I haven't played much Turtle WoW over the past few weeks as life has been quite busy and my limited WoW time has been fully taken up by Legion Remix. That's not to say that I lost interest in the private server though - I still have two unfinished drafts about it in the works, and I was expecting to have even more material once I got back into playing. My initial sense of urgency had just been somewhat diminished due to how unbothered Turtle WoW leadership seemed to be by Blizzard's lawsuit. Sure, it was probably going to be trouble for them, but they seemed to be pretty confident that they'd be able to keep going somehow.
Things changed over the course of this week though. As of my writing this, Turtle WoW is still up and running, but they are clearly feeling the squeeze. Turtle staff member Akalix, who Blizzard identified as "Lead of Marketing" in their lawsuit and who's actually a US resident, has had to lawyer up and is obviously feeling the pressure, as Blizzard is looking to subpoena various websites to get more information about the individuals they are suing. I've seen reddit comments saying that the initial defiant reaction to the lawsuit has been deleted and that the primary server owner deleted her old Discord handle and adopted a new one, presumably in an attempt to evade legal discovery. (I'm not on their Discord, so this is all rumours to me, but it sounds credible enough.)
A week ago, she also posted a lengthy open letter to Blizzard on the Turtle WoW forums. I tried to archive it but the Internet Archive couldn't capture it for some reason, so if the Turtle WoW site goes down in the future, there are also screenshots of the letter in this reddit post. To summarise it in a nutshell, it talks about how much the Turtle devs love World of Warcraft and how much players love what they've done with Turtle WoW, sooo... can't we just all be friends? Other games allow mods and stuff, right?
If I'm sounding a bit flippant, it's because I don't think they make a very strong case. It's particularly ironic that they cite Everquest's Project 99 as an example of a licensed fan server when Daybreak just shut down another EQ private server that - like Turtle WoW - was making money of its services. Even if I try to look at this open letter in the best possible light, assuming that the sentiments expressed in it are completely genuine and that someone at Blizzard might actually be willing to listen, I just don't see how any sort of official collaboration between Blizzard and Turtle WoW could possibly work, considering what Turtle WoW is. They more or less admit that what they are doing is illegal ("Blizzard does not yet have a framework that allows projects like ours to operate without risking legal conflict") and since they don't have a leg to stand on, it just comes off as a weak appeal to Blizzard's good graces (yeah, right).
This definitely feels like a pretty desperate move that could also be seen as an attempt to drum up some public support more than anything else, but I don't see anyone's opinion on the matter being changed by this, no matter whether they are currently cheering on Blizzard or crossing their fingers for Turtle WoW.
After what I've seen from playing on the server myself, it'll be a shame if all the work they put into things like custom zones would be lost, but they really brought it upon themselves by leaning so heavily into their microtransaction store "donation rewards" and openly taunting Blizzard on social media. I also noticed how for all the pleading that was done in the letter about how they'd be willing to make adjustments to be compliant with any rules set by Blizzard, giving up monetisation is not something that's mentioned. Maybe I should get back to levelling my high elf hunter while I still can...
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