On the client side how did they do this? I worked with a team reverse engineering another MMO a few years ago and it was because of a plain XML config and game launch args that we could make the client connect to a private server easily without modifications. Blizzard could just implement DRM and put an end to all this, right?

When I played on a private server, you used an old version of the client binary. So even if Blizzard implemented DRM now, it wouldn’t impact these old versions.

Similar to the XML config you mentioned, WoW uses/used a plaintext config file where a realmlist URL can be set.

WoW (classic era through MoP) stores all game assets in MPQ archives. The client has a built-in override system it loads patch files in order (patch-1.mpq, patch-2.mpq, ... patch-A.mpq, patch-B.mpq etc...) and later patches override earlier ones. So to add custom content, you just drop a new patch-X.mpq into the Data/ folder with your modified files and the client picks them up automatically.

For something like Turtle WoW's custom races and zones that means shipping modified DBC files (the client-side database tables ChrRaces.dbc, CharBaseInfo.dbc, etc), new models/textures, modified Lua for the character creation UI, and map data for new zones. All packaged in an MPQ that players download alongside the client.

As for DRM Blizzard moved away from MPQ to CASC (their own proprietary archive forma) starting in WoD, which makes this kind of modding significantly harder on modern clients. But the classic-era client binaries have been in the wild for 15+ years, so that ship sailed.

Thanks. That architecture lends itself to modding so well you'd think it's intentional.

Each patch is essentially a mod on the previous version to limit the amount of bandwidth-WoW had a number of things like that that aren’t strictly necessary anymore.

I was hoping to try out Turtle last summer but didn't get around to it. And had looked into Azerothcore. I hope turtle open sources (if they haven't already and they are allowed to).

I do think part of the problem is payment to cover dev time is actually profit.

I profit from work, although they are just paying me for my time really.

Payment to devs could be considered profit, but profit for the actual people, not the project as a whole and its owners. Also, remember, it's still work, even if it's work on a game. There are reasons not to call pay you get from work "profit"

  I hope turtle open sources

Have private servers shared their work at all? I have a feeling that everyone is redoing everyone's work and keep it private out of rivalry.

I was involved in another mmo's private server scene- what happened there was the source code for servers would get released after a server is taken down (whether by DMCA, or just pure infighting), then people build on top of that, then repeat. I would say a vast majority of the source code is not released to the public.

Why did u stop?

I had to get a job and I just stopped working on it as time flew by. Fun times though

Hosting a wow classic server cost almost nothing, it's a 30 years old game running on modern hardware and software. You need couple of dedicated servers and a single db.

Former RuneScape private server[0] hoster here. Our infra costs would be about 200$/mo, but for a high quality server like in the OP, if you ever wanted to compensate any developer a respectable amount for their work, you would instantly be in the millions. We had about 20,000 hours of professional dev work put in over 5 years for our game.

[0] https://2009scape.org

It runs in open source software. The costs are low.

> Blizzard is right to protect their IP

No, it's inevitable. There's nothing positive about using the law to crush competition.

I mean, I don't disagree with you in this case, but if not this, then to a degree, what is IP for?

This just happens to be a positive example, IP still exists to restrict certain kinds of competition

I mean you can't get a clearer case of copycatting than this, as much as I'm a fan of pirate servers, assuming that they don't stifle the original game and considering calling Blizzard an 800 pound gorilla is quite an understatement in this case, I doubt this could

> I mean you can't get a clearer case of copycatting than this

I'm pretty sure Turtle WoW has its own storyline, quests, etc. The story focuses heavily on extending Vanilla.

In other words, it's a fan project.

Rather than hiring and vying for talent, Blizzard is CnD their fans away.

