding for popular and live games like WoW and Minecraft is
As well as any fan art itself, legally speaking, right?
If I understand your point correctly, it’s not the profit from the fan art that the creator gets, it’s that the fan art drives profit of their original artwork, right? Because we both agree that profiting from someone else’ IP is illegal, right?
It’s both, and what matters more to me is what works in practice. I consider it totally morally good to profit from content based on someone else’ copyrighted IP. Creator spent effort -> creator can sell their work. It’s sometimes illegal but it should always be legal. By the way, when something is illegal but you think it shouldn’t be, it’s a good soul practice to regularly commit crimes in this area (that you can get away with), to get used and psychologically comfortable with two simple facts:
Ok, so then what is your criticism of Turtle WoW? You’re ok with fan-made art, you don’t care about the legality of IP law, they are more than likely pulling players (and profits) away from blizzard, so are you just critical of the fact that they’re not profiting as much as they could/should be?
On the note of “morally good”, consider Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson had the integrity and legal protection to say that Calvin and Hobbes should exist as a set of comic strips and nothing else. He refused to do what every other comic creator did, selling their IP to mass produce toys, and movies, and clothes etc. He didn’t want to monetization to taint people’s experience with the characters.
So if i understand your position correctly, it is “morally good” that people regularly violate his copyright by creating those bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on various brands and sell them for their own profit, a profit that Watterson himself refuses to enjoy for the good of the art. But you disagree, and profits of others is more important?
It’s not only Turtle WoW, it’s more criticism of the whole Mangos / WoW server emulation community. They were too naive and positive-thinking to jump into developing extremely-high-effort projects like this without planning ahead how exactly it will allow them personally and creators who build upon this to benefit/profit from their work, while also avoiding legal issues. Maybe they put too much trust into Blizzard being good guys and not moving forward with any lawsuits, maybe they were simply enthusiastic about technical side of things and ignored the big picture for too long. If they realized those points sooner, it could have become a general-purpose open-source MMORPG platform, not something that only works for WoW and makes people legally wrecked the moment they try to go further.
it is “morally good” that people regularly violate his copyright by creating those bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on various brands and sell them for their own profit, a profit that Watterson himself refuses to enjoy for the good of the art. But you disagree, and profits of others is more important?
It is “morally good” for people being able to freely do this. Whether you like it or not - it’s subjective. I personally most likely wouldn’t produce derivative works if author asked not to, especially with a stance like this, but that’s just a personal choice, and it’s case-by-case thing. If author is a massive retard like J. K. Rowling - it’s morally good for people to be able to ignore author wishes and opinions regarding their work/characters. And whether author is retard or not is also subjective. In the end, author should not dictate what other people do, including what other people do with their work.
Maybe they put too much trust into Blizzard being good guys
Turtle WoW is a direct response to years of blizzard ignoring players’ request to embrace what people liked about vanilla WoW. They are well aware that blizzard is a shell if its former self and is entirely profit driven. If they thought blizzard were good guys, they wouldn’t need to exist in the first place.
it could have become a general-purpose open-source MMORPG platform, not something that only works for WoW
So first off, telling someone who made a game that they should have made a general purpose engine instead completely misunderstands the intention or relative complexity involved.
A general purpose MMO platform is a holy grail that’s really easy to ask for, but really complex to actually implement. Even for-profit general purpose MMO tooling (ex. Spatial OS, Spacetime DB) are struggling to establish themselves. This is because, one does not simply write a general purpose MMO backend. Every cycle matters because it represents costs in the form of electricity, bandwidth, and latency that scales with the number of connected users. So historically, MMO servers are written specifically for the requirements of the gameplay they are supporting.
And then there’s the actual content, which takes an army of devs and artists.
Turtle WoW devs (if they did any of the coding themselves) are doing something much simpler: approximate existing behavior of the server to support an existing client with existing content. Only then did they attempt to recreate the existing content in UE, and add a bit of extra content.
What you’re asking for is for a handful of volunteers to do with a shoestring budget what an army of professionals did with millions. But you want it to be even better, because it needs to be able to be general purpose, capable of doing anything any MMO would ever want to do.
To make such a leap is, to put it bluntly, incredibly naive.
It is “morally good” for people being able to freely do this. Whether you like it or not…In the end, author should not dictate what other people do, including what other people do with their work.
