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Blizzard Issues DMCA Notice to a Fan-Run 'WoW' Legacy Server (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader calls it "the never-ending stupidity of copyright wars." TorrentFreak reports:
Blizzard Entertainment is taking a stand against a popular World of Warcraft legacy server. The fan-operated project allows gamers to experience how the game was played over a decade ago and to revive old battles... In recent years the project has captured the hearts of tens of thousands of die-hard WoW fans. At the time of writing, the most popular realm has more than 6,000 people playing from all over the world... Blizzard, however, sees this as copyright infringement and has asked GitHub to pull the site's code offline.
The article notes the DMCA notice came "just weeks after several organizations and gaming fans asked the US Copyright Office to make a DMCA circumvention exemption for 'abandoned' games."
The article notes the DMCA notice came "just weeks after several organizations and gaming fans asked the US Copyright Office to make a DMCA circumvention exemption for 'abandoned' games."
Blizzard Issues DMCA Notice to a Fan-Run 'WoW' Leg
No. They issued the DMCA notice to GITHUB. Terrible summary.
Blizzard has asked GitHub to pull the site's code offline.
Blizzard asked Github to take down ONE file. Github complied because they are located in the United States. Light's Hope on the other hand is run outside of the United States so there is absolutely no jurisdiction for Blizzard to take it down and they can't really stop the code from being disseminated. Blizzard is just quite frankly wasting their time and money.
We'll make great pets
To be clear WoW classic will be a compromise of the old game with probably some more recent features that don't impact the gameplay like cross game chat, security exploits removed etc... However you get into some gray area like multi-loot, or what ui addons they support it gets complex. Add into this how fast new content is released within the original game (there are over 12 content patches), and needing to run it on newer servers, and you can understand why it will take a while to get it out the door.
I've seen non-Blizzard classic servers pull all kinds of shady tricks like being able to donate for grossly overpowered items (e.g. similar to best items in the game, but with an extra 0 on the end of each stat)
Also, don't play WoW classic if you didn't play it back in the day. There is no class balance, and death was penalized by having to spend a good 5 minutes or more walking back as a ghost to your body (in harder content areas). This was however a drastic improvement over Ever Quest which had a massive XP loss penality (like 4 or more hours of grinding XP gone).
I would say the Everquest of now is a lot better than the Everquest of yore. Now, if one dies in EQ, they go to a room (guild hall annex), have their body summoned, and one of the NPC priests there give you your exp back. You can easily solo since regardless of class, you can get a mercenary to come with you, while previously, there was 0 way to solo for most classes.
The Everquest of the early 2000s was a game of frustration. One class (bard, druid, monk) could easily and continuously wipe raids just by running mobs onto the raid and either scooting away, or dropping all agro. Progression early on was part trying to get to mobs, part trying to get the mobs needed for a key (everything was gated in EQ), stuck under the world, so no other guild can progress. Since there was no instancing, guild fighting was common. Exploiting (MQ2, ShowEQ) were common, and most guilds were mainly into "fattening up" characters to eBay, since a raid geared character could sell for tens of thousands. In fact, one expansion had items only were droppable before a raid-triggered event happened (The Sleeper), and guilds would run the pre-sleeper event, not bothering with the fourth warder, then kill it once everyone was geared, just so that their characters, and no others had primals (which made them better for eBay.)
The average player pretty had 0% chance of seeing all but maybe 1-2 high level zones, and early on, you needed access to those zones to get to max level.
When WoW came out, Blizzard fixed what was driving people away from Everquest. Raids were instanced, so the cut-throat competition for the one week spawn that dropped one item useful for a single person in a 40 man raid was gone. If someone was a jackass in a dungeon, you kicked them out, and they no longer affected you. Bind on pickup eliminated the ebay sales of items. A death didn't mean 4-6 hours of lost work, and potentially losing all your equipment forever. You didn't need to spend cash on eBay for journeyman's boots or other items to survive for daily level grinding.
Eventually Verant/SOE/Daybreak finally revamped EQ into something a lot more playable, but the damage was done. EQ became a ghost town because the developers told players to love it or leave it... and they left in droves.
If you look in the URL linked in the summary (Yeah I know, /. and actual article reading) :
it might seem debatable.
The complains hinge around 2-3 sql file using names and having a few data that looks like the data used in wow (spells have the same characteristic as old versions of wow, same old trademarked names are used, etc.).
Fantasy Names – “Script” files and folders are named after and reference WoW fantasy names.
They're not complaining about game assets being lifted of blizzard's own software (e.g.: bitmaps, etc.)
They are complaining about the code using official Blizzard trademarked name to designate Blizzard's said trademarked characters.
(Note: e.g. it's not a trademark violation when you use microsoft's trademarked "Microsoft Windows" name to speak about Microsoft Windows itself).
They're complaining that the datamodel is very close to how it used to be in old servers :
The LightsHope spell table has identical layout and typically identical field names as the table from early WoW. We use database tables to represent game data, like spells, in WoW. In our code, we use .sql files to represent the data layout of each table (i.e. the fields of each specific table, like a spell name or the magnitude of its effect). MaNGOS, the platform off of which Light’s Hope appears to be built, uses a similar structure. The LightsHope spell_template table matches almost exactly the layout and field names of early WoW client database tables.
(Looks like the devs made their "Classic" recreation by using old dumps / backups as a referrence).
Matching Record IDs – There are “scripts” that reference database records directly by ID; there are cases where these IDs directly match the ID from WoW’s content.
"Hey, their serial numbers looks suspiciously close to our serial numbers !"
Oh, come one.
(Numbers aren't copyrightable in the US. That's basically Intel complaining that competitor's 386-compatible chip also use numbers like 386)
None of the complain is anything that looks like : "these huges chunks of code are actually a un-licensed copy of the network code of our server".
Overall : Some of the complain could almost fell under the "but these old numbers are necessary to get interoperation" exemption that exists to copyright in some jurisdiction (other /.ers have mentioned Canada as an example).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Vanilla WoW is indeed an abandoned game. There is nowhere you can play it and it is no longer supported in any way by Blizzard.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like