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World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit (screenrant.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

I'm fan of modding, but I wouldn't want to waste my own time doing modding in cases like this. Outside of opensource projects, modding works well for old, effectively abandonware games, running on custom sourceports. Where almost everything is allowed and corpos don't blatantly abuse peoples free work. I do mapping for Doom and Heretic. I play Minecraft mods occasionally but I wouldn't want to waste my time doing Minecraft mods myself to support Microsoft Mojang mismanaging this game so bad. Theoretically Luanti could have been the solution, but it's just damn bad because that particular kind of top-down approach to extensibility didn't work well. Fan art is in much better place because it's a mutual benefit: artists benefit from working with popular franchise because it draws attention to them.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I wouldn't want to waste my time doing...mods myself to support [corpos]...

    Fan art is in much better place because it's a mutual benefit: artists benefit from working with popular franchise because it draws attention to them.

    Doesn't that seem like a double standard? Mods that support "corpos" are a waste of time, but somehow fan art is mutually beneficial? But "mods" are literally "fan art", the only difference is the word you're using using. Fan art is limited in all the same ways Turtle WoW is and vice versa.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    It's very different, in multiple ways. Artists earn money from commissions, the main mechanic to get more commissions is to become more popular. Algorithms on main platforms work by association. It's as simple as this:

    1. I draw my OCs, I want to do commissions.
    2. Very few people are viewing my posts and are aware of me.
    3. What do I do to attract more people, who will in turn buy more commissions?
    4. Draw a fanart of popular character and/or a trending gimmick (your version of new Sonic x Miku meme, Miku birthday, you OC wearing Asuka cloth, you OC in Ghibli style, etc).
    5. This posts gets pushed by algorithm into the feeds of people who like certain popular character or shown interest in current gimmick/meme/trend thing.
    6. Some of those people enjoying post go to artist's page and view their other works.
    7. If they like what they see they might subscribe and order commissions later.

    And the whole copyright thing is way less of an issue in fan arts, I regularly see a lot of people freely taking money for doing commissions of popular characters like Hatsune Miku for example, or characters from popular animes.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    the main mechanic to get more commissions is to become more popular

    Similarly, there are many popular games who started as a mod for another mainstream title, gained support, and pivoted to their own independent game.

    And the whole copyright thing is way less of an issue in fan arts, I regularly see a lot of people freely taking money for doing commissions of popular characters like Hatsune Miku

    But you recognize that is always illegal, right? The only reason it happens is because they're too small and distributed for lawyers to go after every single one. But if one started gaining traction selling custom work featuring copyrighted IP, they should expect a lawsuit just like Turtle WoW. Mods are fan art, Turtle WoW is fan art, they just got popular enough that blizzard lawyers now care.

    The only difference here is that, as I said before, technically if Turtle WoW did it right they would never have to distribute any blizzard assets, and never make money from blizzard IP. They could theoretically be completely independent from blizzard and still distribute the exact same content. Meanwhile fan art is always dependent on the IP it references. So ironically, all your criticisms of about work being dependent on the corpos always applies to fan art, but only maybe apply to Turtle WoW if they messed up.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Similarly, there are many popular games who started as a mod for another mainstream title, gained support, and pivoted to their own independent game.

    The scale is not comparable at all. 100% of artists hugely benefit from fan arts, while maybe 0.01% of modders of popular games benefit from their mods.

    This is basically what I'm saying:

    • creator profit & no corpo profit = good <- this where people building upon opensource gaming projects are
    • no creator profit & no corpo profit = good <- this is where most of the modding for old/abandonware games is
    • creator profit & corpo profit = good <- this is where most of fanart is
    • no creator profit & corpo profit = bad <- this is where most of the modding for popular and live games like WoW and Minecraft is
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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    The scale is not comparable at all

    Totally agree, but a dozen apples and a bushel of apples are both a bunch of apples. Scale doesn't really change what I'm saying.

    creator profit & corpo profit = good <- this is where most of fanart is

    If I understand your point correctly, it's not the profit from the fan art that the creator gets, it's that the fan art drives profit of their original artwork, right? Because we both agree that profiting from someone else' IP is illegal, right?

    no creator profit & corpo profit = bad <- this is where most of the modding for popular and live games like WoW and Minecraft is

    As well as any fan art itself, legally speaking, right?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    If I understand your point correctly, it’s not the profit from the fan art that the creator gets, it’s that the fan art drives profit of their original artwork, right? Because we both agree that profiting from someone else’ IP is illegal, right?

