Back in the day, people were so idealistic that they poured cosmic amounts of time into reverse-engineering games like WoW - rebuilding its systems, network stack, and filling massive databases by hand. By making the game accessible and endlessly customizable (to the point where private servers could even create entirely new content), they unintentionally boosted and cemented its popularity for decades.
But over time, the rose-colored view faded. People began to see that neither Blizzard nor the gaming industry at large were as benevolent as they once imagined. Notice how this never happened again with newer games? WoW was both one of the first and one of the last MMORPGs to inspire that kind of community-driven pirate server scene.
In the future, I hope we will see a truly open-source, modding-first MMORPG - one that makes corporate nonsense irrelevant. So that players and hobbyists could put their energy into something 100% open-source Instead of wasting time building content for companies that don’t value them and would crush them the moment the numbers dip.
just tells me they didn't sell enough wow subscriptions and instead of blaming their overly complex too many things to do game that's constantly changing, and instead blaming people who are making it fun again.
They've been going after private server farms for years, so this is nothing new really. For example, Blizzard forced Nostralrius (sp?) servers to shut down about 10 years ago.
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