Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[Guy4123]

I dunno. They said they were going to, with accounts attached, so someone in the community could keep the dream going. Whether they actually "do"...

I kinda hope they do so all the 'refugees' on the realm I'm on go 'home'

I do believe they are planning on it, but it's not going to be distributed publicly to whoever wants it like some people are assuming. They are going to release it to one person/group/server and they will make the announcement themselves on who it's going to go to.

It's why all of the current "were gonna continue Nos" projects that are popping up right now are all bullshit and not to be trusted.

[MoanaLisa]

So we just attempt not to do any estimations ourselves, and be left in the dark as to what's going on, trusting the company that Wod'd all over our faces?

It's tough to find info anywhere about these costs, and if someone, or some people would be willing to help estimate these costs it would be greatly appreciated. Seems that's the most constructive thing we can do at this point, as it will give us at least some kind of insight into what kind of demand would need to be met.

Blizzard's actual costs and infrastructure are largely proprietary to them. You can estimate all you want but you can't and won't know anything. Blizzard runs their own proprietary network infrastructure and short of a Blizzard network engineer showing up here and spilling the beans it's very difficult to know anything.

If you don't trust Blizzard, don't be one of their customers and stop worrying over whether or not they'll ever do a vanilla server. I don't think they will in any case but I don't patronize companies that I outright don't trust.

[Super Kami Dende]

Even if they did still have the code, it probably wouldn't work with the new hardware, creating an entirely new set of challenges. it's not some flip of the switch thing

SHHHH. Stop using logic here!

[Flower Milk]

If they did it's just gonna hurt them more in the long run(when they go to court)

They're not going to court. There is no court case for this, they just got a C&D and they shut it down.

[shoc]

What I don't understand is, why haven't they shut down the other private servers out there, too? Why just this one? There are other private servers out there even making a profit. Like what is their motivation for only going after one specific server that isn't making any money off of hosting a Vanilla server, rather than prioritizing people actually profiting off of their game?

You can't just flick a switch and shut down every private server. Blizzard has to spend time and money on lawyers.

The bigger the private server, the bigger the cash flow, and the bigger the lawsuit. Blizzard gets more bang for their buck by getting the big servers, and nailing them with the heaviest lawsuits.

In the eyes of the law, it doesn't matter if Nostralius was collecting donations to break even or to make profit. It's money that was being used to facilitate copyright infringement and that's just plain regular illegal.

I'm guessing, that due to Nostralius' staggeringly large playercount, they had some pretty impressive cash flow in order to keep the servers running. That would be grounds for a pretty terrible lawsuit, that would stand as a pretty incredible deterrent for future private servers who dare to grow that large.

[Vichan]

What I don't understand is, why haven't they shut down the other private servers out there, too? Why just this one? There are other private servers out there even making a profit. Like what is their motivation for only going after one specific server that isn't making any money off of hosting a Vanilla server, rather than prioritizing people actually profiting off of their game?

You're talking as if this is the first private server that blizzard has ever taken down, it's far from it, i imagine they take down a few servers a week, just none of the others get the attention this one did

[shoc]

They're not going to court. There is no court case for this, they just got a C&D and they shut it down.

Wrong,

"Yesterday, we received a letter of formal notice from US and french lawyers, acting on behalf of Blizzard Entertainment, preparing to stand trial against our hosting company OVH and ourselves in less than a week now. This means the de facto end of Nostalrius under its current form."

[AeneasBK]

I find it funny how people keep posting the pictures of 100's of people all together saying "LOOK AT THE POPULATION!"

You realise If Blizzard decided to merge a lot of their servers together that there would be a lot in one place at the same time as well? People are literally comparing 1 server with all the population of the game to all of WoWs population spread across multiple regions and servers.

Yes, not gonna lie, if Blizzard HAD merged servers a lot sooner in WoWs lifecycle than they did I would suspect a lot more people would still be playing. Certainly plenty chose "stop playing" over "pay to transfer from my dead realm" over the content droughts at the end of Wrath Cata and MoP... I know as a guild leader recruiting it would probably have meant more than just my guild surviving on 25 man content out of a server that had had 7 or 8...

[Gadzooks]

Please, do point out the faults. I would love to hear them. Those numbers were received from Blizzard themselves as far as I can tell (or at the very least, someone with much more industry experience than you or I), so this is not as much conjecture as you would like to believe.

I'll admit, there is absolutely an initial start up cost, but I cannot estimate that, only how many subs would be needed to maintain server costs. Guess what? That's way more than you have ever provided to this thread.

Refrain from the useless, extraneous comments. I will not be entertaining them.

Lets start with that the infographic is a college made graphic, pulling data from Wikipedia, wow realms, and sk-gaming. None of which have actual financial costs of running a server anywhere I can find.

But I do know where they pulled the numbers from: the only published statement ever made by Blizzard, for server costs. The first time it was mentioned was on Kotaku, in 2008.

http://kotaku.com/5050300/how-much-h...ard-since-2004

This was based on comments made by Blizzard, in their financial update call.

If you can find another statement like that from Blizzard, feel free to link it.

See, I've been interested in this subject for a long time, and generally read any article that describes Blizzards infrastructure.

Lets start there. C'mon, you ran your mouth, back it up. You used a COLLEGE made infographic, that's held to no journalistic integrity, and was made for a grade, not it's accuracy, based on 8 year old data.

Please, explain to us, oh-expert-of-all-things, how you can possibly translate any of this into anything relevant?

You're not even able to do basic research, and you're gonna snivel about "extraneous" comments? I don't give a flying fuck what you "won't entertain" - I'll just continue to laugh my ass off at your posturing and incredibly naive attempt to "fix" this problem. Please, answer away - you're comments are the gems we dig through the shit in this thread to find.

