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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."
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.