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EQ Emulator Winter's Roar Shut Down
grumpygrodyguy writes "Fans of Everquest emulation were dealt a blow today as Sony Online Entertainment threatened Winter's Roar into shutting down their server. WR was home to approximately 350 players and a labor of love for the developers who spent hours a day for nearly 3 years improving this unique game world. WR was a not-for-profit MMORPG that allowed players to play for free as long as they owned the original Everquest client up to and including the Luclin expansions. SOE has threatened WR's hosting company EV1 with legal action unless it ceases and desists service immediately."
like this http://black-legacy.com/index.php
orhttp://sourceforge.net/projects/planeshift/
Have a look on sourceforge for a few more
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I've been developing with the EQEMu project since the ancension from AGX. So far the only time a c&d has been issued was if a server provided a back patch for users to play on their server.
A backpatch was essentially the older version of the game's client and dll files which would allow it to run on the emulated server. These files however were copyrighted material, which usually would give SoE basis for a C&D.
The project was previously C&Ded when it obtained the planes of power expansion early and the files were provided on the sourceforge page, but other then that there have been little to no legal issues.
This wasn't so much as sony being the evil empire, but the fact that you can pretty much dl the game for free then use the provided files off the emulated server's webpage to patch it to a time where it is compatible with the emulated server, this was the problem.
The client updates have pretty much been the single largest setbacks to the project (besides internal developer fights).
You're thinking of WoW emulation which was quickly shut down before release. There were lots of servers and there probably still are, but they're a bit harder to find. Blizzard has been a much larger bully than EQ, although many people may think otherwise. Blizzard has gone as far as shutting down sites that link to this sort of stuff. As a side note, emulated servers (for all games) are nothing in comparison to live servers (hosted by the companies). Winter's Roar was an exception, in that it changed many dynamics of the game, but it still wasn't the same. Most emulated servers (for EQ) never go beyond 50 players at any time which sort of defeats the whole point of an MMO.
rellix