Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[zorkuus]

Many years ago, Gabe Newell (Valve co-founder) said that piracy is a service problem.

Well he was wrong, mostly. Plenty of services ARE available legally but many people choose to pirate them instead. CD's, movies... the list goes on.

[Struggle]

It's not immoral. What really is immoral is what the Nostalrius guys were doing: illegally creating a pirate server, against the wishes of the company that owns the trademark and the copyrights, with art and assets that don't belong to them.


It's legal and moral. People are using their shit without their permission. That is IP theft.


You can rebel if you want, but that doesn't make your "cause" any righteous or any less wrong.

Say there is a group of kids. One kid has a bunch of candy he made, the rest have none. Candy kid refuses to share or sell any of his candy. One of the kids without realizes people want candy, and decides to take the base ingredients of Candy Kids candy and made his own to give to everyone else, and he does so.

Candy kid then goes running to the adult saying "only I am allowed to have candy." So the adult takes away everyone else's candy.

That's the "immorality" of it.

[Kelz]

ROFLMAO are you really that delusional that blizzard or ANY other gamecompany would work with such thugs?

Rolling on the floor and laughing your ass off and then calling me delusional over a legitimate concern is not the way to conduct yourself professionally or following forum etiquette. I look at it as a group of highly skilled engineers and developers, whom over the past year, have learned a lot about the different roles their skills can play both via communication with the consumer and with each other on a project.

The majority of your post comments can be warranted, but you conduct yourself poorly, thus I will no longer be replying to your comments.

[Aggrophobic]

I really wouldn't mind those pennies while swimming in billions.

But you also get that if you don't protect your trademarks you'll lose them, right? So you know, Warcraft would no longer belong to Blizzard.
Would not be many "billions" left if they just gave away all their trademarks, you know.

[Legion]

K keep enjoying your buggy pieces of shit wannabe Vanilla experiences and then get mad all over again when Blizz shuts it down and you lose everything yet again.

Nostalrius was virtually bugless, with some exceptions. The code along with an encrypted database of the characters have been public. You will be able to continue from where you left once someone gets it going. So, let me reiterate: they have only caused grief and frustration. Which will be returned tenfold. Blizzard will never reach Comcast levels of animosity, but it's sure as hell trying to. And they don't have any sort of monopoly to prop them up.

[Kyanion]

What you fanboys have to realize is nostalrius was not in direct competition with retail. Almost none of those players will return to retail. Its apparent the indoctrination of young individuals in America is at a level we have never seen before. SMH.

Read what you said again. Not in competition but "almost none of those players will return to retail" meaning some of them will. What is hard to understand about a FREE server potentially taking money away from Blizzard? Holy crap.

[Deleted]

Glad you had fun playing it that way. The rest of us, we actually group with friends and guild mates and actually go do stuff.

do stuff?

I really wanna hear you on this

[garneroutlaw]

1 million accounts x 12 months (or how long Nostalrius existed) x 13 € sub price. I know, math is HARD. They basically stole 150000000 € out of Blizzard's bank account, holy fuck. No wonder they were threatened with a lawsuit.

Negative nancy. Its a different demographic. Those players would have never paid for retail. If you were around in real vanilla you would have witnessed the mass exodus of that playerbase. In my guild alone, over 50% departed the game between 1.12 and tbc launch. They have never been back since, nor will they return after nostalrius closing up. Nostalrius was composed primarily of a small percentage of those players.

[Stefanus]

This gave me a good laugh. Sad, but true...
--SNIP_-

Don't post spam

[Vomity]

Well he was wrong, mostly. Plenty of services ARE available legally but many people choose to pirate them instead. CD's, movies... the list goes on.

What? The list goes on? The list that of course Vanilla WoW is not on? Did you only read the part you quoted or am I missing something?

[Aggrophobic]

Say there is a group of kids. One kid has a bunch of candy he made, the rest have none. Candy kid refuses to share or sell any of his candy. One of the kids without realizes people want candy, and decides to take the base ingredients of Candy Kids candy and made his own to give to everyone else, and he does so.

Candy kid then goes running to the adult saying "only I am allowed to have candy." So the adult takes away everyone else's candy.

That's the "immorality" of it.

Thats not the same thing. No ones saying you can't make your own game but you can't steal someone elses game.

[Deleted]

Oh, so now we've gone from 800k created accounts, to 150k active players to "Nos reached retail numbers"...
Nos was being tooted and horned for all to behold with streamers and Youtubers proclaiming their love for it far and wide and garnering more and more attention. It didn't reach retail numbers, it just became pretty damned known for a bootleg product. Of course Blizzard wouldn't sit idle.

Check the word sarcasm which is actually not...150k active players on 1 server, let`s count the retail...I`ll be generous and counting with the last known ACCOUNT! numbers: 5,2 million worldwide..split it between just the dedicated serverholder continents: 1,3 million per continent..split it between the servers and wohooo...less than 150k...

[zorkuus]

I look at it as a group of highly skilled engineers and developers

What did they develop? They took someone elses work and put it back together with whatever hackjob they could manage.

[urasim]

Just because you're cluelessly uninformed doesn't make the math have any less sense. That's how many accounts there were created.

