Warcraft fans' fury at Blizzard over server closure

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36044000

by sea6ear • 10 years ago

157 87 10 years ago

bbc.com

mwest• 10 years ago

Incredible to see this hitting the BBC, although it's been discussed on HN already:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444122

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11448908

What is interesting is that they will apparently be releasing their work as open source:

"With that said, as far as we are concerned, this amazing journey would not have been possible without the contribution of the open source World of Warcraft community, especially those who were behind MaNGOS. We believe that we significantly improved their code base, with several interesting algorithms (for example the ongoing work on clustering). For now, our source code may be release 30th of April (educational purposes only) in the hope that it will be useful, and that it may help developers understand how a big project like ours was handled from the inside."

(from https://forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=43600)

minimaxir• 10 years ago

The fan reaction is new information, although the article doesn't go in-depth.

Apparently there were ritualistic suicides of in-game characters on the server in light of the news, among other things: https://reddit.com/r/wow/comments/4e6zee/nostalrius_memories...

oxide• 10 years ago

That's hilarious. There were also huge gatherings, etc. I found it easy to relate to the players as far as mourning the loss goes.

It reminds me of watching an MMO I loved, The Realm Online, die slowly. It's still technically around, but development has all but ceased and the player count is ~25. IIRC it was purchased by a family who eventually let all the programmers and artists go.

zipwitch• 10 years ago

The server was packed even (perhaps especially) in its final moments, with the kind of crowds the official version never sees anymore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y86hk_93d4c

drivers992• 10 years ago

Something limited to "educational purposes only" is technically not "open source". (It doesn't fit the Open Source Definition, and licenses such as GPL would not be compatible with such restrictions either.)

notJim• 10 years ago

I'm not normally a wonk about this kind of stuff, but this distinction seems significant in the context of blizzard apparently threatening fan-run servers with legal action.

ekianjo• 10 years ago

Open source is ambiguous the only term thats clearly defined is Free Software. And GPL is Free Software RMS would jump at your throat for calling it Open Source.

jtmarmon• 10 years ago

open source means the source is open. that's all it means. free software is what you're referring to and it's something entirely different

djsumdog• 10 years ago

It will also face the same fate of bnetd. Unless it gets hosted outside of the US jurisdiction (NZ banned software patents, but they sill enforce US copyright law; hence Kim dotcom).

I bet Blizzard will go after they OSS version too, just like they did with bnetd.

tazjin• 10 years ago

MaNGOS is GPL-licensed so I would hope that they release their changes :)

mesozoic• 10 years ago

I can understand their desire. Some of my best gaming was on non EA Ultima Online shards that ran the version of the game before it was "ruined" or many thought it was.

marak830• 10 years ago

That's how I learnt to code! Running a runuo server :-) it was amazing to have a fully fleshed out world and see my changes effect players immediately.

I doubt I would know how to program at all if it was not for that server.

lsiebert• 10 years ago

Sadly, the Library of Congress Exemption for server based games (https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2488067/2015-2721...) doesn't apply here.

Kenji• 10 years ago

The pain when your favourite private MMORPG server goes down - I know it too well (I've been programming for private MMORPG servers myself, though not WoW). It really is an entire world just disappearing. If I was the head of a large game company, I'd make good friends with the modding/private server crowd (unless it's in direct competition with one's own product), they often create tight-knit communities that provide value for many years.

linxzu• 10 years ago

Considering the server is the driver for a majority of the game, what stops people from recreating the client but modified enough to not mimic the original title?

remwfnnz• 10 years ago

Relevant: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-past-how-runescapes-...

A Jagex employee's view on how they managed to reopen a legacy server and keep it alive (and growing).

chris_wot4• 10 years ago

I'd love to see a full refund for all those people who bought the game - on the grounds they can't use it for its intended purpose in any way.

And this is why its best not to get too involved in games where you have no control or have no possibility of control over the infrastructure that underpins the game.

Falcon92• 10 years ago

Huh? You're buying an account that gives you the ability to further buy monthly access to a living, changing world, and nobody reasonable who forked over money to Blizzard expected or expects otherwise.

