Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[Raiju]

Holy notifications batman.

[Gadzooks]

I take back what I said. I thought #11 might be reasonable but he's just another wannabe e-thug =/

Aw, now I'm an 'e-thug".

LOL.

How cute.

[Lochton]

While I think it's sad for the people that truly had fun, I'm having a hard time sympethising given some of the comments here.

Not playing Blizzard games again? That's like HBO making it impossible to watch season six of Game of Thrones (<3) illegally, and I decide to forever boycott HBO and George R R Martin, despite pouring like 6 mill dollar into each episode to create solid entertainment. It's just illogical and sad, is what I'm getting at

But, that isn't the same. WoW still gives you previous content, just not frozen in a stale rerun.

[shoc]

Hey so I was just digging through old WoW Private Server Lawsuit news and thought this was interesting, I totally forgot that Wowscape was a thing:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/1...rver_Owner.php

Blizzard Entertainment last week won a default judgment worth tens of millions of dollars against the operator of an unauthorized World of Warcraft server.

A U.S. District Court judge awarded Blizzard $88 million from defendant Alyson Reeves, operator of Scapegaming, according to court documents obtained by Gamasutra. Blizzard originally filed the lawsuit in October last year.

Blizzard accused Reeves of copyright infringement, unfair competition and circumvention of copyright protection systems, among other allegations. The company said Scapegaming was "well aware" that its actions were unauthorized.

The total award includes over $3 million in disgorged profits, $85.4 million in statutory damages and $64,000 in attorney's fees. Reeves had not responded to the suit, resulting in the default judgment in favor of Blizzard.

Blizzard had accused Reeves, based in the state of Georgia, of marketing and promoting Scapegaming, which allows users to access the copyrighted World of Warcraft without using official Blizzard servers, circumventing subscription fees due to the game's creators.

Operators of pirate servers can alter gameplay of copyrighted MMOs like World of Warcraft, such as allowing players to level up considerably faster than in the legitimate game. The original complaint said Scapegaming would ask for "donations" from players -- but these donations were in exchange for virtual items ranging from $1 to advance characters two levels, to $300 for a pack that included a collection of rare items.

The judge's order said Blizzard "submitted satisfactory evidence from third-party PayPal Inc. showing that Defendant’s PayPal account received $3,052,339 in gross revenues."

The order also said that Blizzard submitted satisfactory evidence that showed Reeves' website (Scapegaming.com, currently down) hosted 32,000 users on a given day in June 2008. That same month, there were over 427,000 members of the Scapegaming community, and Reeves, who goes by a number of aliases including "Peyton," said that 40,000 people play on Scapegaming's servers every day.

The court took the size of the community, 427,000, and multiplied that figure by $200 "per act of circumvention" of a copyright security system, and came to the statutory damages amount of over $85 million. It's unclear if Reeves, who didn't respond to the suit, would be able to pay the award to fulfillment, or if the defendant would appeal the ruling.

I have a question, is Nostralius somehow registered as a company, or is it just one guy moving around potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars around in his personal bank accounts? If it's the former, then wouldn't he also be held liable for massive tax evasion? Otherwise he is just a guy making 100% income into 'disgorged profits' and 'paying for the operating costs' becomes 'spending it on copyright infringement'.

[Cosmoz]

Perhaps somebody can set up a Nost like realm in a country blizzard has no legal rights in, that'd be nice. I doubt they'll ever give us legacy servers so best that can be done is to keep making private realms.

[Vichan]

Must be why the old Vanilla pservers still have players six years after their creation, and Nost had a constantly growing pop...

It's really ridiculous how the anti-Vanilla crowd is adamant they know what people think better than the persons themselves...

read the 2 posts i quoted on the last page. even if blizzard does make vanilla servers, people will eventually start an outcry for more content, they'll want all the unplayable specs fixed, they'll want all this and that done and blizzard doesn't want to do it to something they moved on from 10 years ago, theres also the huge financial risk of them, all the time it would take to get them up to par and mantain them, hiring gm's and support staff. and what happens if they bomb? blizzard is still out all the money they spent on them and still have to keep loosing money because the outcry they'd get if they took them down would be worse than what's happening right now. so it's easier for blizzard to just not do vanilla servers

[Deleted]

I have a question, is Nostralius somehow registered as a company, or is it just one guy moving around potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars around in his personal bank accounts?

Where would that money have come from?

[Raiju]

@shoc nostalrius is a team not registered as a company afaik, but how much they personally take in is an unknown. The hosting company is also being attacked by blizzard inthis case though, so they will be liable for damages regardless.

[Propainn]

Aw, now I'm an 'e-thug".

LOL.

How cute.

Heh, implying I even gave you that much credit. If you read my other post, I actually gave you a compliment.

Then you just went and continued to prove that you're useless to the community/this discussion, and probably nowhere near as knowledgable as I thought. There's a reason you're #11 though I suppose.

Also, cute? Bitch, I'm fuckin' adorable.

[Flower Milk]

Yes sir, I'm sure (http://imgur.com/4sjs7wP - first three and fourth topics are all on this matter). I think they cannot delete so many posts on the subject and might even be considering how to mitigate the damage. I can't see how they can tone this down if they weren't able until now.

Oh you're on EU forums, on NA they have been deleting them all as soon as they're made, unfortunately.

[Akka]

Aw, how cute, someone is upset with the facts I've posted. LOL.

I'll stop there, you're not worth the infraction. I'll just wait for your stunning refutation of anything I've posted.

