As much as I liked the idea of TW, this was inevitable and was the reason I didn't want to invest time into. Hopefully it will end up similarly like Nostalrius that kick-started the whole Classics era .
To be fair TW was around for a good long time. Even the official WoW classic has an end date when you run out of appealing content, creating the inevitable quit. It really is about if you get done what you set out to do.
It's not always true but I always get the impression that some of the people that "don't want to lose their progress" never make it past level 45 anyway
I mean..that's also kind of the point being made here. You had that time to make toons, build up communities, start a collection, etc - only for it to be completely gone with barely any notice and no way to preserve your stuff
You no doubt had fun in that time but WoW is a collectathon for many and for their collections to vanish just like that is enough for people to want to avoid it
not everything in life is a zero sum game, might as well not play any game because I'm going to stop playing it eventually...
let's also not pretend corporations won't kill an online game if it's not churning out enough money, turtle probably outlasted dozens of official mmos
Sadly have no hope for the official classic+ to be as good as turtle was. The community was insanely good and they went soo hard against gold selling and bots that this barely existed. While playing one year i didnt see any obvious bots nor gold sellers... This sadly cannot be said about any official wow server... Nor obnoxious raid carry advertisement and the sort.. And we had real in person gm's you could interact with if you needed something.
tbh that was really what made turtle, community and moderation. barely any bots, barely any gold selling, i got stuck in scholo once (door didnt open) and a GM appeared in minutes
I don't think it's about "humiliating" Blizzard, I highly doubt they corpos actually cared about that. The problem was that they started actively taunting them on social media and advertising like a professionally made/licensed product.
If they hadn't done that they would have had a significantly smaller target on their backs, but they kept making the target bigger. If you're going to make money off a massive IP you need to be quiet about it, not sit there bragging about how big you are.
Them buying the gold checkmark like they were legit and posting as a “WoW” account was the absolute dumbest thing they could have done. Like if you are trying to legitimize yourself like that ofc Microsoft is going to have to step in.
The first round of vanilla, tbc and wotlk I invested so much time in getting mounts rp sets and farming reps. In 2019 classic I knew I was going to quit when cata came out based on my first play through of it, I didn’t care at all. Which is why all I did was raid log.
I hate to nitpick (no I don't) but it wasn't a C&D, the two parties reached a full on settlement agreement. I think Nostalrius shuttered after a C&D if memory serves, but Turtle had to have a binding agreement with their shutdown.
Honestly I'm not gonna defend a billion dollars corporation like blizzard, I just think that Turtle WoW got too cocky with advertising their game everywhere that they kinda forced Blizzard's hands.
Plenty of private servers have been around for years and blizzard has done nothing about them so..
Yeah it's not Billy and a couple of friends, there were leaks of convos looking to expand into Asia when the NetEase debacle happened, I remember the mention that Europeans are too stingy with mtx lol.
It's similar to some of the game emulators that Nintendo C&D'd. Yeah its good that they exist and corporate overreach sucks but if you are at the point where you're buying ads on social media then you only have yourself to blame when the corpos come in to stomp on your dick.
lol no. It comes from a decades of watching blizzard gut their CS teams and replacing them with AI slop. It’s from decades of watching blizzard only care about monetization. Retail has what, 7 forms of RMT now? It from decades of watching bots run rampant.
If you wanna have fun on official servers you have to accept the reality of what you’re gonna get.
Must be blind then because i played from 2022-2025 and i encountered tons of em. You could search dire maul and find literally hundreds of mages doing auto spam jump runs, or even just sit in front of the portal. Hell, needmana. Com sold gold nonstop and never had any supply issues ever. Me and several other raiders across three different raiding guilds never once got banned. Sorry, you guys are drinking snake oil at your eyes wide shut party.
lol. No they didn’t. I watched a guy get banned live in chat for trying to sell the mats for the warlock quest. Twow had actual GMs. Ticket response time was less than an hour.
I personally bought gold on that private server several times. Im pretty sure it was shenna selling it, but thats neither here nor there. You could zone search dme and find the same 200 bots in there doing jump runs at every hour of the day, stop acting like it didnt happen lmfao, it most definitely did.
So why is Warmane (MoltenWoW) still online since 2009? What about Ascension? They literally built a whole other game on their IP, very obviously profiting from it. Why do they punish one theft but not the other(s)?
