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...
"Hi! We're building a competitor to your game using your assets! We good?"
ReplyDeleteThey should have just shut down.
With my forty-year-old marketing hat on, I'd say it's all good so long as what "fans" are doing amounts to free advertizing and shoring up the brand but it's a very different story when customers start preferring the "homage" to the original and going there to spend their money.
DeleteThe key to getting away with this sort of thing is not to be too good at it and definitely not to think you can turn it into a way to pay your rent.
It does feel like they've been victims of their own success to some degree. The server has been online for the better part of a decade, but for most of that it wasn't very well known and Blizzard likely wouldn't have pursued them even if the Turtles were technically making some money off the company's IP. I don't know when they decided that they might as well turn this private server thing into their day job with paid staff and professional advertising, but that's clearly where things went wrong.
DeleteYeah, that letter... that is a real change up from how they started out. I feel like I might need to do a post about it, quoting the letter in full, just to preserve it for posterity.
ReplyDeleteTheir "hey, look what other companies allow" examples are all pretty hollow. They are not modding the game, they aren't preserving an older state of the game, and they aren't running a server dedicated to a game that no longer exists.
Pirate servers survive by being small so as to not be worth the effort, unseen, and ready to close down and open up elsewhere when the heat dies down.
I still think that in the end Microsoft will have to deal with Putin's Russia to get those servers. And good luck with that.
DeleteThey don't need to physically get the servers though. The question is whether what they can do is enough to make things sufficiently difficult and unpleasant for the remaining staff to make them want to discontinue the whole enterprise.
DeleteOh, I agree that they can be shut down, but the legal docs also stipulate that Microsoft/Blizzard want the physical assets too. And that is why I said "good luck with that".
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