[Charge me Doctor]

Anyone actually believing that Blizzard really "lost" the old code is absolutely naive or purposedly ignorant. Even small IT companies preserve their sources from years, it's ludicrous to believe that a multi-billions dollars one wouldn't have the knowledge nor the ability to do the same.

You don't really know how data is stored/modified in big company where people from various parts of the world have access to files, right? I mean, even crap like clearcase have limits to amount of stored modified copies of documents

[Deleted]

Even if they did still have the code, it probably wouldn't work with the new hardware, creating an entirely new set of challenges. it's not some flip of the switch thing

If bunch of amateurs can recreate vannila with barely any resources then Blizzard can definitly too.

[bluspacecow]

Oh, so the number *could* actually be lower. Interesting. I'm ware they're old numbers, but they're the best ones we have at the moment. People get upset when we post something remotely tangible, and then back it up with absolutely no hard data. I'm just trying to provide something.

Most of the server data appears from this talk here :

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...hp?story=25307

The numbers would of changed since then

[Deleted]

Yeah, several things. Mainly though that you, nor anyone else, knows what sort of hardware they would use. Personally, I would imagine they would continue to use their standard server hardware so that they don't need to do any special maintenance on some non-standard equipment. Which would also account for their statements about the expense involved in developing a vanilla version. But I believe that you are presuming a lot when you just flat out state what sort of hardware Blizzard would use for this.

You can ponder this: Do they use a 1.12 client and force everyone on both vanilla and retail to have two clients on their box or do they smoothly integrate all of this into one client so that they are only supporting a single client instead of two? Don't bother to answer because you don't know the answer to that question either. There are lots of complications to doing this from their side and presuming that you understand or even have any idea how they would go about it is something you shouldn't do.

Yeah that's part of the reason some believe Blizz would fuck it up. If they recode it from beginning, it'd obv be different. When it's different people are automatically turned away since it's not what they asked for. Some people even played on 1024x768 resolution for the old feel.

[AeneasBK]

I'm guessing, that due to Nostralius' staggeringly large playercount, they had some pretty impressive cash flow in order to keep the servers running. That would be grounds for a pretty terrible lawsuit, that would stand as a pretty incredible deterrent for future private servers who dare to grow that large.

Not gonna lie, the times I looked for a way to donate, there really didn't seem to be one available. I could just be blind though.

[MoanaLisa]

They're not going to court. There is no court case for this, they just got a C&D and they shut it down.

Oh they can if they want to. The C&D doesn't preclude them taking the Nost admins and their hosting service to court for punitive damages. Which is why it's just really, really stupid for them to be waving this particular red flag in front of Blizzard and their lawyers. As I said earlier, if they want to be smart about it, wait for things to die down and quietly release it to the community. What they are engaged in now is just stupid.

[Flower Milk]

You can't just flick a switch and shut down every private server. Blizzard has to spend time and money on lawyers.

The bigger the private server, the bigger the cash flow, and the bigger the lawsuit. Blizzard gets more bang for their buck by getting the big servers, and nailing them with the heaviest lawsuits.

In the eyes of the law, it doesn't matter if Nostralius was collecting donations to break even or to make profit. It's money that was being used to facilitate copyright infringement and that's just plain regular illegal.

I'm guessing, that due to Nostralius' staggeringly large playercount, they had some pretty impressive cash flow in order to keep the servers running. That would be grounds for a pretty terrible lawsuit, that would stand as a pretty incredible deterrent for future private servers who dare to grow that large.

They weren't making any profit off Nostalrius though. So why not go after servers who were making a profit?

[Akka]

What I don't understand is, why haven't they shut down the other private servers out there, too? Why just this one? There are other private servers out there even making a profit. Like what is their motivation for only going after one specific server that isn't making any money off of hosting a Vanilla server, rather than prioritizing people actually profiting off of their game?

The reason is probably to send a message.

M*****-C*** was actually even bigger than Nost population-wise at its peak, and actually had TONS of "donation" (read : PTW) options and the owner literally made millions of pounds of money out of it, and Blizzard never shut it down. Notice that this server WAS what the rabid fanboys try to paint Nost at : a big cash-grab making bucks on an IP that didn't belonged to them. And fittingly, it came to an end not long ago not at all because of Blizzard, but because the owner was pissed off that the guy he let in charge of the project didn't paid its rent, and so shut down the server.

The difference ? M*****-C*** was abysmally bad when it came to quality, and was PTW garbage. Nost was rather well scripted server (there is a number of pserver higher in term of scripting quality, but Nost was pretty good by itself) and was obviously not a cash-grab (as referenced, you had to go out of your way to even participate to pay the server, there wasn't even a donation option).
In other words : M*****-C*** gave a bad name to private server that made retail look better in contrast, while Nost could be rather uncomfortable by providing an actual contradiction to the "you think you do but you don't" party line.

[Gadzooks]

Wrong,

"Yesterday, we received a letter of formal notice from US and french lawyers, acting on behalf of Blizzard Entertainment, preparing to stand trial against our hosting company OVH and ourselves in less than a week now. This means the de facto end of Nostalrius under its current form."

Great, I'm interested to see how Blizzard is approaching this, in regards to international law. Will be very interesting, once the actual case can be posted.

[AeneasBK]

They weren't making any profit off Nostalrius though. So why not go after servers who were making a profit?

Brand strength? $$$ =/= Reputation damage. Nost was louder.

[Vichan]

If bunch of amateurs can recreate vannila with barely any resources then Blizzard can definitly too.

go read mine and Gadzooks' original posts a few pages back, i think between the two of us we covered almost every reason why blizzard wouldn't do it