Turtle WoW's Version of Gilneas

I said I had one more post about Turtle WoW's custom content coming up, and this is it - about the Turtle WoW version of Gilneas. I'm glad I still managed to make it to this zone before the shutdown (it was designed for levels 39-46) because it was uniquely interesting in the sense that it was the first custom zone I encountered that had a direct retail counterpart.

I mentioned in my post about Grim Reaches that in terms of location and vague themes it had connections to retail's Twilight Highlands, but they weren't exactly the same zone. Gilneas though, that's the same place at its core as in retail: the werewolf-infested kingdom beyond the wall, ruled by Genn Greymane. Somehow, that made the differences all the more fascinating.

As I hadn't come across a breadcrumb quest to lead me to the zone, I simply rode over to the Greymane Wall from Southshore and stepped through the now open gate, bursting with curiosity. Visually, it was very much a continuation of Silverpine with slightly fewer trees.

The first quest hub I encountered was a refugee/rebel camp whose residents needed help with fending off the local wildlife and gathering food - pretty standard fare, but it did make me wonder what these people were fleeing from/rebelling against. My eyebrows shot up some more when further down the road, I encountered hostile mobs with names like "Greymane Enforcer" - followers of Greymane are the bad guys here?! What the heck is going on?

Fortunately I didn't have to wait too long to find out what was happening, as the town of Ravenshire contained an NPC called Lord Darius Ravenwood that was more than happy to provide an exposition dump about what the zone was all about. In short, Gilneas' isolation led to famine and unrest, which was only exacerbated by Genn having outsiders that were stuck in his castle whispering in his ear and ultimately led to him seizing the nobility's lands to provide food. After his wife Mia was killed in a riot, Genn completely withdrew from the public, and the population is now in open rebellion.

Now, I hated the bit about Mia dying because it seemed pretty much like a copy and paste of Tiffin Wrynn getting a rock to the head, and I don't consider the fridging of female characters a classic trope to be preserved. However, other than that, I thought it was an interesting twist. Genn is no werewolf in this alternate history of Azeroth - in fact, most Gilneans aren't.

This got me thinking about how the worgen lore in Vanilla is a bit confusing - in Pyrewood Village in Silverpine they are basically classic werewolves, living like normal humans by day, but the Scythe of Elune quest chain, somewhat contradictory to this, describes them as these demonic beings from another dimension that were summoned onto Azeroth. I can see on Warcraft Wiki that this has since been recontextualised so that the first worgen were actually druids... but regardless, the point is that in Turtle WoW's Gilneas, the worgen are still more like these strange, demonic creatures that are to be avoided at all costs, not like in Cata where they were made more obviously werewolf-like and Worgen and Gilnean became largely synonymous.

Anyway, to get back to the point - I had a feeling that Lord Darius' quest would result in more story about all that Greymane business, but I made it a priority to explore and do basically every other quest first instead, which led to some interesting discoveries.

In a crypt I found a cult of worgen worshippers that did want to become werewolves, so that idea was also present in Turtle WoW after all. It wasn't quite clear to me from the quests whether they were already capable of turning or were still working towards that part, as they were all normal humanoids and friendly towards me.

It took me embarrassingly long to notice because I so rarely look up in MMOs, but the centre of the zone was a tall tree on top of a mountain, and in a cave under said mountain I encountered the Pellars, a word I had to look up. They're kind of... nature-aligned witches friendly to the populace, but also a bit weird. One of them spoke in rhymes for example.

There was also a ruined town where the Scourge had broken through once, and a naga incursion from the south. The beach with the naga was a bit wonky as there was an invisible border where you could suddenly phase, with the current mobs around you disappearing and different ones suddenly popping into existence. It also made me realise that for all the love and care the Turtle devs put into their zone design, I don't think they were very good at beaches, as those always seemed more dull than the ones designed by Blizzard.

Regardless, I did decide to follow what I'd call the "main story chain" eventually, which tasked me with freeing Liam and Tess Greymane - yes, Liam is alive in this one! I already knew that Tess had escaped as I found her hanging out with the Pellars before I actually got sent there, but Liam was chained up at the back of a cave. Rescuing him was pretty tedious as I had to fight my way in, back out to get the key to his shackles, and then back in again - this was probably less annoying when there were more other players around than there were towards the end of my play time. I was half expecting that I'd have to escort him out as well, but escort quests are one thing I didn't see the Turtle WoW devs port over from Vanilla actually, and there wasn't one here either. Liam just finds his way to Ravenshire on his own once you've freed him.

