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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."
That is highly Debatable , the TOS should only apply to the service they provide(The servers ,and use of them) and its questionable as to if the EULA is enforceable (in the UK and Germany it defiantly is not, not sure about the USA though).
The question of if it is lost revenue is also a problem , It raises two question
Is it a loss of revenue IE: Would these people have played on the normal servers otherwise.
Or is it a gain in revenue , Did some of these people buy EQ and the expansions(or gold edition) specifically to play on this server.
Sony only really loses money if you steal the game from a shop and then hack onto their servers and play for nothing. Otherwise they gain money , just not as much as they would like to gain.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Doesn't anyone at Sony want to MAKE money?
I don't think that this shutdown was instigated by SoE marketting people, since as you point out it's a terrible marketting move.
Far more likely that it's their legal division that has pushed for it since it justifies their existence and hence their salaries, and marketting simply doesn't want to antagonize them.
I've seen it happen in a lot of big companies, being freelance -- "Group Legal" is always treated as gods, despite being clueless about the product itself and the marketting issues. As many have pointed out before, if all lawyers everywhere were put to work sweeping the roads, the world would be a far better place.
What some game companies can't understand is, they make the games, we have fun, they get money
That's the point. Everquest is a subscription game. This server emulator allows people to play Everquest without paying money to Sony.
some people have more fun creating than fighting and leveling up
If they really want to build bits and pieces of somebody else's MMO world, they should go and play Second Life (which is essentially a sandbox designed to host whatever you create, the have Windows and Mac clients, a Linux client is apparently on the way) - or they should simply roll their own MMO client (and when, in a sad twist of irony they decide to charge people to play it, I shall laugh).
Just creating a new game world is not enough. They spent loads of time and money creating the graphics and protocol, on which these other people are piggy-backing.
Sure these people must still own the legal copy of the game, but this is subsidised by the fact that by playing the legal game on the real server builds a client base. So this argument is invalid.
Not only is it illegal, but it does have a (long-term) financial impact on Sony.
Thus is it wrong with the letter and the spirit of the law.
Actually from a financial point of view, I believe there are very good reasons for Blizzard not wanting third party Battle.net servers out there. Blizzard games all have unique cd-keys, and I know a lot of people who buy the game primarily for the valid cd-key in order to able to play online. With third party servers, a valid cd-key is not required. While I cannot be sure how bad the piracy issue actually is, I know that on our local reverse engineered battle.net server, almost all the players are using a pirated version of the game. IMO, the only justifiable reason for a small private battle.net is if you don't like the chance of playing with cheaters, apart from that I think that the official servers are better in every other way.
I was a very fond WR player. Sometimes I wonder why over the past 6 or 7 years i haven't quit MMoRPG's in general. Honestly, because of my love for what wiz, and the crew created, I will be there at the unveiling of dawntide. I will aid them in any way I can, simply because that crew, has a passion for what they are doing. Argue all you want about who had the rights, and what not, I remember countless hours I spent stuck in walls on eqlive waiting for GM assistance. I remember glitches, bugged content, and the whole scpeal. All I know is, Sony never paid any attention to us, and they lost their profit the day they stopped focusing on customer service, and fixes. They lost me, and 80% of the WR players on way back then. I personally will never turn to a EQ game again, so long as it's hosted by sony. They've shown no exempilary work with customer service, and this attempt to blame WR for picking up where they left off is simply irresponsible and childish. Regardless of what this company comes up with in the future, I've officially boycotted it, even if it's going to be the cutting edge. Immature kids who deal with things in an immature manner, will not get any respect, glory, and surely not any funding from me.
Riesen out.
Eh,
I'd say Planeshift is kind of ruled out as getting anywhere, really. When I originally found out about it, I was so caught up in fascination, I installed Windows XP back on my computer just so I could play it (ATI Linux drivers, you know).
Trust me, I don't say this easily, but Planeshift is going no where. I know, its already so well developed, but in truth, there are so many problems behind the scenes.
A while back, I emailed the project manager for Planeshift and asked him why he didn't use the SourceForge mirrors for hosting the Planeshift binaries and replied saying, and I quote, "We have a proprietary license on art, and we don't want to use bandwidth of sourceforge for it, as it's intended for open assets." Now, Planeshift relies only on user-donated mirrors which are a joke. If any of them work at all, you'll spend a day downloading the game.
Actual playing for fun is on their servers is another sad impossibility. Because it's open source, it has tons of hackers who cause the admins to periodically flush the database of player characters. Not to mention, there's absolutely no story or any real depth to the game. It feels like it's more of a "proof of concept."
Creating a Planeshift character is probably the most frustrating thing a game has ever made me do. In a respectable sign of innovation, the Planeshift developers created tons of different things you can change, but really, as the creation windows say, most of the things don't really work. What you end up doing is reading hundreds of lines of text, understanding everything, then you get an ambiguous error message that says some of your choices conflict *AFTER* you go through the creation system, and end up having to do it all over again. If you're making a Planeshift character, expect to set aside one or two hours, at least.
Realistically, no one wants Planeshift to be a hit more than I do. I'm an open source programmer with a strong love for MMORPGs. But Planeshift is not the solution we've all been waiting for. A tragedy, truly.
How fucking stupid do you have to be...
Uh...No. How stupid do *you* have to be to raise your hand and volunteer for a reduced set of civil rights.
What we are talking about here is Copyright and you apparently don't understand even the basic principles of that right.
We are free to write anything, make anything, say anything and create anything we want.
For centuries the act of "creating" consisted of taking existing creations and modifying and improving them.
The wheel became the pully, the gear and ultimately the printing press. The wall became the crossbeam, the arch, the buttress and the cathedral. We live in a world where creations are in fact synergies of other creations.
Now the latest set of creators would like to use money, lawmaking, threats, evangelism and prosecution to make you believe that their simple act of "pulling the ladder up behind them" is in fact a moral action.
It is not.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )