Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[psyquest]

Some people are yet to grasp that nothing is free.

The amount people spent putting that server, developing the back end, managing the database etc is not free. In business terms if blizzard had to do the same it would be a reccurring cost that includes (incomplete)

server hardware
server maintenance
cost of running the server.
licenses for all software required to run the server, maintain it and add it to their datacenter monitoring.
cost of developing any upgrade
cost of fixing bugs, identifying them, testing them
cost of the x amount of people salaries you have to add + the extra cost depending on the country (national insurance, taxes, retirement etc).
etc etc

Some people think time = free. You will one day grow up and find out that time is not free and time is very very precious, for a company, time to do x is money that is spent. If money is spent, it better be a good investment that will allow the company to recup the costs.

[Aehl]

Nost runs on hardware
Hardware costs money
Hardware is paid for
Nost isnt free.
Someone else paid for it
You didnt.
But someone else did.
Nost isnt free.

I never played on pirate servers and never will.

[Deleted]

Yeah the difference is you have to work a little bit to get enough gold together, but in Vanilla WoW that is even harder. So why don't these people pick WoD then?

I guess it's the same reason as always. You play where your friends play.
If your buddies are all on Nost - you're not going to go for WoD.

[Deleted]

It's interesting, but does this really count as stealing? Can you play vanilla wow anywhere, via legitimate means? Nope. And there certainly isn't any way of playing it for money legitimately. So this "stealing" was basically giving people a chance to play a game that wouldn't otherwise exist. And the people running it weren't trying to make any money out of it either.

Nobody was losing any money because of this. Nothing physical was being taken. All that was happening is that someone decided to make the IP of someone else, that they were no longer using, available to people who wanted it, for free.

It might be stealing in a strictly legal sense, but from a moral viewpoint, I find it hard to see anything wrong with this.

yes its stealing, there is no debate to be had on this, from a moral and legal point of view.

[Aehl]

Theres no point in discussing whether or not it is "legally" correct, and i use "" because illegal is the wrong term to use here, as its not unlawful to run a private server, but obviously a business has its right to protect its contents.

Yes it IS unlawful, I refer to the DMCA, to the Berne and Buoens Aires Conventions, to international copyright law.

SOFTWARE PIRACY IS ILLEGAL.

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Read. Learn. Remember.

Online piracy is a term used to elucidate on the illegal copying of licensed and copyrighted materials from the Internet. Online piracy, as a term, is widely used and upheld by agents who distribute licenses and trademarks for Internet companies in a multitude of industries.

Software piracy is the unauthorized duplication, use or distribution of any copyrighted software. Illegal downloading, copying and expired licenses are all forms of software piracy. According to the Business Software Alliance and Software and Information Industry Association, approximately 40 percent of installed business software and 23 percent of software in the U.S. overall is illegally copied. Software piracy is a serious crime and can result in severe legal penalties for both individuals and businesses.

Criminal Piracy

For people or businesses caught selling illegal software, the legal penalties are much worse. Fines can go as high as $250,000. The ccused may also face up to five years in prison with a permanent felony on their record.

[Deleted]

I guess it's the same reason as always. You play where your friends play.
If your buddies are all on Nost - you're not going to go for WoD.

In some cases, maybe, but those buddies needed to make the decision to play on Nostalrius in the first place. I wonder why so many buddies are making that decision. At least a handful of them have to start it.

But in some other cases, it has nothing to do with buddies. Some people leave their buddies behind because they just don't want to play WoD anymore. It happens allof the time. People quit. Nostalrius is one of the places they go to. But that doesn't mean they're gonna go back to a game that is shit just because Nostalrius closes.

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SOFTWARE PIRACY IS ILLEGAL.

So is gay marriage in some states. Legality =/= morality.

[Eroginous]

Lots of great, very valid points raised here.

I'd question some of the hand-waiving on Blizzards behalf, mainly regarding the whole "reporting" thing. They used to have humans involved in that process, but then (as you said) they got too busy counting money Essentially they decided it was better to let the players suffer an automated system and save themselves money than provide the same level of service they had used to. Unless the cuts were "necessary" or we'd "lose a raid tier". Which I think is bollocks but it seems to be a popular company line.

I just dealt with their new customer service today when I cancelled my Legion pre order (completely unrelated reasons to the Nost thing). I opened the ticket from in game, picked the 'call back' option, expecting a call back within 24 hours as the ticket estimated. A guy named Jason from Blizzard was calling me within 2 minutes to authorize the refund. They called me back within 2 minutes to give me money. I'm not sure we are talking about the same Blizzard here.

What does the cost of anything have to do with anything in the first place?

It was only a response to the point about who ends up paying for your sub fee on a Wow token.

But lemme ask you, why do you think that the copyright protection of things like books expire after 50 to 60 years in most european countries(provided the owner is either dead, or development of it has siezed)?.

Why let a product that is no longer in development, simply rot?. What financial damage is Blizzard suffering from letting a "dead" product live in legacy?. Probably none. Diablo 2 still runs on official servers, its laggy as hell, which is why most people play D2 on private servers, those private servers are living fine, Blizzard have never been hunting them, theres simply no point.

Theres no point in discussing whether or not it is "legally" correct, and i use "" because illegal is the wrong term to use here, as its not unlawful to run a private server, but obviously a business has its right to protect its contents.

I can however see a perfectly decent discussion happening on whether or not Blizzard are assholes for taking this kind of action for the sake of "just" doing it, unless they plan to somehow move into this space themselves, which quite clearly they aren't.

Diablo 2 was built with offline mode, you don't need a 'private server' to host the game. Not to mention it's a 20 year old game that is no longer Blizzard's flagship title. The game itself doesn't align with Blizzard's DRM policies and they would have to recode the game in order to make that a thing. It's just not worth it to anyone. Should they let it rot? They have the right, I guess. It's their property.

But if someone came along, modified the game, updated it with better graphics (which I think someone is actually doing), better hardware support, essentially recreating D2 for 2016 and Blizzard had a problem with it? I think that person should be able to argue that their own work was put into the game and they should be allowed to publish without owing anything to Blizzard, simply because the age of the game and Blizzard's own neglect to continue development on it for 20 years (copyright protection for video games should be short, like 2-5 years max). Wow is a different case though. They've maintained Wow for a decade. The version of the game the Nost kids want to play was legally modified into what we have today (per the ToS) so they don't really have any legal ground to host a private server for that version of the game. Why else do you think the ToS explains how Blizzard has the right to modify the game and its contents?

[wowaccounttom]

there is currently a petition to the senate or something like that going around so companies, such as blizzard, are forced to review their software and label them abandonware.

imo, wow is and isnt abandonware... and even if it was, i doubt blizz would let go of it too easily.



also, all this talk about piracy and not even one mention of lazy town... :*(

[Holtzmann]

You are quite wrong of course. Keeping builds for ten years does little good. Tools change. Old builds don't always work with newer development tools. Branch versions get lost. Changing to a different version control system often causes old code to be lost or unrecoverable. The idea that every software developer keeps every single build of his/her/their code is quite untrue. You don't need to believe me and probably don't and that's OK. Anyone that's been in the business of managing large software projects over a number of years (enterprise resource planning in my own case) probably has stories of the nightmares associated with trying to resurrect an entire suite of software from ten or more years ago. Everything changes over that amount of time. Whatever software stack you were on then will have elements now that need a lot of work to make them work together now. It's not always the build that is the problem. It's the environment in which the build needs to function that is impossible to recreate that many years later. Have it your own way though.

Quite right there. Blizzard certainly has the old compiled builds stashed in their storage servers and ready to deploy. Which is all fine and dandy, but there are problems:

First, those compiled builds aren't the source code. The source code has moved along and evolved. Once a version of a program is released, there is no reason to keep its source code around besides as a back-up in case someone screws things up. People seem to think that programmers keep all their old source code neatly filed away, which simply doesn't happen. If your program went from version 1.0 to 1.5, you don't keep the source code for versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4. You keep the source code for the last stable version (1.5), and use that as the basis for your next stable release.

Second, this is a server application we're talking about here. The client will likely run just fine on most machines out there because it was made to run on as broad an install base as possible (from shiny obsidian monoliths made out of raw computing power, to your average toaster). The server software, however, had to be heavily optimized to work with a very specific set of hardware and network configurations. Why? Because that's what servers do. Software intended to run on a server has to be robust and efficient, because as opposed to clients -- which can suffer in terms of performance because it's just one person being affected -- an unstable or laggy server screws things up for hundreds to thousands of people at once. And so they're programmed to squeeze every last drop of performance they can from the hardware they're running on. That means your server may malfunction or even not work at all if you try to run it on the hardware it was not made for. And the server hardware and network infrastructure of 10 to 12 years ago is very different from what we have now. I know that first hand, since I used to work at a data center that ran servers from the early 90s to the early 2010s.

Third, it's a combination of the first and second problems: without the source code, you can't make the necessary tweaks to get the server to run on the new hardware. Private servers get around that issue by running emulators, but that's like propping up a wall that's about to collapse with a bunch of 2-by-4s. It's not a workable solution when you scale things up, and writing a proper emulator that offers the same tools as the original platform the program was released on takes a lot of effort, and by definition an emulator reduces peak performance by being an additional layer of code between the software and the hardware. So Blizzard would essentially have to write the servers from scratch to run on their current hardware, and that's going to result in a ton of bugs that have to be fixed because they're trying to cobble a shoe without all of the measurements of the foot it's supposed to fit. They're working with client software that's already built and working with data patterns and network calls that are at least a decade old, likely programmed by people whose coding style has evolved in said decade.