And yet, my guess is you would feel the exact opposite the moment it’s blizzard taking some small artist’s content and putting it in their games without compensation, no? Is an AI trained on every artist’s content in order to generate new art and sell it for a profit “morally good” to you?
I agree, what you’re saying is subjective, in that it’s not an actual thought out, ethical framework. It’s just a case where you’re losing a game of Monopoly, so on your turn you yell “new rule, my hotels get to take over your hotels!” Thing is, on their turn they take them back and then some. If you want to play that game, corpos will beat you at it, not because they’re capable of being so much more ethical than you, but because they have the resources to be far more unethical. And that’s what stealing an artist’s IP is: unethical.
Instead, I suggest not making rash blanket statements for unethical behaviors and doing mental gymnastics to convince yourself you’re some kind of robin hood. Robin hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, he didn’t say “stealing is morally good”. Just call it what it is, and say you’re ok with it as long as the people you approve of are the ones benefiting.
So first off, telling someone who made a game that they should have made a general purpose engine instead completely misunderstands the intention or relative complexity involved.
I’m talking about Mangos and its forks here, they didn’t make a game, they made a server emulator. And by “general purpose MMORPG” I meant “general purpose WoW-like MMORPG”. When people develop sourceports for old games for example, those sourceports often work as general purpose platforms for similar games. Countless games based on GZDoom as example. Yet WoW emulator projects failed at this.
if they did any of the coding themselves
At Turtle WoW they definitely did some scripting, but sure they didn’t implement their own server emulator, that’s monumental work. That’s been going on for decades. Unpaid work with no way to benefit from it for community, unpaid work that only makes rich people richer and poor people poorer. If emu devs looked at it this way, maybe they would have also set a goal of making their own frontend as well instead of depending on WoW client and assets. And this would ultimately enable this whole ecosystem becoming a platform for “general purpose WoW-like MMORPGs”.
And yet, my guess is you would feel the exact opposite the moment it’s blizzard taking some small artist’s content and putting it in their games without compensation, no?
I hear this happening occasionally. Currently it’s uncomfortable because of unfairness with corpos being able to defend themselves legally better than individuals. But I don’t see this as a problem if anyone’s allowed to freely do and sell derivative works of anyone’s else content.
Is an AI trained on every artist’s content in order to generate new art and sell it for a profit “morally good” to you?
Yes, I’m totally good with AI and even though I used to think about myself as skeptic, at current point I’m more like heavily pro-AI. And I don’t think it makes artists obsolete in any way. We only have to wait a little bit until it becomes as granular and useful for artists as an intermediate tool in their workflow as it is for programmers now. Also I consider AI generations derivative work.
Unpaid work with no way to benefit from it for community, unpaid work that only makes rich people richer and poor people poorer.
I don’t follow how reverse engineering blizzard’s server makes the rich richer here. Blizzard doesn’t want that information to be public.
I don’t see this as a problem if anyone’s allowed to freely do and sell derivative works of anyone’s else content.
This is the “deregulation” argument that Elon and the rich keep perpetuating. “Just let everyone do everything and let the free market figure it out”. But we already know how it ends: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. They have the resources to be more unethical than you.
at current point I’m more like heavily pro-AI
Specifically training it on content without permission? Well AI capabilities are directly proportional to energy costs, so that’s another pro “rich get richer” stance.
And I don’t think it makes artists obsolete in any way. We only have to wait a little bit until it becomes as granular and useful for artists as an intermediate tool in their workflow
Less than 5 years ago people were saying that they weren’t afraid of AI because it always looked like easily identifiable slop, always had extra fingers, sounded robotic. Now we’re at the point where it can generate really high quality content indistinguishable from high quality artwork on the first try. The expressed goal of AI companies is to create AGI capable of doing everything itself, not as a tool. So what makes you believe everything will suddenly reverse course and just settle as a tool?
I don’t follow how reverse engineering blizzard’s server makes the rich richer here. Blizzard doesn’t want that information to be public.