    It's both, and what matters more to me is what works in practice. I consider it totally morally good to profit from content based on someone else' copyrighted IP. Creator spent effort -> creator can sell their work. It's sometimes illegal but it should always be legal. By the way, when something is illegal but you think it shouldn't be, it's a good soul practice to regularly commit crimes in this area (that you can get away with), to get used and psychologically comfortable with two simple facts:

    • legal =/= right
    • illegal =/= wrong
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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Ok, so then what is your criticism of Turtle WoW? You're ok with fan-made art, you don't care about the legality of IP law, they are more than likely pulling players (and profits) away from blizzard, so are you just critical of the fact that they're not profiting as much as they could/should be?

    On the note of "morally good", consider Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson had the integrity and legal protection to say that Calvin and Hobbes should exist as a set of comic strips and nothing else. He refused to do what every other comic creator did, selling their IP to mass produce toys, and movies, and clothes etc. He didn't want to monetization to taint people's experience with the characters.

    So if i understand your position correctly, it is "morally good" that people regularly violate his copyright by creating those bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on various brands and sell them for their own profit, a profit that Watterson himself refuses to enjoy for the good of the art. But you disagree, and profits of others is more important?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Ok, so then what is your criticism of Turtle WoW?

    It's not only Turtle WoW, it's more criticism of the whole Mangos / WoW server emulation community. They were too naive and positive-thinking to jump into developing extremely-high-effort projects like this without planning ahead how exactly it will allow them personally and creators who build upon this to benefit/profit from their work, while also avoiding legal issues. Maybe they put too much trust into Blizzard being good guys and not moving forward with any lawsuits, maybe they were simply enthusiastic about technical side of things and ignored the big picture for too long. If they realized those points sooner, it could have become a general-purpose open-source MMORPG platform, not something that only works for WoW and makes people legally wrecked the moment they try to go further.

    it is “morally good” that people regularly violate his copyright by creating those bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on various brands and sell them for their own profit, a profit that Watterson himself refuses to enjoy for the good of the art. But you disagree, and profits of others is more important?

    It is "morally good" for people being able to freely do this. Whether you like it or not - it's subjective. I personally most likely wouldn't produce derivative works if author asked not to, especially with a stance like this, but that's just a personal choice, and it's case-by-case thing. If author is a massive retard like J. K. Rowling - it's morally good for people to be able to ignore author wishes and opinions regarding their work/characters. And whether author is retard or not is also subjective. In the end, author should not dictate what other people do, including what other people do with their work.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Maybe they put too much trust into Blizzard being good guys

    Turtle WoW is a direct response to years of blizzard ignoring players' request to embrace what people liked about vanilla WoW. They are well aware that blizzard is a shell if its former self and is entirely profit driven. If they thought blizzard were good guys, they wouldn't need to exist in the first place.

    it could have become a general-purpose open-source MMORPG platform, not something that only works for WoW

    So first off, telling someone who made a game that they should have made a general purpose engine instead completely misunderstands the intention or relative complexity involved.

    A general purpose MMO platform is a holy grail that's really easy to ask for, but really complex to actually implement. Even for-profit general purpose MMO tooling (ex. Spatial OS, Spacetime DB) are struggling to establish themselves. This is because, one does not simply write a general purpose MMO backend. Every cycle matters because it represents costs in the form of electricity, bandwidth, and latency that scales with the number of connected users. So historically, MMO servers are written specifically for the requirements of the gameplay they are supporting.

    And then there's the actual content, which takes an army of devs and artists.

    Turtle WoW devs (if they did any of the coding themselves) are doing something much simpler: approximate existing behavior of the server to support an existing client with existing content. Only then did they attempt to recreate the existing content in UE, and add a bit of extra content.

    What you're asking for is for a handful of volunteers to do with a shoestring budget what an army of professionals did with millions. But you want it to be even better, because it needs to be able to be general purpose, capable of doing anything any MMO would ever want to do.

    To make such a leap is, to put it bluntly, incredibly naive.

    It is "morally good" for people being able to freely do this. Whether you like it or not...In the end, author should not dictate what other people do, including what other people do with their work.

