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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? 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...
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 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
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
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 : )