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."

Comments

Cloners or Creators?

[Rick the Red]

They've already cloned the servers, why not just clone the clients too, and tell Sony to climb a rope?

What? Too much like work? Seriously, if the Open Source community wants to shake the "only cloners" label, why not create an Open MMORPG? It should be easy -- if it's architected well, you can just release a basic shell and let it grow. The players will want a good game, so they'll develop content, enhancements, and bug fixes, right? The Players will be the Developers will be the Artists will be the Community. It should be a perfect application for Open Source. And if you toss in a little BitTorrent and a little Seti@home you could do it serverless peer-to-peer.

To you, EQ Emulation!

[Jicksta]

Everquest emulation is such a stunning achievement in reverse engineering. I used to run an EQEmu server a couple years ago and being a GM on a server was the most empowering feeling I've ever felt in my life. Not many can say they've killed Kerafyrm one-on-one with pure melee and no GM invincibility!

To this day I owe my sanity to Everquest emulation because it effectively killed my Everquest addiction. Playing as a GM ruined my want to ever want to go back to measly old dictated EQ servers. :)

More servers will follow. Go to hell SOE. We're going to keep playing.

Re:To you, EQ Emulation!

[Elsebet]

Why on earth was the parent modded Troll?

*boggle*

Anyway, I must agree that playing an emulated version can help quench that Evercrack addiction. I used to play with EQEmu just on my own system with no remote server. It was an hour or two of fun running around in the zones I never got to see due to my level (only ever hit 30 myself). I also summoned myself all the best cleric armor and weapons I could find, just to see what it all looked like. I did the same for a few other classes with epic weapons I felt were pleasing to the eye.

In that regard, I can see why SoE is so protective of anyone playing on non-official servers. Once a player sees how silly easy it is to type a command and have Ragebringer pop into your hand (as a cleric nonetheless) spending hours on the same effort just loses it luster. Obviously the social aspect is lost on the detached server, and really that is all that keeps me and likely many others firmly attached to the genre.

One option

[ghmh]

would be to host the servers somewhere like the Channel Islands, Luxemburg or similar, where Sony won't have much bullying power.

I guess Sony is missing a small amount of income from people not playing on their servers. IMHO, they're costing themselves a lot more than they'd hope to (re)gain by doing this sort of thing.

In fact, the win-win situation would probably be to offer some of these people a job working on upcoming Everquest stuff, but somehow I doubt that's gonna happen.

Doesnt anyone at Sony want to MAKE money?

[mcmonkey]

Seriously. This won't affect most customers and most won't care, but out of the few that do take note, are they going to be more likely or less likely to buy Sony products in the future?

And I don't think this fits the old razor/blade example. Sure, MS takes a loss on each x-box, so they don't want you to figure out how to use the hardware without buying games.

I don't imagine Sony loses money on selling a box and a CD. That's pretty much pure profit. In fact it's better for them. I'm sure the revenue from the monthly fees are great, but then you have to support all those users--servers, developers, support monkeys, etc.

But then again, Blizzard did the same thing with Bnet, and those folks weren't even paying! You'd think Blizzard would be glad to get them off their servers...

oh well...

Re:EULA DMCA

[Draigon]

I was with HackersQuest when it first began before it splinted off into EQEmu and their behavior towards this sort of community has always been in wide mood swings.

Here's a few facts tho:
Sony hired at least one person from the emulator community that many considered to be the best addition to the team ever. The emulated service is not the same as the non-emulated service. A few hundred people (300-400? hah!) is a drop in the bucket. People on emulated servers are fans of the game but not fans of the service. Embracing the community of player auctions (selling in-game items for real world cash) is more damaging to their game, as well as the entire MMOG industry, than anything an emulated service could do (specially since the service was provided free).

As for the emulation crowd having subscriptions, not necessarily true. I wrote a php script around 2000/01 that retrieved their patch files and let me stay up to date. Out of morbid curiosity, I tested it sometime early last year and it still worked.