Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[Teebone]

it doesnt matter if people had fun in there - creators of nostalarius commited a deliberate theft and should be swiftly and severly punished for it

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its the very primal instinct coming out of many simple minded people - if they steal its ok , if someone steals from them its bad

Justification of a crime because people were having fun is the VERY FUCKING DEFINITION OF A SOCIOPATH.

[Klingers]

There ya go. In words much better than my own http://www.copyhype.com/2013/09/why-...ment-is-theft/
@Klingers You can read this article too if you want. It does a good job of explaining the intricacies of theft laws and copyright infringement

Thanks mate but I've read various articles along those lines before.

I'm not actually talking about legal definitions of theft. We all know what legal definitions of theft are.

14 year-old kid downloads an MP3 = Theft.
Wall street banker pyramid-schemes retirees out of their life savings ≠ Theft.

I'm talking pure, visceral definitions of theft going back into antiquity. I run a fruit stall and you take fruit without paying, that's stealing. I'm a farmer and you stomp in with your rampaging barbarian hordes? You've stolen my land. You draw a sketch of my sketch of a vase? You haven't stolen my sketch of a vase.

[Klingers]

its true its not theft - but its also a crime - cloning of people is as illegal as stealing intelectual property

See I'm not disagreeing with you on that. It is illegal as defined by the legal system. But when people use that emotive word "stealing", they're wrong. Plain wrong.

[Teebone]

I'm not against Nostralius people, it sucks when a private server shuts down and loosing everything you built on that server but it comes with the territory. Suck it up and move on to the next private server. All of this bitching and whining is not going to do anything. Is Blizzard a shit for what they did? yeah you can make that argument... you can make a lot of different arguments, but at the end of they day you should know the fucking risk of playing a private server.

I'm not against them either. But what they did was wrong. The ones I have a beef with are the ones that are trying to justify it because it was fun. Germany thought invading Poland was fun. The Manson family had fun. So did Ted Bundy. My point is, there is no justification for this. Stop. Trying. You are wrong. Stealing is stealing.

(also don't end this thread until it hits 300 pages. Not that I have anything riding on that =D )

[Tuesdays]

Can we close this now?
It's pretty much on repeat with random insults

I think they are just going to let it run its course, soon as the next f2p shiny comes along, it will all be forgotten.

They are probably making out pretty good on adrev anyways.

[Teebone]

I think they are just going to let it run its course, soon as the next f2p shiny comes along, it will all be forgotten.

That or when Trump says something stupid again.

[Tuesdays]

That or when Trump says something stupid again.

So yeah, sooner than we had hoped. Nos what?

[Teebone]

So yeah, sooner than we had hoped. Nos what?

God damnit Trump, now this thread won't hit 300 pages.

[Deleted]

I think his point was that there is an Azeroth beyond Draenor, or the Broken Isles, there is a world nobody hears about, plenty of stories that can be told out there, in familiar territory.

But there is not enough player interest to keep such server economically viable. Nost actually proved that. Even with the very dedicated fanbase, playing with purpose - they were shutting down because they could not keep it economically viable.

As a last desperate effort they linked payments directly to the hosting company - which sealed their death, because at that point Blizzard had to move in to stop the trademark violation.

If this has proven anything it's that the market for that pre-Cata world is just not there.

[Thanatoss]

Thanks mate but I've read various articles along those lines before.

I'm not actually talking about legal definitions of theft. We all know what legal definitions of theft are.

14 year-old kid downloads an MP3 = Theft.
Wall street banker pyramid-schemes retirees out of their life savings ≠ Theft.

I'm talking pure, visceral definitions of theft going back into antiquity. I run a fruit stall and you take fruit without paying, that's stealing. I'm a farmer and you stomp in with your rampaging barbarian hordes? You've stolen my land. You draw a sketch of my sketch of a vase? You haven't stolen my sketch of a vase.

Then you should know that there are plenty of theft laws covering the "theft" of intangibles esp when it's in reference to something one party has no ownership over. Also, drawing on a vase ≠ allowing for a free service that a parent company doesn't allow for their IP.

[Pull My Finger]

I happen to know many people who played Nost, and all of them are/were subscribed to retail WoW whilst playing it. Blizzard didn't support the content anymore, and nobody was profiting from it. No harm is being done because it's a game blizzard doesn't actively host at this time. Any subscribers they are taking away wouldn't be taking away from the game, because the population is comprised (if they aren't subscribers) people who hold disdain for WoW in it's current form.

That's not important at all. All this "no harm done" is just your opinion, your personal feelings, how you gauge things from your personal perspective, and your anecdotal experience. Not to diminish that, but it's irrelevant. A private person's common sense doesn't apply here. Legally, there was indeed "harm done". Bottom line is that you have to protect your IP to not weaken your claim to it on the market. It doesn't matter if the people on the server were nice chaps that stop their cars for cats and hedgehogs.

I'm flabbergasted by the fact that people are whining and being upset over this. Newsflash, copyright infringement is illegal. The dudes who were running the server knew that counter-action was inevitable at some point, and the people who played on the server hopefully did too. Nobody has any right to be upset and act as if this was a "dick move" by Blizzard. It's completely ridiculous. Just once again goes to show what crazy times we live in - with all these people who seem to assume that legality is a matter of interpretation and their momentary goodwill, and that they're entitled to free stuff anyway because internetz.

