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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."
What some game companies can't understand is, they make the games, we have fun, they get money. some people have more fun creating than fighting and leveling up.
they would lose. unless sony doesnt have a line in it which I doubt they dont, the TOS pretty much spells out you will play this game on their servers only. In the least they could probably get you on hacking, but likely they would try to get you on theft of fees since every person on that server is lost SOE revinue.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
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.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
Yes, thats the way it works:
The Golden Rule: Whoever has the gold makes the rules.
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).
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.
I was told there was a server type for World of Warcraft. I forget the name of it. I was surprised Blizzard didn't shut those guys down especially when they don't like bnetd.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
no, you dont need a valid CD key or a subscription to patch the client. I know. All you need is to have a friend to email you the EQ exe. You stick it in a folder, run it, an it will download all your missing content. Boom, your done.
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.
-Rabbit
Because it is about a game, silly.
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.
Sony Online Entertainment only claim to fame WAS Everquest but now that WoW has over 2 millions users and EQ 1 and 2 only have about 750k subscribers ( about 20% of them are all staion access Duplicates), SOE most to anything in its power to secure its faling product.
It is about your rights online in reguard to the EULA agreement with said game's publisher. Thin line, yes?
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).
You were doing fine until you started to throw some opinion into your "facts" paragraph.
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 : )
If SOE provided any real customer support they would have more customers, not only that but the crap they pump out for expansions is unreal. If you go to the actual boards you see class issues that have been around for a year or longer and with promises that it will be looked into. They hardly ever actually deal with problems but they put out expansions that will cause you to fall ebhind the game if you dont buy them, make you an inferior player because of gear. I played Wintersroar, and it had nothing to do with me leaving EQ, SOE had everything to do with that, maybe if they put out an expansion every year or maybe year and a half instead of trying to anally molest their customers by sticking it to them with expansions every 6 months they would have more people staying. they might blame eqemu's for loss of customers, but I know I for one left SOE and will bever support another one of their endevors of because how poorly they treat their customers. As far as I am concerned SOE can choke on it! Wintersroar was the best mmorpg i have played since sony took over varent with the luclin expansion, eveything was down hill after then.
Uh, no sir. How stupid do YOU have to be, to....
uhm... I've got nothing. I just like the pattern.
you dont even need to have a friend, you can get the eqlive patcher on sony's website, run it and it wil download and rebuild the game for you beofore it ever asks for a user/password. i just reinstalled myself this way under a week ago, on a high speed line it is in fact teh easier way to do it (takes longer but is unattended ..no disk swaps)
"tell the ones that come after me that 5 is to much"
EQEMu actually spawned from Ags by Agz, not EthernalQuest directly. Also, I know of no one from the emulating community that was hired -- they did hire someone from SEQ though. Also, the TFA is wrong about the number of players. WR peaked at about 380 players /concurrent/, but I do not have a good number of active accounts at the time we shut down.
True about not needing to patch, but the majority of emu players are likely to have played live in the past and purchased the game in a box or one of the pay-to-download expansions
I feel kind of ambivielent about this. I mean, I believe Sony has the right to control their intellectual property. The development of the basic engine and graphics that run the game is all theirs. But on the other hand, like any other work of art like a book, or movie, or song (or whatever...obviously 'art' here is a very relative phrase), once the artists puts it out into the public, it's kind of stupid not to expect some members of the auidence to take things from it and run with them. Speculative Fiction writers have been doing this to each other since the down of SF. And it's only made the fields stronger over all. It's very hard to advance if we aren't allowed to stand on the shoulders of the giants around us. This is just another of the far-too-many examples of this kind of thing that are prevelent in the world today. Then again, I've recently been meme-infected by Cory Doctorow, so maybe I'm not an unbiased person any longer...