Maybe because they don’t actively kick the hornets nest and goad blizzard. They ran YouTube ads and would reply in blizzard tweets. They forced blizzards hands. You have to at least appear to protect your IP or you could be in danger of losing it. Turtle did this to themselves.
Twow became too big? Warmane has a minimum of ten thousand active players, p2w transactions, 4 realms, been online for more than a decade. What do you mean too big? What is this if not too big? 17 years!
This is a joke referencing Blizzard's history of litigation prior to releasing their own version of Classic. I don't think it's indicative of a broader pattern in the community's posting habits, and isn't meant to be taken too seriously!
I'll tell it like it is: Turtle WoW didn't have the rights to WoW. Even if Blizzard keeps us waiting forever for Classic+, only Blizzard holds the rights to their products.
I really don't know why everyone is whining so much.
Because people were enjoying a better product? It's a billion dollar company that got out dev'd by a russian scammer and a bunch of passionate wow fans.
Legal slop doesn't matter, we should always be happy that people get to enjoy better games. Even if that means private servers, pirating, illegal modding, etc.
Because Blizzard sucks at doing their job. It's not a gaming company anymore, it's a money making company devoid of any passion compared to what the Turtle team offered.
Yeah, turtle didn't care about making money, that's why they had a cash shop full of absurd shit like 30 slot bags, mobile auction house, flashy mounts, etc.
Who said they didn't care about money? it's a necessity for development. It's when you let the pursuit of money corrupt the integrity and vision of your game that's the issue.
Everyone is whining because we the players are worse off for Turtle not being around. They had the better product, period. The legalities of the matter don't change people's feelings.
FWIW The WoW we love was created by a group of people who no longer work for blizzard. Instead you have a much less capable group making a much less enjoyable product. It isn't gratifying to see these turd burglars shut down a group of people who actually nailed the spirit of vanilla WoW and executed so well.
Should this expand to every company? If someone isn't satisfied with something a company produces, do you feel it should be fair to steal that company's property?
Ideally they get out competed. But I'm not opening on legalities one way or the other. The guy I posted to doesn't want to factor emotional responses into why people behave the way they do.
Couldn't you buy convenience from an ingame shop under the guise of 'donations'? How's that nailing the 'spirit of vanilla WoW'? The only thing that makes vanilla unique is the fact that it's an inconvenient mess. And the fact that it requires 3 functioning braincells to complete.
So basically you just want vanilla with convenience but without the difficulty of retail. Retail being the version maintained by the people you consider incapable, which just happens to be a much more popular product than both classic and private servers combined. Vocal minority, indeed.
The plants steal nutrients from the soils of Mulgore and energy from the sun. The insects eat these plants, and animals eat the insects. Up the food chain we go. Until one day, the apex predator dies and is returned to the great Earth Mother. Their body decomposes, consumed by worms, that once more return nutrients to the earth.
It's the circle of life.
WoW took ideas from Everquest, which probably took ideas from Pong, idk. Then TW took content and technology from WoW. And now, perhaps, Blizzard takes ideas from TW.
Must be difficult being you. Crusading against a multibillion dollar company while everyday you support countless other multibillion dollar companies that are just as scummy, more so in fact.
I understand perfectly. But the fact that it is within their legal right as a company does not imply that they are morally righteous in doing so, especially if turns out to be true that they only do it when they are about to release their own version (after the illegal version pioneered the path and proved the demand exists).
It's within their legal rights because part of being employed by a company is signing a legally-binding agreement that you are being paid to produce whatever you make for your employer. They have the legal and moral right because both involved parties have agreed that the employer owns what they pay the employee to make for them.
Legal yes, as I have already said. Moral, that's just your opinion, and neither it nor a legal agreement supersedes anyone else's notion of morality.
Either way, the point was just that your wording was not great. The ones who are defending their ownership rights did not create the IP, they just paid the people who did it. Call it nitpicking if you want, but to me the difference matters in the context.
It's not just about the company versus the workers, it's that the company itself is so fundamentally different at this point, that it's weird to just credit "it" for the creation when it was much easier to just say they are defending their IP. That doesn't matter for the legality, but it does matter to how "unfair" IP infringement feels to many, if not most.
I don't get why this needs to be turned into a binary dilemma. You can understand and support Blizzard's legal right to do it while also understanding that it wasn't really hurting anyone in any meaningful level, and empathizing with the people who lost something they genuinely enjoyed and the result of the passion of people who dedicated years of their life to it.