The Nost guys posted the numbers themselves. You have nothing. You lost this. You can't prove your numbers but I can. You post bullshit and lies. I guess I shouldn't expect anything more from a dishonest thief like you.

[Namalia]

Say there is a group of kids. One kid has a bunch of candy he made, the rest have none. Candy kid refuses to share or sell any of his candy. One of the kids without realizes people want candy, and decides to take the base ingredients of Candy Kids candy and made his own to give to everyone else, and he does so.

Candy kid then goes running to the adult saying "only I am allowed to have candy." So the adult takes away everyone else's candy.

That's the "immorality" of it.

Nothing immoral about what Blizzard did. The Nost team did not build everything from the ground up using ingredients that they purchased/were free. They used ingredients that someone else made and copyrighted.

Blizzard was 100% legally, 100% morally, and 100% ethically right.

The Nost team and anyone that played on or are supporting them are 100% legally, 100% morally, and 100% ethically wrong.

End of story.

[Kyanion]

A donation link was hidden because they didn't want it advertised that they had to accept some donation to support the server. They made no profit off of the server being running. The case that Blizzard won against the private server owner showed that he had profits of over $3M in his personal paypal account. Nost mostly funded their server through their own funds, while sometimes, extremely rarely, requiring outside donations. They listed the cost of the sever, and only accepted a donation until that cost point was met, and then immediately shut the donation link. I know it's still wrong to accept a donation, but don't make it sound like they were rolling in some serious dough here.

Which is all well and good but the bottom line to me is there is no guarantee that the Nost people were on the level. I've heard Nost people in this thread say that gold selling was a thing that happened on the PS. So what if that gold was coming from the Nost people to earn some money on the side. Maybe it happened and maybe it didn't. But people already willing to host an illegal server are not sterling members of the community that I'd want to take their word on it. Even so it does not really matter. They took donations to pay for server hosting so someone was making money off of it. All the more reason for Blizz to defend their IP.

[Nosdrone]

Nostalrius was virtually bugless, with some exceptions. The code along with an encrypted database of the characters have been public. You will be able to continue from where you left once someone gets it going. So, let me reiterate: they have only caused grief and frustration. Which will be returned tenfold. Blizzard will never reach Comcast levels of animosity, but it's sure as hell trying to. And they don't have any sort of monopoly to prop them up.

Millions of Americans use and hate Comcast. Most need it for their internet and cable use.

A hundred thousand pirates, freeloaders, and thieves used Nost.

Might as well compare Blizzard to Exxon Mobil next.

[Kelz]

Half-jokingly my goal for the thread is to keep it on track. More seriously you've raised some good points but to convince Blizzard to spend money and resources on this the convincing will require something that I don't think we actually have. Enough knowledge of the ins and outs on exactly what Blizzard needs to do to make it happen, enough knowledge on the economics of this, and enough knowledge of how and where it would stop.

For instance: Would a vanilla realm be PVP or PVE? How would that limit the audience by splitting it and requiring yet more resources for support? If Blizzard says yes to vanilla, how can they say no to BC, to Wrath or other versions? Is all of this going to be in one client? How will that work and what will it take for a full vanilla version of the game to run on the same client as retail? If there are to be two separate clients, how will that work with battlenet? How many people will want multiple clients installed on their PC's? How much of a problem can multiple clients cause? If Blizzard installs a suitable voice chat system that is in testing now should it be available to the vanilla version of the game? Is that still vanilla? How much will this cost players?

There are a lot of questions that few have even mildly bothered to consider from Blizzard's point of view. That above isn't even really a start.

That is a list that I did not realize could get so big. With all new developments, I'm sure there are new concerns and worries that can easily hinder it. To address some of your points: The server(s) (assuming one for PVE, one for PVP) would be progressive, so they start as Vanilla, and progress (through content patches) through how they would have when they were live. If popularity throughout the "expansion" was warranted, and the numbers were indicative of success, discussion of the second phase could take place.

I cannot answer the rest of your questions as I lack the technical experience is to justify any of my answers but thank you for bringing up some good points and thank you for keeping this thread open for discussion as long as you have.

[Legion]

Nothing immoral about what Blizzard did. The Nost team did not build everything from the ground up using ingredients that they purchased/were free. They used ingredients that someone else made and copyrighted.

Blizzard was 100% legally, 100% morally, and 100% ethically right.

The Nost team and anyone that played on or are supporting them are 100% legally, 100% morally, and 100% ethically wrong.

End of story.

Anyone dealing in absolutes is to be disregarded. The fact that you claim 100% on morality is edifying on your ability to grasp such notions.

[Nigeldruid]

Well he was wrong, mostly. Plenty of services ARE available legally but some people choose to pirate them instead. CD's, movies... the list goes on.

He most definitely was not wrong, Steam is a living proof of that. There have always been, and always will be, people trying to cheat the system. That doesn't mean that the vast majority of people wouldn't pay for a service, if it was better than the illegal route.

Personally, I used to pirate the shit out of games. Why? Because it was faster than going to the store. I could try without buying. If I didn't like the game I didn't have to bother with refunds. Today, I haven't pirated a game for over 10 years. When I wanna try a game, I can buy it, get my money back with a click of a button, if I don't like it. And I know none who pirate anything, that they can get easily through paying. And studies shows this. People prefer paying a fee, rather than going through the hassle of pirating.