Free advertising for their product, free efforts to keep the fandom alive. Don’t downplay marketing - marketing is king. Marketing drives the money. Even when it’s unintentional. This is pure speculation, but in my opinion most private server players would never have bought a subscription if they hadn’t first gotten hooked by playing for free on pservers for a long time. And this is a game where people who enjoy it keep coming back for decades. I’d be very interested to see statistics on “how many players who started on free pservers eventually bought a subscription.” Personally, I casually played on and off for about 10 years before finally subscribing and spending a few years on the official Classic servers. I’ve seen plenty of others with the same story - it’s especially common among people from the third world, Eastern Europe, and so on. Without pservers, WoW might never have become as popular as it is today, and it could have been long dead by now.
They have the resources to be more unethical than you.
What does this even mean in context of deregulation? If nobody has to pay for lawsuits because there are no lawsuits, what difference does it make who has more money.
Specifically training it on content without permission?
Under current legal framework, it probably should be illegal, because it’s unfair and inconsistent that derivative works by people are illegal when derivative works by AI are not. But under my perfect legal framework, it all should be legal, and avoiding training on works of people who ask not to, should be a choice not enforced legally, which should be transparently communicated and affect which models people prefer to use or not to use.
AI capabilities are directly proportional to energy costs,
Ever heard of DeepSeek? Every once in a while people figure out how to do the same as previous state-of-art models using 1000x less resources. And OpenAI actually became open a month ago.
The expressed goal of AI companies is to create AGI capable of doing everything itself, not as a tool.
Great, let them do it. Let people be able to generate a great game by saying “make me a great game”. That’s fine. It might not be the game you actually wanted though, if you care about any details at all. Because it’s all in the details to the lowest level, to the level how exactly strokes are made, how colors are blended, etc, and when you start going into the details you need a granular model that you can use step by step, interwined with your manual work, manual sketching, etc - just like it works in programming now. Just like it programming some details and intricacies are pointless trying to describe in words because it’s easier and faster just to write few lines of code yourself, do some strokes yourself, etc.
Personally, I casually played on and off for about 10 years before finally subscribing and spending a few years on the official Classic servers. I’ve seen plenty of others with the same story
I think your anecdotal evidence is an outlier. Blizzard used to publish subscriber counts until it started dipping after wrath. They’ve subsequently never publicly posted sub counts again. I don’t know if this means it’s never been as high again, but given how many more options people have these days, I wouldn’t be surprised. Which means sub counts were never as high as they were before private servers took off.
Also, blizzard has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to do what it believes will maximize profits, and as a result they’ve chosen to shut down Turtle WoW.
What does this even mean in context of deregulation?
It’s the entire basis for the push for deregulation. You can grift from all the people you have resources to grift, and corpos can grift from all the people they have resources to grift. A completely free market is not a level playing field. The rich get richer. Regulations are how common folk maintain a competitive landscape.
there are no lawsuits, what difference does it make who has more money
So we should just get rid of all civil lawsuits then, that would create a completely fair playing field? Come on now…
But under my perfect legal framework
Lol or lack thereof?
Ever heard of DeepSeek? Every once in a while people figure out how to do the same as previous state-of-art models using 1000x less resources
Why do you think corpos somehow don’t know how to take advantage of DeepSeek, but the little guys do? Why do you believe the poor have an advantage in that situation? Someone makes a 1000x breakthrough and everyone can use it. Great, before: it was your 1 unit of work vs OpenAI’s 1000, an absolute difference of 999; after: it’s your 1000 vs 1,000,000, an absolute difference of 999,000. They run you out of business even faster! The rich get richer!
You understand that if a model doesn’t expose the training set and training algorithm, there’s no way to know if it has been maliciously trained, right? Their use of the terms “open source” are misnomers. They could be effectively backdoored and there’s no way to know.
Great, let them do it. Let people be able to generate a great game by saying “make me a great game”. That’s fine.
That’s not the question at hand. If you can make a tool like that ethically, I’m all for it. But 1) they haven’t demonstrated they can do so ethically, and 2) there’s nothing to indicate that their goal is to create a tool to enable more artists and engineers.
Their stated goal is to completely eliminate as many jobs as possible. Combined with corporate ownership of fusion research, AI does not currently represent any promise of a democratization of creation. It is the water in a Mad Max movie. The best we will be able to do is fight each other for the bit of energy they allow us to have.
It’s clear you haven’t thought through your positions because you’re just repeating the same trickle-down rhetoric the right has been using to dismantle the US for the last 50 years, all while believing yourself to be anti-corpo. But we’ve fully strayed from the original topic at this point, so i think it’s time we called it. Hope you get some time to seriously re-evaluate your judgments here, cheers.
threaded - newest
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.