GavinMcG• 10 years ago

I totally would expect that I would be able to play without buying expansions.

What would actually happen if I logged in now with my account that I haven't used since vanilla? Would I be told I'm SOL?

developer2• 10 years ago

Or... not. MMOs are "Massively multiplayer _online_". They are expected to require mandatory updates. Anyone who is opposed to the very concept should avoid MMOs entirely and enjoy single-player campaigns and LAN networking with friends. Games evolve. Expecting every game to maintain a live production environment of what - every previous release? - is simply unrealistic. WoW is bad enough with its expansions where different subsets of players can access any given area. Can you even imagine people complaining about not having access to play Season 1 of League of Legends? It makes no sense - to the business or the average player - to have tiny populations on old server versions that need to be maintained.

> its best not to get too involved in games where you have no control or have no possibility of control over the infrastructure

Unless you are a professional competitive player, why would anyone become so deeply connected to a _game_ such that future updates, and/or the publisher shutting down the game entirely, would result in such a vehement reaction? If you're the type to cry "lawsuit" over a game getting updates, you may want to avoid playing such games.

tldr; For some people, "its best not to get too involved in games where you have no control" probably starts and ends with not installing an MMO to begin with.

chris_wot4• 10 years ago

So you basically agree with my second sentence, just with more mouth frothing?

beloch• 10 years ago

The original Everquest ran a variety of different servers under different rulesets. I just checked and, suprisingly, they still do! At one point this included an unpatched version of the game as it was on release day, but no longer.

At this point in time the only appeal of the game to me is nostalgia. I don't think I'd care to log in and immediately upgrade my formerly maxed out character with 40 levels of free exp just so I can go to the latest newbie zone and not get slaughtered. That would sort of trivialize the entirely excessive amount of time I put into that character.

I played WoW's beta but then went entirely off of MMO's for good (such a waste of time!). I'm sure there are lots of people who would love to revist the release version of the game. Clearly, the demand is there. Instead of shutting Nostalrius down, the Blizzard team should be buying the server config and data off of the team that was running it and then keep it online. They have to protect their IP, but the cost of keeping long-time loyal fans happy (even if they aren't currently paying ones) happy is pretty minimal.

endemic• 10 years ago

Or even turn it into a paid service! Seems to be an underserved niche fan base. I'm sure most of the players would be happy to fork over $15/mo. for an official "oldschool" server.

etiam• 10 years ago

Defective by design, sadly.

While I was gaming a lot, before the turn of the century, it usually seemed like when you bought a game you owned it. WoW was to me one of the earliest salient examples of a game you didn't really own, but only were permitted to rent. Even though the community has apparently overcome the challenges of getting a working, large scale server running and maintain a community, that spirit of "not really yours" seems to shine through here.

Poor form, Blizzard! Adding to a design that was better off without additions to sell it all over again is one thing, but smashing the original for those who loved it that way and don't want the extra cruft is just mean.

incepted• 10 years ago

before the turn of the century, it usually seemed like when you bought a game you owned it.

That was never true.

nickspacek• 10 years ago

You're correct in that software (including games) is almost always licensed, but I think you're also being a little pedantic. There were certainly fewer games that required "phoning home" for verification and fewer games that had required content served remotely from servers that could be shut down. The (obvious) spirit of the post was that when you purchased a license/the game the developer would typically not mess with your copy and you were free to do what you wanted with it.

sevensor• 10 years ago

Maybe not in the literal sense, but I can still play my copy of the original Panzer General 22 years after it was released, because there are no technical impediments to doing so and because the license permits it. (And because of DOSbox.)

wonderlust2• 10 years ago

It used to be that you bought a license. Now you rent one.

a_small_island• 10 years ago

"You're in our world now." -preblizzard mmo market, circa the turn of the century

Nothing new.

andrepd• 10 years ago

Subscription MMOs existed before WoW. Paying continually for the privilege of playing a game was not something that blizzard invented in 2004.

Aelinsaar• 10 years ago

I can understand the frustration, it must be painful to be that much of a fan and lose such an enormous community.