That's what I mean by a positive example

A fan project still encroaches and Blizzard as many have pointed out is well within their rights to do this

In case I wasn't clear enough, I'm not a fan of this move, I don't think it's a good thing they're doing, however I can't deny they can choose to do it

If we want their behaviour to be constrained, then we've got to either convince them otherwise, regulate away their ability to do this or weaken copyright to prevent this

That's the reality of the situation

> A fan project still encroaches and Blizzard as many have pointed out is well within their rights to do this

Sure, but I'm sure that IP laws don't demand you send CnD any fan project[1]. In the past, they were way more lenient. I guess they got scarred by their DotA experience. And honestly DotA mismanagement was their own fault.

Stuff like that has a hugely detrimental effect; see Games Workshop and Warhammer 40k fan projects.

[1] As far as I know the law doesn't prohibit to giving the server a license to run as a non-profit or giving them a cheap, short term license.

IANAL but from what I understand, failure to enforce your IP in situations like this is often legally interpreted as a forfeit of your IP, and creates much more friction if you ever need to enforce it down the line

Sure, but giving them a generous IP license isn't considered a forfeit of your IP.

Blizzard actually went a step beyond and asked for your forfeit of any IP that you make with their tools. Not that any of those tools was used for Turtle WoW.

So why didn’t they just make a game with their own IP and avoid this whole issue in the first place?

Oh yeah, because people didn’t want a new game, they wanted free WoW.

Why do people write fanfiction rather than writing their original stuff?

> Oh yeah, because people didn’t want a new game, they wanted free WoW.

That's an error; Turtle WoW isn't a free WoW. It's WoW fixed to classic, with 2 new races, extra content. It's basically their flavor of WoW.

Free WoW exists and it's called a pirate server. This isn't it chief.

It’s WoW but it’s not WoW?

Sounds like they’re talented game designers and they sunk their whole project because they stole art and assets. Sounds like they could have made a cool, new game with their own assets and been successful if it stands so well on its own merits.

> It’s WoW but it’s not WoW?

It's substantially different from a pirate server.

> Sounds like they’re talented game designers and they sunk their whole project because they stole art and assets.

At the end of the day, they are in essence WoW modders. Plus, a new game with own assets and engine is a different beast compared to modding an existing engine.

Yes, and talented modders sometimes become a new studio, that's all I was wondering, if that was going to happen here

Totally agree with this. Blizzard nowadays is a giant, but nobody would have blamed them if they remained a small studio, trying to protect what they've worked hard for to create. Just because they have a lot of money now, doesn't legally change a thing. It sucks because Blizzard has become a shitty company, and I'd like these types of devs from Turtle WoW to be able to continue their work, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

> but if not this, then to a degree, what is IP for?

The same thing other state-granted monopolies are for.

Turtle WoW built off a 20 year old client with their own original content. After how many decades do you think it is acceptable for people to be allowed to mod and sell their own version of it? 75 years like with Disney? Would you feel that society would be worse off if people were allowed to sell modded N64 games?

Turtle WOW is not a competition to the blizzard's in my point of view. I played on Turtle WOW from time to time with my kids, like once a month, because this is the amount of time I have.

I won't buy 4 subscriptions and pay them monthly, because there is no point of paying 63$ a month for one-a-month session. So obviously I am not interested in it. Also the new gameplay that is really crippled by a lot of un-skippable tutorials and too-much-experience first levels gameplay is appalling to me, so I won't teach my kids to play this new broken WoW version, sorry.

With AI coding tools, pretty easy to use Mangos or similar to run a private server locally. They even have versions that fill the world with fake players to make it feel more MMOish.

copium argument

Competition? From top to bottom, they stole IP for the purpose of selling it. If there was zero content in common and with no overlap in quests, locations, etc, then a fair use argument might make some sense. Instead, they chose to set up shop next to Barnes and Noble and offer to sell photocopied books that they go next door and steal, then call it competition.

> they stole IP for the purpose of selling it.

The concept of IP is simply nonsensical to me, let alone the clear category error of trying to apply theft to it. Blizzard was deprived of nothing. Who cares?