    And yet, my guess is you would feel the exact opposite the moment it's blizzard taking some small artist's content and putting it in their games without compensation, no? Is an AI trained on every artist's content in order to generate new art and sell it for a profit "morally good" to you?

    I agree, what you're saying is subjective, in that it's not an actual thought out, ethical framework. It's just a case where you're losing a game of Monopoly, so on your turn you yell "new rule, my hotels get to take over your hotels!" Thing is, on their turn they take them back and then some. If you want to play that game, corpos will beat you at it, not because they're capable of being so much more ethical than you, but because they have the resources to be far more unethical. And that's what stealing an artist's IP is: unethical.

    Instead, I suggest not making rash blanket statements for unethical behaviors and doing mental gymnastics to convince yourself you're some kind of robin hood. Robin hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, he didn't say "stealing is morally good". Just call it what it is, and say you're ok with it as long as the people you approve of are the ones benefiting.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    So first off, telling someone who made a game that they should have made a general purpose engine instead completely misunderstands the intention or relative complexity involved.

    I'm talking about Mangos and its forks here, they didn't make a game, they made a server emulator. And by "general purpose MMORPG" I meant "general purpose WoW-like MMORPG". When people develop sourceports for old games for example, those sourceports often work as general purpose platforms for similar games. Countless games based on GZDoom as example. Yet WoW emulator projects failed at this.

    if they did any of the coding themselves

    At Turtle WoW they definitely did some scripting, but sure they didn't implement their own server emulator, that's monumental work. That's been going on for decades. Unpaid work with no way to benefit from it for community, unpaid work that only makes rich people richer and poor people poorer. If emu devs looked at it this way, maybe they would have also set a goal of making their own frontend as well instead of depending on WoW client and assets. And this would ultimately enable this whole ecosystem becoming a platform for "general purpose WoW-like MMORPGs".

    And yet, my guess is you would feel the exact opposite the moment it’s blizzard taking some small artist’s content and putting it in their games without compensation, no?

    I hear this happening occasionally. Currently it's uncomfortable because of unfairness with corpos being able to defend themselves legally better than individuals. But I don't see this as a problem if anyone's allowed to freely do and sell derivative works of anyone's else content.

    Is an AI trained on every artist’s content in order to generate new art and sell it for a profit “morally good” to you?

    Yes, I'm totally good with AI and even though I used to think about myself as skeptic, at current point I'm more like heavily pro-AI. And I don't think it makes artists obsolete in any way. We only have to wait a little bit until it becomes as granular and useful for artists as an intermediate tool in their workflow as it is for programmers now. Also I consider AI generations derivative work.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Unpaid work with no way to benefit from it for community, unpaid work that only makes rich people richer and poor people poorer.

    I don't follow how reverse engineering blizzard's server makes the rich richer here. Blizzard doesn't want that information to be public.

    I don't see this as a problem if anyone's allowed to freely do and sell derivative works of anyone's else content.

    This is the "deregulation" argument that Elon and the rich keep perpetuating. "Just let everyone do everything and let the free market figure it out". But we already know how it ends: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. They have the resources to be more unethical than you.

    at current point I'm more like heavily pro-AI

    Specifically training it on content without permission? Well AI capabilities are directly proportional to energy costs, so that's another pro "rich get richer" stance.

    And I don't think it makes artists obsolete in any way. We only have to wait a little bit until it becomes as granular and useful for artists as an intermediate tool in their workflow

    Less than 5 years ago people were saying that they weren't afraid of AI because it always looked like easily identifiable slop, always had extra fingers, sounded robotic. Now we're at the point where it can generate really high quality content indistinguishable from high quality artwork on the first try. The expressed goal of AI companies is to create AGI capable of doing everything itself, not as a tool. So what makes you believe everything will suddenly reverse course and just settle as a tool?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I don’t follow how reverse engineering blizzard’s server makes the rich richer here. Blizzard doesn’t want that information to be public.

    Free advertising for their product, free efforts to keep the fandom alive. Don’t downplay marketing - marketing is king. Marketing drives the money. Even when it's unintentional. This is pure speculation, but in my opinion most private server players would never have bought a subscription if they hadn’t first gotten hooked by playing for free on pservers for a long time. And this is a game where people who enjoy it keep coming back for decades. I’d be very interested to see statistics on “how many players who started on free pservers eventually bought a subscription.” Personally, I casually played on and off for about 10 years before finally subscribing and spending a few years on the official Classic servers. I’ve seen plenty of others with the same story - it’s especially common among people from the third world, Eastern Europe, and so on. Without pservers, WoW might never have become as popular as it is today, and it could have been long dead by now.