.
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
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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.
Lol toon
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Really? It tells me that Turtle WoW became too popular, so Actiblizz needs to remind everyone who is in charge.
I have a feeling that once these scumbags personally hear of someone else playing something for free, then they get very angry.
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.
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.
This was always going to happen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s very different, in multiple ways. Artists earn money from commissions, the main mechanic to get more commissions is to become more popular. Algorithms on main platforms work by association. It’s as simple as this:
And the whole copyright thing is way less of an issue in fan arts, I regularly see a lot of people freely taking money for doing commissions of popular characters like Hatsune Miku for example, or characters from popular animes.
Similarly, there are many popular games who started as a mod for another mainstream title, gained support, and pivoted to their own independent game.
But you recognize that is always illegal, right? The only reason it happens is because they’re too small and distributed for lawyers to go after every single one. But if one started gaining traction selling custom work featuring copyrighted IP, they should expect a lawsuit just like Turtle WoW. Mods are fan art, Turtle WoW is fan art, they just got popular enough that blizzard lawyers now care.
The only difference here is that, as I said before, technically if Turtle WoW did it right they would never have to distribute any blizzard assets, and never make money from blizzard IP. They could theoretically be completely independent from blizzard and still distribute the exact same content. Meanwhile fan art is always dependent on the IP it references. So ironically, all your criticisms of about work being dependent on the corpos always applies to fan art, but only maybe apply to Turtle WoW if they messed up.
The scale is not comparable at all. 100% of artists hugely benefit from fan arts, while maybe 0.01% of modders of popular games benefit from their mods.
This is basically what I’m saying:
Totally agree, but a dozen apples and a bushel of apples are both a bunch of apples. Scale doesn’t really change what I’m saying.
If I understand your point correctly, it’s not the profit from the fan art that the creator gets, it’s that the fan art drives profit of their original artwork, right? Because we both agree that profiting from someone else’ IP is illegal, right?
As well as any fan art itself, legally speaking, right?
It’s both, and what matters more to me is what works in practice. I consider it totally morally good to profit from content based on someone else’ copyrighted IP. Creator spent effort -> creator can sell their work. It’s sometimes illegal but it should always be legal. By the way, when something is illegal but you think it shouldn’t be, it’s a good soul practice to regularly commit crimes in this area (that you can get away with), to get used and psychologically comfortable with two simple facts:
Ok, so then what is your criticism of Turtle WoW? You’re ok with fan-made art, you don’t care about the legality of IP law, they are more than likely pulling players (and profits) away from blizzard, so are you just critical of the fact that they’re not profiting as much as they could/should be?
On the note of “morally good”, consider Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson had the integrity and legal protection to say that Calvin and Hobbes should exist as a set of comic strips and nothing else. He refused to do what every other comic creator did, selling their IP to mass produce toys, and movies, and clothes etc. He didn’t want to monetization to taint people’s experience with the characters.
So if i understand your position correctly, it is “morally good” that people regularly violate his copyright by creating those bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on various brands and sell them for their own profit, a profit that Watterson himself refuses to enjoy for the good of the art. But you disagree, and profits of others is more important?
It’s not only Turtle WoW, it’s more criticism of the whole Mangos / WoW server emulation community. They were too naive and positive-thinking to jump into developing extremely-high-effort projects like this without planning ahead how exactly it will allow them personally and creators who build upon this to benefit/profit from their work, while also avoiding legal issues. Maybe they put too much trust into Blizzard being good guys and not moving forward with any lawsuits, maybe they were simply enthusiastic about technical side of things and ignored the big picture for too long. If they realized those points sooner, it could have become a general-purpose open-source MMORPG platform, not something that only works for WoW and makes people legally wrecked the moment they try to go further.
It is “morally good” for people being able to freely do this. Whether you like it or not - it’s subjective. I personally most likely wouldn’t produce derivative works if author asked not to, especially with a stance like this, but that’s just a personal choice, and it’s case-by-case thing. If author is a massive retard like J. K. Rowling - it’s morally good for people to be able to ignore author wishes and opinions regarding their work/characters. And whether author is retard or not is also subjective. In the end, author should not dictate what other people do, including what other people do with their work.