For new developments, absolutely, but once something has been out for decades (plural), modifying and selling that isn't so unethical. Keep in mind that Turtle WoW built off and supported that original game client from over 20 years ago, they weren't just backporting a bunch of content from Blizzard's newer releases. It's the same as if someone wanted to sell a modded Super Nintendo game, society would not be worse off for this.

> but once something has been out for decades (plural), modifying and selling that isn't so unethical

Yep, copyright used to last only 14-28 years.

It was fine then, and I believe that same term should be fine now.

In what way was anything "stolen"? The content you refer to came with the original client. They reverse engineered the protocol and let existing clients connect to that. There's as much "stealing" going on here as with the Samba team reverse-engineering the SMB1/2/3 protocols. They weren't deceptively tricking users into thinking they were the real Battle.net servers, were they?

In a sane economy and legal regime, this would be allowed under open competition rules, in the same way that car manufacturers cannot prevent aftermarket mods to be sold and installed on their models. All these online platforms have big digital moats, and projects like these are offering alternatives to an otherwise captive audience. That's why Big Platform doesn't like it, but nothing about this has anything to do with stealing.

Thinking about this some more, from now on I'm going to refer to cases like this as "user rustling". Because that's all it is: guiding users out of some corporation's paddock. And if that's seen as a crime, then that must mean that the corporation views those users as property.

Except that is not at all how the game works and your example is simply and fundamentally invalid. The content is not “included with the game”.

Every quest, every drop, every starting location, every single bit of what makes the game playable is server side. You do not get this by getting the game. This isn’t about the use of some 3d models and textures.

While they may have recreated their data item by item and quest by quest, they quite literally stole that copyrighted material (what is THAT item named, what is THAT NPC named, what is THAT quests text, what is THAT towns name) in order to replicate the classic Warcraft experience. That is, quite literally, copyright infringement for the sake of selling a competing product. I can’t steal your apples and then set up a store to sell them for a lower price next door.

If they came up with their entirely own universe and simply reused the assets but without a single reference to the Warcraft world, maybe your argument would make some sense.

Stolen? Why would a huge company not back up their IP?

I’m not sure if you are asking a serious question or making an attempt at sarcasm, but things can be “stolen” without the party being physically deprived of a thing. If someone “steals” your identity, you haven’t lost it, and yet they can cause significant damage to you. This is the same “stealing” we are talking about.

At the end of the day, copyright is a government-enforced monopoly. Crushing competition is literally the point.

Cases like this though make a good argument for copyright reform in my opinion. Video games probably don't need as long a copyright term as, say, books, and mods should legally protected (and copyrightable in their own right) as long as they don't function without a legal copy of the original game/program they're modifying.

Infantile take. Here's a positive: creates incentive for people who want to compete to actually make something new.

If we could just freely clone generational hit games and make millions off them, only idiots would make new games.

I could be wrong and being a bit naive, but what prevents them from creating an original game now?

The team have proven credentials at this point surely?

Not to mention at least some of their players must actually like what they do vs wow, unless I'm mistaken about that part and it's still mostly nostalgia

Having the prebuilt client and art assets you hack and change on saves you million of up front cost.

The foldingideas videos about decentraland talks about this. "Dead" mmorpgs work on a small skeleton crew despite the original game having taken 100s of people years to make. Looking it up the turtle wow server was like 5-10k concurrent players? A lot for sure but bordering on that category.

It takes a lot of work to manage that but nothing compared to making an original IP from scratch.

Don't disagree, just thinking it's a shame as it's non-trivial to create a good team that creates something new, even if it is on top of something old

Also, I'm not sure they have to start by creating an MMO

I wouldn't be surprised if this is not the last we hear from them. The server itself is not based on proprietary Blizzard code so they could keep using it and they already started developing their UE5 client. Maybe they will go the full way, create their own art assets and relaunch as TurtleMMO in the future.