It really isn't just a matter of "c'mon, Blizz! Just hire Nost's programmers and they'll fix everything for you!". Code will have to be written from scratch to be compliant both with the new hardware and integration with Battle.net (both security and communication systems) in mind. You don't get to do that with a handful of unpaid programmers, and you don't get to do it without a lot of time, bug-fixing and play-testing.

[Itisamuh]

yes its stealing, there is no debate to be had on this, from a moral and legal point of view.

Judging by the length of the thread, I would say there is plenty of debate to be had on this. I and many others disagree with you.

[Kyanion]

If we're just talking about the subscription money, yes, it is free for me when someone else pays for it.

It is absolutely retarded to say anything else.

If someone makes you a gift, then it is free for you. Period. End of story.

If you disagree you have serious problems with logic.

If I take you to a restaurant and I told you "pick whatever you want" and you order a big fat steak, and I pay for it, and at the end of the evening I would say something like "enjoyed your free steak?" would you yell "IT WASN'T FREE. YOU PAID FOR IT SO IT WASN'T FREE!!!"

Because that's how you come across right now.

Mental.

Good lord we have to argue over the most basic of things here. Sure you paid no money but you paid in TIME to farm that gold to buy that token. Even with garrison busy work it still takes TIME to get that gold. So you are basically working a below minimum wage job to earn enough gold to buy that 20 dollar token. Yay?

Just because you yell in all caps and bold something does not make it true. Someone paid for that steak so it was not free.

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Yeah the difference is you have to work a little bit to get enough gold together, but in Vanilla WoW that is even harder. So why don't these people pick WoD then? A lot of them end up buying gold on Nostalrius with real money, cause they don't wanna waste that time. So why not just dish out 13 euros to play a game where getting gold is a lot easier? In the end they pay less.

Heh even funnier if they spend money to buy gold on a PS. Lord knows if that gold comes from the benevolent souls running the game. You don't know where it is coming from. Those guys are angels though man, working for nothing to run that PS.

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Talking to the Nost fanatics on forums feels like talking to a spoiled child that thinks everything it approves is justified. But if you talk/act against that you are sooooo wrong.

Yeah I imagine they have a rotation of people from their PS coming over here to keep posting a bunch of nonsense to try and keep this thread going. It is getting pretty boring to keep pointing out just how many ways these people don't get it. Then again I mean we are talking about people that willingly went to a Private Server and are now shocked that Blizzard protected its IP and had it shut down.

[Osmeric]

The real lesson Blizzard will learn from this is they should clobber private servers much sooner, to avoid the clueless shitstorms.

Expect increased enforcement of their IP rights against the pirates.

[Bollocks]

What does the cost of anything have to do with anything in the first place?. I see your point, to a degree.

But lemme ask you, why do you think that the copyright protection of things like books expire after 50 to 60 years in most european countries(provided the owner is either dead, or development of it has siezed)?.

Why let a product that is no longer in development, simply rot?. What financial damage is Blizzard suffering from letting a "dead" product live in legacy?. Probably none. Diablo 2 still runs on official servers, its laggy as hell, which is why most people play D2 on private servers, those private servers are living fine, Blizzard have never been hunting them, theres simply no point.

Theres no point in discussing whether or not it is "legally" correct, and i use "" because illegal is the wrong term to use here, as its not unlawful to run a private server, but obviously a business has its right to protect its contents.

I can however see a perfectly decent discussion happening on whether or not Blizzard are assholes for taking this kind of action for the sake of "just" doing it, unless they plan to somehow move into this space themselves, which quite clearly they aren't.

I never played nost, and i don't play official.

Anyone going into this discussion with an arguement of "Well they did something wrong, Blizzard is king, learn to live with it" are simply stupid and ignorant, emulators exist for many things, many IPs are being infringed on daily with the acceptance of the actual copyright owners simply beacuse its advertisement, or its legacy items that the business cannot sustain themselves. Theres reasons for these things to exist, and it simply sucks to see so many people in here just fanboy their way through these talks on behalf of Blizzard like this lol.

I can recall there being a law in the US and in Bolivia, which states that failure to protect copyright material reflects that you don't care and it belongs to public. So there is that.