Turtle WoW is a direct response to years of blizzard ignoring players’ request to embrace what people liked about vanilla WoW. They are well aware that blizzard is a shell if its former self and is entirely profit driven. If they thought blizzard were good guys, they wouldn’t need to exist in the first place.
So first off, telling someone who made a game that they should have made a general purpose engine instead completely misunderstands the intention or relative complexity involved.
A general purpose MMO platform is a holy grail that’s really easy to ask for, but really complex to actually implement. Even for-profit general purpose MMO tooling (ex. Spatial OS, Spacetime DB) are struggling to establish themselves. This is because, one does not simply write a general purpose MMO backend. Every cycle matters because it represents costs in the form of electricity, bandwidth, and latency that scales with the number of connected users. So historically, MMO servers are written specifically for the requirements of the gameplay they are supporting.
And then there’s the actual content, which takes an army of devs and artists.
Turtle WoW devs (if they did any of the coding themselves) are doing something much simpler: approximate existing behavior of the server to support an existing client with existing content. Only then did they attempt to recreate the existing content in UE, and add a bit of extra content.
What you’re asking for is for a handful of volunteers to do with a shoestring budget what an army of professionals did with millions. But you want it to be even better, because it needs to be able to be general purpose, capable of doing anything any MMO would ever want to do.
To make such a leap is, to put it bluntly, incredibly naive.
And yet, my guess is you would feel the exact opposite the moment it’s blizzard taking some small artist’s content and putting it in their games without compensation, no? Is an AI trained on every artist’s content in order to generate new art and sell it for a profit “morally good” to you?
I agree, what you’re saying is subjective, in that it’s not an actual thought out, ethical framework. It’s just a case where you’re losing a game of Monopoly, so on your turn you yell “new rule, my hotels get to take over your hotels!” Thing is, on their turn they take them back and then some. If you want to play that game, corpos will beat you at it, not because they’re capable of being so much more ethical than you, but because they have the resources to be far more unethical. And that’s what stealing an artist’s IP is: unethical.
Instead, I suggest not making rash blanket statements for unethical behaviors and doing mental gymnastics to convince yourself you’re some kind of robin hood. Robin hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, he didn’t say “stealing is morally good”. Just call it what it is, and say you’re ok with it as long as the people you approve of are the ones benefiting.
I’m talking about Mangos and its forks here, they didn’t make a game, they made a server emulator. And by “general purpose MMORPG” I meant “general purpose WoW-like MMORPG”. When people develop sourceports for old games for example, those sourceports often work as general purpose platforms for similar games. Countless games based on GZDoom as example. Yet WoW emulator projects failed at this.
At Turtle WoW they definitely did some scripting, but sure they didn’t implement their own server emulator, that’s monumental work. That’s been going on for decades. Unpaid work with no way to benefit from it for community, unpaid work that only makes rich people richer and poor people poorer. If emu devs looked at it this way, maybe they would have also set a goal of making their own frontend as well instead of depending on WoW client and assets. And this would ultimately enable this whole ecosystem becoming a platform for “general purpose WoW-like MMORPGs”.
I hear this happening occasionally. Currently it’s uncomfortable because of unfairness with corpos being able to defend themselves legally better than individuals. But I don’t see this as a problem if anyone’s allowed to freely do and sell derivative works of anyone’s else content.
Yes, I’m totally good with AI and even though I used to think about myself as skeptic, at current point I’m more like heavily pro-AI. And I don’t think it makes artists obsolete in any way. We only have to wait a little bit until it becomes as granular and useful for artists as an intermediate tool in their workflow as it is for programmers now. Also I consider AI generations derivative work.
I don’t follow how reverse engineering blizzard’s server makes the rich richer here. Blizzard doesn’t want that information to be public.
This is the “deregulation” argument that Elon and the rich keep perpetuating. “Just let everyone do everything and let the free market figure it out”. But we already know how it ends: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. They have the resources to be more unethical than you.
Specifically training it on content without permission? Well AI capabilities are directly proportional to energy costs, so that’s another pro “rich get richer” stance.
Less than 5 years ago people were saying that they weren’t afraid of AI because it always looked like easily identifiable slop, always had extra fingers, sounded robotic. Now we’re at the point where it can generate really high quality content indistinguishable from high quality artwork on the first try. The expressed goal of AI companies is to create AGI capable of doing everything itself, not as a tool. So what makes you believe everything will suddenly reverse course and just settle as a tool?