There is no shortage of game dev talent or adjacent creatives. It’s doubtful they will go on to find roles in the industry given the current climate and they presumably don’t have the capital to gamble on multiple years of game dev for potentially no return.

It's not a small thing to create a team who's proven to ship a successful offering, trust me I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do it and hitting that bar is hard

Honestly as someone building a game right now, I'd love to meet some people who are trying things and are open to meeting

If you just make “wow but with different graphics” how long until Blizzard sues you?

Wow but with different graphics is pretty much every MMO that has come out since 2004.

I guess you haven't played many MMOs. Unless you just mean "it moves like wow and and has quests" because that is not what I meant. I meant that you have to make a whole new world with its own lore and all new quests and NPCs and monsters and spells and classes and whatever. You can't literally just slap a coat of paint on WoW and expect to get away with it.

I’ll never understand modding in this day and age, I got it back in the quake and half-life 1 days when teenagers didn’t have access to commercial game engines but modding total seems crazy to invest time into building on infrastructure you don’t own, you can’t successfully monetize and will likely be taken from you if you do.

Instead of just building something you own.

> you can’t successfully monetize

this wasn't the goal of modding.

but there will be a point you'll wish you did.

So much has to go right for a new game to see even moderate success. In addition to the programming, you need an art director to give your game a coherent style, 2D texture artists, 3D model and terrain artists, UI designers, music composers, narrative writers, etc, and on top of that you need a compelling universe and concepts for all of these people to work from. And then once that's all done, you need competent marketing so people actually know about this game so they can want to play it.

By comparison, with a pre-existing game much of this is already out of the way and amateurs can get pretty far by just kitbashing existing assets and occasionally mimicking them when creating new assets. Marketing can be as simple as, "this thing you liked, but more, in the way you want it". It's a much smaller lift.

Part of the settlement might prevent them from launching a similar game for X years. Wouldn't be unheard of.

thank you for the optics. i curse all c-level employees at blizzard to stub their toes on a daily basis.

I can't believe people defending this, I already said and I will say it again, I'm ALL for private servers, but these fricking guys were using art and stuff Blizzard created and profiting from it, they fucked up and deserve to be down, get over it, stop defending the indefensible.

How can you be all for private severs, but against them using “art and stuff”? Have you ever played a private server that didn’t use WoW assets? That would just be another game.

Come on man, at least put some elbow grease on it, normal private servers don't use "wow assets", YOU own the client, Turtle WoW instead built extra worlds with Blizzard's assets and charged for it with a DIFFERENT client, that's IP stealing, and that's illegal like it or not. Totally different things.

Yes, give your money to the company of breast milk thiefs.

It’s not like the actual creators/artists have the IP they were all nickel and dimed by blizzard (now microsoft) as well.

People need to learn to let go and build their own gaming worlds, instead of nuthugging and giving money to an evil entity, that is Blizzard. They deliberately shit on every player's head. During the heyday of WoW, they announced something very cool for a specific class, everyone was running amok seeing the new feature.... and then, after release, seeing that people loved it.... they removed it few weeks later, saying, oooh we couldn't make this work.

Bunch of scumbags, who shat on people. Don't give money to Blizzard, they stole almost all their ideas from somewhere else, and Kotick made the whole thing a fucking soulless money making machine that exploits people left and right.

Bobby Kotick announced it early and kept his promise that he made sure they ripped the fun part out of gaming. Well, mission completed. And the addicts keep giving their money to them. Ridiculous.

> Blizzard is right to protect their IP.

They should have just taken their binaries, trained on the outputs (frames may be) run a few simulations games, and produced WoW-GPT. Blizzard would be working out to acquihire them for millions. Wrong move Turtle WoW.

This is interesting point. I think lot of people assume that training gathers new "metadata" based on the original data and ignore what the training optimises for which is direct copy of the input. Training a model results in a fancy copy paste (unless incentivised differently).