Pyxl101• 10 years ago

The elephant in the room, and the aspect of this issue that no one wants to talk about is that players can play on these servers for free. Any player who drops their WoW subscription in favor of a private server is a loss for blizzard, and some players are thrifty enough to do this. Thus, even though the server might not be charging, it's certainly draining revenue from Blizzard. If the population was 150k, then some % of those were paying customers anyway, and some would play only if it's free, while others might pay for WoW if a free server was not available.

WoW currently costs $15/mo. Blizzard is in a much better position to have numbers for this, but let's say that the existence of the free server might have discouraged 50 K people from having subscriptions who otherwise would have. Assuming 50K, then that's a monthly loss of $750,000 in revenue; or if all 150K did not subscribe but would have, it's $2,250,000/mo. Given that servers are relatively cheap, probably a good portion of that would be profit.

The people who say that the servers do not threaten blizzard are naïve or at worst disingenuous. They threaten Blizzard exactly as much as they discourage people from having wow subscriptions whenever they would otherwise. A player who spends a lot of time on a private server is probably not going to see a lot of value in keeping their WoW account active, after all. Given the way network effects work, a popular server could have a runaway success effect (people tend to play where a critical mass of their friends play). Furthermore, it is probably quite difficult to convince a player to reactivate their account once the successfully play for a while on a private server and have friends there; the server is probably very sticky.

Rather than asking Blizzard to bring back old versions of the game, perhaps Blizzard should embrace a model where players can run their own servers and list them in a public directory, such the players still require a subscription in order to play. And perhaps the server gets song cut of the profit from players who predominantly play on their server, like 10%. Perhaps this could align the interest of Blizzard and server hosts too much greater degree. The analog of a gameplay mod in other games is more like a custom server in wow, and think of all the good that's come from mods like DOTA. There are still a number of reasons why Blizard would not want to do this, such as the fact they lose control of customer experience, but maybe it's closer to a workable model.

venomsnake• 10 years ago

The real elephant in the room is that we have no right to preserve a game that we are entitled to entering public domain at some time, unless the copyright holder feels like it.

spacehome• 10 years ago

It was made after Mickey Mouse.

Who are you kidding? It will never be public domain.

paride5745• 10 years ago

I disagree about the drain from retail to private.

7 millions+ people are not paying Blizzard already (me included) because the game they sell now it's not the one I subscribed years ago. It is not an MMO nowadays, you just hang around in your personal space, click to get in instances, click to get a selfie, click to buy some gold. I miss the community and the sense of exploration, and private servers, especially those on Vanilla or TBC, are the only ones giving me that feeling.

It's years the community ask Blizzard to give us Vanilla/TBC servers, and let us play the game we love. Most of us will pay an higher sub if required, so it's not being cheap.

Closing Nostalrius will not bring more people in retail, but the opposite. Most of the people I know are dropping their subscriptions BECAUSE of the action Blizzard has taken. Instead of solving the cause, they are sticking they head in the sands, telling us we don't know what we want, that they know better. Well, numbers don't lie, and the game is empty.

So yeah, good work Blizzard, you managed to kill the biggest game in history. And they could make a lot of money with a couple of legacy servers. Those have no costs, except for limited maintenance, and the game development has paid itself years ago. So it is virtually pure profit.

unlinker3• 10 years ago

Those have no costs, except for limited maintenance, and the game development has paid itself years ago. So it is virtually pure profit.

Sorry for nitpicking, but ancient versions of the game client don't really work so well on modern hardware. Also, we don't know how much the server infrastructure has changed since then. It's not that easy.

simonh• 10 years ago

A sort of assumed this was sour grapes and Blizard probably know what they're doing, but then I checked the subscriber history for WoW. They're back to 5.5m, the same as 2005 a year after launch and down from a high of 12m. Ouch!

The downward momentum looks crushing. The few big temporary peaks over the last few years vanished immediately and it reverted back to decline as though they'd never happened. So people jump in for a look when there's something big happening, but _none_ of them (statistically speaking) stay afterwards. No wonder they're hammering down hard on anything that might draw away subscribers.

http://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-world-of...