Free advertising for their product, free efforts to keep the fandom alive. Don’t downplay marketing - marketing is king. Marketing drives the money. Even when it’s unintentional. This is pure speculation, but in my opinion most private server players would never have bought a subscription if they hadn’t first gotten hooked by playing for free on pservers for a long time. And this is a game where people who enjoy it keep coming back for decades. I’d be very interested to see statistics on “how many players who started on free pservers eventually bought a subscription.” Personally, I casually played on and off for about 10 years before finally subscribing and spending a few years on the official Classic servers. I’ve seen plenty of others with the same story - it’s especially common among people from the third world, Eastern Europe, and so on. Without pservers, WoW might never have become as popular as it is today, and it could have been long dead by now.
What does this even mean in context of deregulation? If nobody has to pay for lawsuits because there are no lawsuits, what difference does it make who has more money.
Under current legal framework, it probably should be illegal, because it’s unfair and inconsistent that derivative works by people are illegal when derivative works by AI are not. But under my perfect legal framework, it all should be legal, and avoiding training on works of people who ask not to, should be a choice not enforced legally, which should be transparently communicated and affect which models people prefer to use or not to use.
Ever heard of DeepSeek? Every once in a while people figure out how to do the same as previous state-of-art models using 1000x less resources. And OpenAI actually became open a month ago.
Great, let them do it. Let people be able to generate a great game by saying “make me a great game”. That’s fine. It might not be the game you actually wanted though, if you care about any details at all. Because it’s all in the details to the lowest level, to the level how exactly strokes are made, how colors are blended, etc, and when you start going into the details you need a granular model that you can use step by step, interwined with your manual work, manual sketching, etc - just like it works in programming now. Just like it programming some details and intricacies are pointless trying to describe in words because it’s easier and faster just to write few lines of code yourself, do some strokes yourself, etc.
I think your anecdotal evidence is an outlier. Blizzard used to publish subscriber counts until it started dipping after wrath. They’ve subsequently never publicly posted sub counts again. I don’t know if this means it’s never been as high again, but given how many more options people have these days, I wouldn’t be surprised. Which means sub counts were never as high as they were before private servers took off.
Also, blizzard has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to do what it believes will maximize profits, and as a result they’ve chosen to shut down Turtle WoW.
It’s the entire basis for the push for deregulation. You can grift from all the people you have resources to grift, and corpos can grift from all the people they have resources to grift. A completely free market is not a level playing field. The rich get richer. Regulations are how common folk maintain a competitive landscape.
So we should just get rid of all civil lawsuits then, that would create a completely fair playing field? Come on now…
Lol or lack thereof?
Why do you think corpos somehow don’t know how to take advantage of DeepSeek, but the little guys do? Why do you believe the poor have an advantage in that situation? Someone makes a 1000x breakthrough and everyone can use it. Great, before: it was your 1 unit of work vs OpenAI’s 1000, an absolute difference of 999; after: it’s your 1000 vs 1,000,000, an absolute difference of 999,000. They run you out of business even faster! The rich get richer!
You understand that if a model doesn’t expose the training set and training algorithm, there’s no way to know if it has been maliciously trained, right? Their use of the terms “open source” are misnomers. They could be effectively backdoored and there’s no way to know.
That’s not the question at hand. If you can make a tool like that ethically, I’m all for it. But 1) they haven’t demonstrated they can do so ethically, and 2) there’s nothing to indicate that their goal is to create a tool to enable more artists and engineers.
Their stated goal is to completely eliminate as many jobs as possible. Combined with corporate ownership of fusion research, AI does not currently represent any promise of a democratization of creation. It is the water in a Mad Max movie. The best we will be able to do is fight each other for the bit of energy they allow us to have.
It’s clear you haven’t thought through your positions because you’re just repeating the same trickle-down rhetoric the right has been using to dismantle the US for the last 50 years, all while believing yourself to be anti-corpo. But we’ve fully strayed from the original topic at this point, so i think it’s time we called it. Hope you get some time to seriously re-evaluate your judgments here, cheers.
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.
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.
Here’s hoping the TWoW team has been hosting anonymously and has contingency plans in order.