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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.
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).
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
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.