Edit: It just occurred to me that even given this, perhaps Blizzard is doing the commercially adept thing. Suppose decline for a game like this is inevitable. In which case switching to a model that extracts maximum revenue from players at the cost of long term viability might be the best way to capture value. Cynical? Me?

stavrus• 10 years ago

Those have no costs, except for limited maintenance, and the game development has paid itself years ago. So it is virtually pure profit.

In the years since WoW came out Blizzard came out with a centralized authentication, billing, and support system known as Battle.Net. It took them quite a few patches over 2-3 expansions to integrate that system fully into WoW and a not insignificant effort would be required to port that over to the old game client, especially if they wanted to give it the same level of polish in integration that they're known for applying to their games.

Second, patch 2.0.1 (the Burning Crusade pre-patch) brought in a massive amount of changes designed solely to combat a growing player trend at the time - the use of addons to automate playing the game (no not bots, actual addons like Healbot) - through the concept of protected functions. And this was just a small portion of their overall effort in combating automation/bots. The player base would cry foul if they brought out legacy servers and didn't keep the anti-bot measures, Warden included, up-to-date. They tried for years to fight those problems head-on only and are only barely keeping up in the fight against Glider and its brethren. Log onto retail WoW nowadays and run non-100 dungeons and you'll easily run into quite a few sophisticated bots that'll run the dungeon with you, fully programmed to handle all the dungeon mechanics [1]. There's also plenty of people running bots with level 90 (from the character boost) druids farming dungeons like Stonecore, Gundrak, and the like. It's kind of hilariously sad seeing a chain of them all following the same pre-programmed path in the world, especially when they take advantage of how client movement works in the game to fly straight through obstructing terrain as if it weren't there.

Third, running a game, especially an MMO, also requires providing dedicated support staff. A very large effort would have to be made to recover/remember the issues and workarounds the GM staff would use back when the server was live and then train the new staff with this knowledge. There would probably be a rather significant engineering effort involved in this as well as the old GM ticketing system used to be done entirely in-client while nowadays it's some web-based thing (the former made it rather easy for players to impersonate GMs). Improvements like those and other GM tools like better insight/control over a player character and logged events that were made over the years would have to be back-ported in order to maintain the high expectation of quality Blizzard support has fought hard to maintain.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsaE4pM9-cw

kybernetyk• 10 years ago

Thus, even though the server might not be charging, it's certainly draining revenue from Blizzard.

I actually was thinking about that today because a video regarding this server issue popped up in my YT feed.

The idea I came up with goes like that: Blizzard could offer free server software to interested 3rd parties who could then run their own favorite incarnations of WoW.

And to make sure customers would still pay the subscription fees this 3rd party server software would use the official Battle.net authentication service WoW uses.

Blizzard would still get their subscription fees and customers would have access to "vanilla" servers without Blizzard having to lift one finger.

(But knowing Blizzard this would probably never happen. They are very protective when it comes to their IP and creative control; Even after all those years they still don't allow players to dye their ingame armor because Orcs running around in pink armor would go against their design language).

breul992• 10 years ago

Have you played the current version of WoW and the vanilla version? They are radically different games. Those who were playing on nost were _never_ going to pay to play retail as it exists now. Blizzard cannot lose business to a private server that the would have never had in the first place.

yAnonymous3• 10 years ago

What were the server setup and monthly costs like?

It should be clear that Blizzard are ridiculously overcharging people with 10$/month when fans can run something like this and offer it for free or based on donations.

thenomad2• 10 years ago

Much as I'm in favour of private servers in general, this statement doesn't really work.

Blizzard have to - legally have to - pay the people who do customer support, development, art, writing server ops, etc.

That adds up to a lot more than just server costs.

yAnonymous3• 10 years ago

That argument doesn't hold, considering WoW players also have to pay for the games themselves, not just the monthly costs.

On top of that, you can buy character boosts, too. No, this isn't covering development and support costs, it's shameless profit optimization.

Warcraft fans' fury at Blizzard over server closure

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