However the idea that FREE advertising as you call it, doesn't work as you think. First off, companies ignore very old games, considering they have been out for a very long time, but a VERY long time and even then, companies have been releleasing those old games (reinforcing their copyright strikes) and/or when mods inject new life to old games (in which case the company still keeps in check the copyright of the game) (I.E Skyrim). However wow is not a "dead" game its still running, wheather you like that version or not is a very different story. It doesn't work like that, for example smash, they added bayonneta a broken character that I don't like and hate by all means, does that mean that I can get an illegal version of it because changes I didn't like were made? Now to addres the issue of diablo 2 and diablo 3, the difference when compared to wow, is that both games are one payment only, wereas wow is a subscription model, once a game is too old its more than likely than the company doesn't care what happens to it you already made the revenue when it was fresh, whereas in a subscription model the profit is constant, money is constantly being injected, hence its in the best interests of the company to keep it like reducing whatever competition they might have.

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Yeah the difference is you have to work a little bit to get enough gold together, but in Vanilla WoW that is even harder. So why don't these people pick WoD then? A lot of them end up buying gold on Nostalrius with real money, cause they don't wanna waste that time. So why not just dish out 13 euros to play a game where getting gold is a lot easier? In the end they pay less.

WOD costs 50$ and wow costs 20$.

[Kyanion]

The real lesson Blizzard will learn from this is they should clobber private servers much sooner, to avoid the clueless shitstorms.

Expect increased enforcement of their IP rights against the pirates.

Lord we can only hope. I guess we see what happens when they let one sit around too long and build up a noisy group of players.

[AeneasBK]

I just dealt with their new customer service today when I cancelled my Legion pre order (completely unrelated reasons to the Nost thing). I opened the ticket from in game, picked the 'call back' option, expecting a call back within 24 hours as the ticket estimated. A guy named Jason from Blizzard was calling me within 2 minutes to authorize the refund. They called me back within 2 minutes to give me money. I'm not sure we are talking about the same Blizzard here.

Oh fair enough I thought you meant the "in game issues" (because that's what you were, or rather I'd assumed you were, talking about regarding Nosts ability to manage their server) rather than the customer service side of things which I have no doubt they keep people on to deal with. So we weren't talking about the same "department" of Blizzard no.

[slaise1]

Blizzard have transformed from a company that built their games with passion and for their fans to corporate a$$holes.

Why you say?

Not even a single blue post to why they shut it down.

You may ask why should they do that it is ILLEGAL?

That is not the point! With a blue that acknowledge the reaction it would show THEY DO CARE about their old school fans, even though their answer is no to classic realms.

Nostalrius have grown into a family and Blizzard decided to spear its heart without a single fcking word!

Yes! lick my salty tears. I wont be buying any Blizzard from now on. I'm tired of their screw the community bullshit.

[Lorianus]

Blizzard have transformed from a company that built their games with passion and for their fans to corporate a$$holes.

Why you say?

Not even a single blue post to why they shut it down.

You may ask why should they do that it is ILLEGAL?

That is not the point! With a blue that acknowledge the reaction it would show THEY DO CARE about their old school fans, even though their answer is no to classic realms.

Nostalrius have grown into a family and Blizzard decided to spear its heart without a single fcking word!

Yes! lick my salty tears. I wont be buying any Blizzard from now on. I'm tired of their screw the community bullshit.

So we label a company now as evil when they act in the interesst of their shareholders ? O.o

Oh noes they are a company they want to make money !..... more news @ 11.

[Deleted]

But in some other cases, it has nothing to do with buddies. Some people leave their buddies behind because they just don't want to play WoD anymore. It happens allof the time. People quit. Nostalrius is one of the places they go to. But that doesn't mean they're gonna go back to a game that is shit just because Nostalrius closes.

People have been playing on pservers since Vanilla. They played there even when the game was good. There are probably as many reasons as there are players, but for me personally it's mostly just due to the "ease of access".
Don't have to sign up for anything. Don't have to pay. Don't have to put in your payment options. Don't have to feel like you must grind gold every month.

It's the sort of free lunch that some people enjoy.

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Nostalrius have grown into a family and Blizzard decided to spear its heart without a single fcking word!
.

Oh please. Can we stop being so fucking dramatic. It's a videogame. You were playing on a illegal server. They get shut down. It's happened many times before. It will continue happening.

Jesus fuck man.

[Deleted]

I wouldn't go to the OTHER two big servers out there, FYI. Been reporting those as well.

May just want to look at another game. I heard WildStar is hardcore.

Hah you actually think you made a difference.. keep thinking that. <Snipped> has been around FAR longer and blizzard have yet to take it down because they cant.

Infracted [MoanaLisa]

[Deleted]

Hah you actually think you made a difference.. keep thinking that. XXXX has been around FAR longer and blizzard have yet to take it down because they cant.

Dude. Naming pservers here is not allowed.