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Blizzard Shuts Down Popular Fan-run 'Pirate' Server For Classic WoW (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Blizzard is threatening legal action against the popular "pirate" servers for World of Warcraft. The Nostalrius servers have been operating for nearly a year, running version 1.12 of the original World of Warcraft as it existed in 2006. Admins say that 800K registered accounts and 150K active players were working through quest progressions reproduced to precisely match the game of a decade ago. Nostalrius' team says its French hosting provider has been issued a formal letter asking it to shut down the servers or face a potential copyright infringement lawsuit as hosting private servers is explicitly against Blizzard's Terms of Use. Blizzard says the rule "isn't an issue because of 'lost' subscription fees from players choosing these illegitimate servers over the real WoW servers -- it simply boils down to the fact that private servers are illegal, and that's that." Nostalrius' servers will be shut down on April 10, but the team says it "will still be publicly providing everything needed in order to setup your own 'Nostalrius' if you are willing to."
I poked around with running a private server for funsies at one point years ago mostly for my own use, and virtually everything is controlled by the server. NPCs' locations, models, and dialogs, any scripting involving NPCs, monster spawn locations and attacks/spells/etc, Quests, quest text, any scripting that goes along with the quests, things like levelups and level caps, skill-handling... the server pretty much makes it the game. Without that you're just running around a dead, empty world. There were quite a few database sets of quests too - from full blizz-like (advertised as such) that attempted to recreate the official experience as closely as possible to various remixes and tweaks (mostly involving massively overpowering everything).
And even for things in the client, even if Blizzard distributes it for free, it's still their client. I'm pretty sure you have to accept the EULA before you even log in. It'll be an interesting court case all the same.