[Dormie]

Here's the thing, Bliz chose Nostalrius because it was big and successful, not because it was illegal. Doing a quick google, search, there are 893 private servers I could go play RIGHT NOW. Bliz happened to choose the most successful version of the one people keep asking for a legitimate version of. Weird. Yes I consider it pirating but I also consider this crusade against pirating to be unnatural and irrelevant because, like I said, I can go choose from 893 different servers right now. If you asked Bliz to write down all the reasons they shut down the server, not one of those things would be solved from what they've done because the servers are out there. So then leaves Blizzards hidden motives, whatever they are specifically.

So get past telling me it's illegal and talk about the real issue. I don't play private and play retail but that doesn't mean I'm against what private servers are about.

[Lutris]

One final note to those who say the server wasn't stealing...Blizzards server code is propriety and is not found on ANY CD in a retail store. How do you suppose this private server knew how get it running? You think they just magically know how to code a server to run WoW vanilla? Trial and error? I am going to go with no. . Somewhere, the server code was taken without Blizzards permission.

Post #1278 and someone finally says it.

Granted I haven't read the entire thread yet but this is the #1 issue when it comes to private servers. Server code has never been made available for World of Warcraft, meaning that private servers are either running on stolen or reverse engineered code. The former is absolutely theft, and the latter is intellectual property theft, since you are modifying code that 100% belongs to blizzard without prior permission.

Also that guy going on about how WoW is an "idea" knows literally nothing about intellectual property, and has likely never created anything but high school/college essays in their life. As long as a private server is using assets from the original game (aka all artwork, models, quest text, npc dialogue, scripting, the code itself) then said private server is in direct violation of basically all intellectual property laws. You may or may not agree with those, but that doesn't change the fact that people running private servers are directly profiting from something that doesn't belong to them.

Fair use only applies to small chunks of something used for educational or commentary purposes. Reproducing an entire playable game whether it's currently in circulation or not is not and never has been fair use.

Is it sad people have lost something they enjoyed? Sure. But that's the risk you take when you pirate games. Nothing about private servers is legal, whether people are profiting or not. And if you're gonna do it, you need to accept that you will, eventually, lose that server. Either it'll get too big to support itself (as Nost apparently did before the C&D) or someone will show it to Blizz, who are legally obligated to act.

[Thanatoss]

Here's the thing, Bliz chose Nostalrius because it was big and successful, not because it was illegal. Doing a quick google, search, there are 893 private servers I could go play RIGHT NOW. Bliz happened to choose the most successful version of the one people keep asking for a legitimate version of. Weird. Yes I consider it pirating but I also consider this crusade against pirating to be unnatural and irrelevant because, like I said, I can go choose from 893 different servers right now. If you asked Bliz to write down all the reasons they shut down the server, not one of those things would be solved from what they've done because the servers are out there. So then leaves Blizzards hidden motives, whatever they are specifically.

So get past telling me it's illegal and talk about the real issue. I don't play private and play retail but that doesn't mean I'm against what private servers are about.

Ok, so what's the real issue then that needs to be discussed? People asked for retro servers, Blizzard said no. Nos decides they didn't like the answer no and made it themselves illegally. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

[Deleted]

You just ignored everything I just said, man. I said that blizzard can learn from this and develop more content in the old world, like in Kalimdor+EK+Northrend+Pandaria. There are still things to do there, a world to explore and tell stories in, rather than just on the newest continent.

I agree, sorry.
They certainly should do that.

[Noxina]

About time someone shut down those illigal servers, they were(are) stolen property.

And Vanilla really wasn't that great.

[Deleted]

Post #1278 and someone finally says it.

Granted I haven't read the entire thread yet but this is the #1 issue when it comes to private servers. Server code has never been made available for World of Warcraft, meaning that private servers are either running on stolen or reverse engineered code. The former is absolutely theft, and the latter is intellectual property theft, since you are modifying code that 100% belongs to blizzard without prior permission.

There are plenty of reverse engineered open source projects around. They're totally legit and Blizzard can't shut that down.
Nost was based on one of these reverse engineered servers. Then they developed their own pathing and scripting on top of it.

That part of the operation was just fine and there was nothing wrong with it.
The part where it went wrong was when they linked payments to their hosting company.

At that point you had a commercial entity in France, getting money for providing a World of Warcraft service.
They can't legally do that, because Blizzard owns the trademark.

So it had to be shut down.

[Ryzek]

Here's the thing, Bliz chose Nostalrius because it was big and successful, not because it was illegal. Doing a quick google, search, there are 893 private servers I could go play RIGHT NOW. Bliz happened to choose the most successful version of the one people keep asking for a legitimate version of. Weird. Yes I consider it pirating but I also consider this crusade against pirating to be unnatural and irrelevant because, like I said, I can go choose from 893 different servers right now. If you asked Bliz to write down all the reasons they shut down the server, not one of those things would be solved from what they've done because the servers are out there. So then leaves Blizzards hidden motives, whatever they are specifically.

So get past telling me it's illegal and talk about the real issue. I don't play private and play retail but that doesn't mean I'm against what private servers are about.

What is the real issue? Did Bliz shut down Nos because it got too popular? Sure it looks like it. Does that mean there are a lot of people who want to play Vanilla? Sure! Does that change anything? No! Right now Bliz is not going to make Vanilla servers so people will need to play on Private servers, and they run the risk of those servers getting shut down. I don't see what there is to discuss.

[Uurdz]

You just ignored everything I just said, man. I said that blizzard can learn from this and develop more content in the old world, like in Kalimdor+EK+Northrend+Pandaria. There are still things to do there, a world to explore and tell stories in, rather than just on the newest continent.

I wouldn't include Pandarian in 'old world' considering it only exists to attract the Chinese market rather than being part of the original Warcraft Universe.

[Tuesdays]

God damnit Trump, now this thread won't hit 300 pages.

It probably will sadly, the 5 people who claim 1000's played say so.