    They have the resources to be more unethical than you.

    What does this even mean in context of deregulation? If nobody has to pay for lawsuits because there are no lawsuits, what difference does it make who has more money.

    Specifically training it on content without permission?

    Under current legal framework, it probably should be illegal, because it's unfair and inconsistent that derivative works by people are illegal when derivative works by AI are not. But under my perfect legal framework, it all should be legal, and avoiding training on works of people who ask not to, should be a choice not enforced legally, which should be transparently communicated and affect which models people prefer to use or not to use.

    AI capabilities are directly proportional to energy costs,

    Ever heard of DeepSeek? Every once in a while people figure out how to do the same as previous state-of-art models using 1000x less resources. And OpenAI actually became open a month ago.

    The expressed goal of AI companies is to create AGI capable of doing everything itself, not as a tool.

    Great, let them do it. Let people be able to generate a great game by saying "make me a great game". That's fine. It might not be the game you actually wanted though, if you care about any details at all. Because it's all in the details to the lowest level, to the level how exactly strokes are made, how colors are blended, etc, and when you start going into the details you need a granular model that you can use step by step, interwined with your manual work, manual sketching, etc - just like it works in programming now. Just like it programming some details and intricacies are pointless trying to describe in words because it's easier and faster just to write few lines of code yourself, do some strokes yourself, etc.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    Personally, I casually played on and off for about 10 years before finally subscribing and spending a few years on the official Classic servers. I’ve seen plenty of others with the same story

    I think your anecdotal evidence is an outlier. Blizzard used to publish subscriber counts until it started dipping after wrath. They've subsequently never publicly posted sub counts again. I don't know if this means it's never been as high again, but given how many more options people have these days, I wouldn't be surprised. Which means sub counts were never as high as they were before private servers took off.

    Also, blizzard has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to do what it believes will maximize profits, and as a result they've chosen to shut down Turtle WoW.

    What does this even mean in context of deregulation?

    It's the entire basis for the push for deregulation. You can grift from all the people you have resources to grift, and corpos can grift from all the people they have resources to grift. A completely free market is not a level playing field. The rich get richer. Regulations are how common folk maintain a competitive landscape.

    there are no lawsuits, what difference does it make who has more money

    So we should just get rid of all civil lawsuits then, that would create a completely fair playing field? Come on now...

    But under my perfect legal framework

    Lol or lack thereof?

    Ever heard of DeepSeek? Every once in a while people figure out how to do the same as previous state-of-art models using 1000x less resources

    Why do you think corpos somehow don't know how to take advantage of DeepSeek, but the little guys do? Why do you believe the poor have an advantage in that situation? Someone makes a 1000x breakthrough and everyone can use it. Great, before: it was your 1 unit of work vs OpenAI's 1000, an absolute difference of 999; after: it's your 1000 vs 1,000,000, an absolute difference of 999,000. They run you out of business even faster! The rich get richer!

    And OpenAI actually became open a month ago.

    You understand that if a model doesn't expose the training set and training algorithm, there's no way to know if it has been maliciously trained, right? Their use of the terms "open source" are misnomers. They could be effectively backdoored and there's no way to know.

    Great, let them do it. Let people be able to generate a great game by saying "make me a great game". That's fine.

    That's not the question at hand. If you can make a tool like that ethically, I'm all for it. But 1) they haven't demonstrated they can do so ethically, and 2) there's nothing to indicate that their goal is to create a tool to enable more artists and engineers.

    Their stated goal is to completely eliminate as many jobs as possible. Combined with corporate ownership of fusion research, AI does not currently represent any promise of a democratization of creation. It is the water in a Mad Max movie. The best we will be able to do is fight each other for the bit of energy they allow us to have.

    It's clear you haven't thought through your positions because you're just repeating the same trickle-down rhetoric the right has been using to dismantle the US for the last 50 years, all while believing yourself to be anti-corpo. But we've fully strayed from the original topic at this point, so i think it's time we called it. Hope you get some time to seriously re-evaluate your judgments here, cheers.

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