You've posted precious few facts. You've made some affirmations supported by little (like claiming their software is heavily dependant on their hardware just because they have tailored hardware servers, and confusing a software update with a hardware one) and postured a lot. Not really sufficient to make you an authority on... anything, really.

I also saw you being obliterated by Xarian when it came to discussing technical matters, where you were just acting like a child and were unable to answer solidly to his polite and argumented posts.

So yeah, I stand by what I said, you're all posture and no substance.

[Gadzooks]

How much money will it cost blizzard to redevelop and/or reengineer Vanilla realm? :3 What do you think? At least approximately.

Hard to say. How many people will you throw at it? How much time for it to happen? How much code needs to be redone? What can be transferred over, partially?

The devs have said, they discussed it internally, and even said there was support for it internally, but it was too expensive and time consuming to be worth it. That's the best answer anyone can give.

[Lorianus]

Perhaps somebody can set up a Nost like realm in a country blizzard has no legal rights in, that'd be nice. I doubt they'll ever give us legacy servers so best that can be done is to keep making private realms.

Where does this myth come from that there is some holy lands where laws do not get enforced (Russia and others) ?, last time i checked Blizzard has HQ´s and sub Companys in every mayor region in EU/NA/KR/Oceanic/Asia if they wanted to they could just go with the local legal systems or not ?

[Deleted]

6 months are arguably far more sustainable weight than the current iteration of WoW can offer. And when you argue 6 months you fail to take into consideration that Vanilla raiding tiers are much harder to progress through (because different tiers of difficulty are not relevant, the different stages of raiding themselves are different difficulties), irrelevant of how much more "skilled" the playerbase might think they are. Its potential longevity is arguably higher than retail, if it succeeds in sustaining a decent playerbase. If a single pirate-run server can do so, Blizzard can too.

Given that the first two tiers would be cleared within the first month, barring any artificial gating, I'm not sure a KT kill before 6 months were up, is entirely out of the question.

[Deleted]

"Is anyone else sick of just being an 'adventurer'"

Whoever quoted the above thread title; no, MMORPG players generally aren't divided on what an MMORPG should be. WoW players are divided on what WoW should be; there's a difference. WoW incorporates many other demographics that inherently would not like, or don't even know what an MMORPG, in reality, looks like.

The above title is also bullshit; re: Commander of the faction in WoD; Every ret paladin is the Ashbringer in Legion; Everybody is a Hero; also re: class homogenization.

Terrible argument.

Hard to say. How many people will you throw at it? How much time for it to happen? How much code needs to be redone? What can be transferred over, partially?

The devs have said, they discussed it internally, and even said there was support for it internally, but it was too expensive and time consuming to be worth it. That's the best answer anyone can give.

Blizzard looked at the metrics and said, hey, it's cheaper for us to sue Nostalrius, than to continue to let them do their thing out of their own free time, with no profit involved on their part.

Nostalrius stole nothing significant Blizzard. Blizzard stole their passion, their time and effort.

[Propainn]

You've posted precious few facts. You've made some affirmations supported by little (like claiming their software is heavily dependant on their hardware just because they have tailored hardware servers, and confusing a software update with a hardware one) and postured a lot. Not really sufficient to make you an authority on... anything, really.

I also saw you being obliterated by Xarian when it came to discussing technical matters, where you were just acting like a child and were unable to answer solidly to his polite and argumented posts.

So yeah, I stand by what I said, you're all posture and no substance.

Sounds about right.

[Flower Milk]

They aren't wrong though. People think they want Legacy servers, but after 1-2 months they would be dead once people realised there was no content beyond things they had already done 10 years ago.

I find the massive irony of a lot of players that complain current WoW sucks because it has no content, being the same people that want legacy servers to be introduced which are servers that have FROZEN content.

Actually.. not really irony, more just stupidity.

Yeah, no. You or Blizzard has no right to tell me what I actually want and enjoy, sorry.

[shimerra]

They certainly aren't using it to improve retail WoW.

In your opinion. Retail WoW is still by pretty much every metric and astounding success dominating its market.


But I guess in your eye the key to maintaining that is to piss away money restarting vanilla to appease a small minority instead of investing in new content?

[Gadzooks]

Heh, implying I even gave you that much credit. If you read my other post, I actually gave you a compliment.

Then you just went and continued to prove that you're useless to the community/this discussion, and probably nowhere near as knowledgable as I thought. There's a reason you're #11 though I suppose.

Also, cute? Bitch, I'm fuckin' adorable.

Now I'm "useless".

Meanwhile, you've yet to refute anything I've said.

And, I don't seem to recall ever calling you any names. Odd, that.

[Kynario]

It's been said many times, and a lot throughout this thread, but some of you guys really have to understand that Blizzard is constantly moving WoW forward ... The world, the story, their in-game systems etc.

The idea of a Legacy Server does appeal to me too for sure, the days of Vanilla/BC/WoTLK were incredible ... However, think of all the great changes they've already developed since those times, like new character models, achievements, tons of incremental improvements to the game like talents, spells, thousands of quests etc. ... Would all of these systems become obsolete? Neglected? Would we return to old character models again? Disregard changes that took years of development time? ... I'm really not sure this'd be the way to go forward, hence why Blizzard hasn't done it. The way I do see it though is that one day there will be "Classic Realms" where the Cap for the whole server is at level 60, although this brings about issues like Blizzard having to resort to changing the talent trees/spells etc. to a Vanilla-like state.

Not sure how they'd execute this. :-/

But there's no way they'd just "move backwards", and disregard all of the work and complex systems they've been developing for years and years.