You're naive thinking that Blizzard wants to make something new and creative.

They're just milking current players and they even let people to bot and RMT. Without banning anybody.

Out of curiosity, as a fellow dev I'm interested in how you go about reverse engineering these types of things. I assume for networking, you keep track of what goes in and out of the live game. How do you go about pathing? How do you reverse engineer spells, how they scale over levels, and how bosses work, when they spawn, and how they spawn (based on non time based factors) ?

Yes kind of. You have to differentiate between all the different kinds of data. A lot of data was already included in the client files, but for the rest you had to sniff packages, analyse combat logs, watch 360p videos of boss fights and try to figure out exactly how mechanics are working. It got very ugly after a new expansion has been released, because it was not possible anymore to sniff for the older expansion.

It was always a “best effort”, but also very rewarding if you got a specific fight “somewhat” close how it was on the official servers.

In WoW specifically, I'll chime in with some things I know about: - the WoW client contains a lot of stuff in their DBC (DataBase Client) files (for example spells and their effects, talents, achievements, etc), which you can extract (the file formats used are basically unchanged and well known since first WoW came out) - the client also uses WDB Cache files which contain things the player has encountered (creatures, items, quests), and volunteer players then send these files to projects like TrinityCore (probably the best known server emulator), which use them to build databases - for dungeon/boss scripting specifically, there's a lot of guilds competing for "world firsts" on official servers who collect a ton of information about boss behaviour, they then use that to develop addons, which help their players when actually doing the boss. then, when you want to implement the boss scripting in TrinityCore (or other emulator), these addons provide a decent starting point for things like abilities and their times, boss phases, etc. afterwards, volunteers report differences they encounter on official servers vs emulators in boss behavior

Networking was the most straightforward part actually. You run the real client and then point it at your server, and use a packet sniffer to capture everything.

> ran a private server years ago.

Do you share any code then?

I'll answer myself - there are some projects available on github so nothing scarce, really. I just wonder how much does it take to set it up. And also the loneliness there would be unbearable (turtle wow was quite populated, so Auction House would pose some value)

Crazily misleading comment. It's absolutely profit.

One machine can handle over 15,000 players. There's very little to the 'scaling' and the costs are quite low. Low enough that larger projects have managed it without being funded.

Yes, exactly.

How expensive is this:

Download opensource wow server from github

Rent a server VM.

Come up with very cool name, like MurlocWOW

Create Discord for it.

Post AD to reddit/wowservers

Run server

Day 1, several thousands of players will join by themselves. Because everyone looks for something "new" for free.

Profit?

Did you ever play Turtle? They did a lot more than just that, as per the top comment in this lineage, and were serving a subset of the community by listening to what people want. Turtle WoW was popular because Blizzard and the shareholders do not care about making a fun and engaging game. They care about you spending money in their store and finding ways to poison the economy with their own gold buying system. WoW died in December 2010, the true spirit at least. Makes me sad to say that, and I hope Classic+ is everything we dreamed, but framing Turtle as just another private server is disingenuous. They were on the wrong side of the law, and perhaps they did get some money for their efforts, but at least they tried harder than the entire WoW Classic team combined.

So Blizzard is supposed to make a game that's fun specifically for a subset of players who think WoW died in 2010?

I hate to break it to you, but WoW is still the most played MMO on the planet, even after 20 years.

So it would seem like the MMO playerbase on the whole would disagree with you.

WoW classic has been fully reversed engineered way before Turtle WoW released, the thing they did better is to extend the game with a lot of content, but the core wow experience has been emulated for a long time.

20 years ago I was already using Mangos to play wow classic. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marenkay

Not only content, but countless bug fixes and new features (such as the guild bank). There's also a related project (SuperWoW) that injected a dll to fix and extend the client (which is still Blizzard's old original client).

Thanks Claude

> Blizzard is right to protect their IP.

By what standard?

How does this action promote the progress of science and the useful arts?