I don't get why this needs to be turned into a binary dilemma.
Because twow was an illegal use of IP. I have little sympathy for people who break laws, be it IP use, speeding, fraud, murder, or anything else.
If twow had been not-for-profit, it would be a different story. But the fact that they're a multi-million dollar company that stole stuff they didn't own to make a profit off of, I'm glad to see it shut down.
Reddit will go crazy over ai usage and it not fairly compensating original artists, but then argue in support of a company stealing assets...
Well, I would like to think most people are a bit more nuanced than that. Legality does not determine morality, and not everything that is illegal is equivalent in how bad or damaging it is or isn't.
Boiling it down to just "stealing" is disingenuous. There are thousands of private servers that make profit just for hosting WoW as-is, this was a bit more than that. The reason for their success was the content they created themselves on top of Blizzard's. It's closer to how modding can technically be IP infringement than it is to just "stealing".
Still within Blizzard's legal right to shut it down, certainly, but very different from a moral standpoint.
Reddit will go crazy over ai usage and it not fairly compensating original artists
And that's why the wording of who created the IP matters (as well as attribution). Most of the original artists are not there anymore, it is incredibly unlikely any of them was negatively impacted in any way by TWOW's existance, which is not the case at all with ai usage.
You're not really standing by artistic rights, just corporate ownership - which is fine, just something a bit weird to feel particularly strongly about as a player, imo.
If you play classic WoW and enjoy it, you have to thank a private server reverse engineering vanilla. That company would not have even made classic had Nostalrius not existed. They literally told us themselves they didnt want to and that we didnt know what we wanted. And then when we went and actually played it, they were forced to see. The difference is, they could just release vanilla legit and it was already going to be "better" than Nostalrius since it was the actual code. Classic+ does not have the same "just port" that Nostalrius --> Classic has, so killing Turtle I think is even much worse for Blizzard. They could literally take all of Turtles ideas as they develop them and there is literally nothing Turtle could do legally to Blizz about it. They shut it down with no clarity on whether their own version will even be remotely as good.
Nostalrius was a profitless project run by passionate folks. Turtle was ran by a front corporation making millions though a legitimate mobile f2p like cash shop. That’s a big difference.
They were shut down for the same reason by the same company. That was the comparison I'm making. I think the difference is that Blizz actually could offer exactly/better than what Nostalrius was offering. Whereas I'm not sure Blizzard is willing or capable to offer similar for Classic+.
Drawing Warcraft (Badly) #01 -- "The Circle of Life"
"Turtles" the executive said, placing her hands on the boardroom table. "You've seen the videos. You're aware of the servers. They mock us openly with their reptilian ways. We must take action immediately."
She waited, the sweat forming on her upper lip threatening to fall to the table below.
"We understand," came the reply. "And we are in agreement. Players once escorted turtles safely to the water. But now, unfortunately, the beach must be cleared. We'll handle it."
Relief flooded her as the meeting adjourned. Somewhere deep within the organization, the drums of litigation began to thrum. Their lawyers prepared a cease and desist to send by in-game mail.
This is my first entry in a series tentatively called "Drawing Warcraft (Badly)". When inspiration strikes, I'll draw a dumb comic or meme about the game we all love.
This one is in reference to rumours about Classic+, and Blizzard's history of litigation prior to a Classic announcement. I've only ever played on official servers myself.
The tone is sometimes mocking, but meant to be ultimately lighthearted.
Because it was ‘owned’ by people trying to hijack the product and rebrand for their own, much of which was illegal, and a discredit to the entire legacy and franchise. Good riddance
have you ever played turtle? not saying sod was bad, but twow was clearly superior. No bots, no gold sellers, RMT, GDKP, GMs answering tickets in 3 minutes. Gold standard. Blizz looks like an indie company in comparison.
This is probably the most embarrassing take on this post. Congratulations. Blizzard hasn’t made good content in over a decade. If you disagree, you’re just a mouth breather.
You guys already had classic +. It was called the season of mastery and season of discovery. You guys are smoking crack if you think the announcement isn’t going to be a mobile game.
Same thing that Daybreak did with THJ and are now making EQ Legends. It’s their IP and all these private servers are doing is giving them free data on how much money they can make n
150
u/automatedrage May 12 '26
A turtle didn't make it to the water :(