In a nutshell, you then go on to fight some more Greymane soldiers, as well as recruiting the werewolf worshippers and the Pellars to your cause. Then you get given a quest to do the local dungeon, Gilneas City, to "save" Genn Greymane. Yes, it's in quotes in the quest text as well, which gives the game away a bit.

Unfortunately I didn't get to run the dungeon before the shutdown, but I did pop my head in the door and used my hunter's Eagle Eye to look around a bit. I could tell from the map at least that this one wasn't another mega dungeon like Dragonmaw Retreat or Stormwrought Ruins, but much smaller, so I don't feel I missed as much. I also watched a YouTube video that someone recorded of the place and it's basically a few streets full of Worgen and then a tower in which you kill Genn, who I presume has gone mad with grief or something (still not a werewolf though).

So I ultimately didn't get to see everything the zone had to offer - there were also a couple of elite quests I wasn't able to complete, and in a small house I found a guy that taunted me with a grey exclamation mark over his head, but at 45 I was apparently still too low to see what he wanted people to do.

However, I do think I got the gist of the zone, and I really enjoyed it. I might even go so far as to call it my favourite of all the Turtle WoW custom zones I played through, possibly outdoing even Northwind and Balor (and I did like both of those a lot as well). The people who designed it really seemed to get what makes a Vanilla WoW zone great, with lots of little stories woven together to form rich tapestry of everything that's going on in the zone, culminating in a big finale in the zone's dungeon, similar to how the lawlessness of Westfall makes you wonder just who these Defias guys are, until you eventually take the battle to the Deadmines. That's pretty much the highest praise I can give I think!

Turtle WoW's Final Farewell

As of today, the Turtle WoW private server is no longer available. I was able to make it to the final shutdown event last night, and I'm glad I did because it certainly was a unique experience.

I originally logged in about an hour beforehand, because I wasn't 100% certain of the exact time and didn't want to accidentally miss it. There were already plenty of people in both Stormwind and Moonwhisper Coast (at the Farewell Faire) and GMs were walking among them openly while spawning in some strange NPCs, such as a giant white cat.

One thing I think I never mentioned before was that Turtle WoW also had an in-game radio station. The reason I didn't mention it was that I never used it. I basically tried to connect once but nothing was playing, so I figured it was only active on special occasions. Plus, to be honest I wasn't that keen on having some modern music blasted into my ears while playing WoW anyway - I prefer the in-game music for immersion.

Either way, that evening I clicked the button for the radio again as there was a DJ playing for the final shutdown, and it worked. From my understanding he was also hosting some community run event on the Ambershire server.

Still, as there was still over an hour to go and I didn't care to just hang out for that long, I took some screenshots and then went away again to do something else for a while, only logging back in about ten minutes before the real shutdown.

It was nice to see how many people had shown up for the final farewell. As mentioned previously, the population had dropped down to a couple hundred concurrent players after the shutdown announcement, but for the party we were back to several thousand online on Nordanaar alone, and I'm sure there were just as many if not more on Ambershire, plus I imagine even some on the smaller Tel'Abim PvP server.

Some were sitting quietly on the beach and staring out into the sea, others were dancing, others were bouncing around like rabbits on crack. Chat got so busy that I was no longer able to read anything because the text was scrolling past so quickly - it was like in one of those Twitch streams where you get nothing but a vague impression of sentiment as hundreds of people spam yells in ALL CAPS.

Along the beach a line of people riding their turtle mounts had formed, and after riding back and forth along the line a couple of times, I planted my own among them. The DJ put on Semisonic's Closing Time as the last song to play before the shutdown and I've got to admit I was definitely feeling some feelings, having that in my ear as I sat among the turtles with fireworks going off around us and chat spam flying everywhere.

And to think I had only come here after the lawsuit, knowing full well that it was all going to go away! I'd only wanted to have a brief, curious peek, but even though I wasn't looking to make friends, it was hard not to get engrossed and feel part of something bigger. I'd always scoffed at the idea of a "Classic Plus" but what I saw on Turtle WoW really did bring back that feeling of old school excitement for me, of not knowing where that boat was going to go, being giddy about making it to the next zone to see what was new, and of eagerly thinking about what I was going to do the next time I logged in even when I wasn't actually playing.

For my own reference, here's how much progress my little high elf made over these last few weeks (since I last wrote down her stats in my 2025 end-of-year post):

• Level 45 Hunter (+7)
• 5 days, 15 hours played (+1 day, 12 hours)
• 225 Jewelcrafting (+24), 250 Mining (+24), 261 Cooking (+36), 221 Fishing (+16), 270 First Aid (+58), 1 Survival (-97 since they reset it)

The DJ did his job well in terms of timing, so the song ended and then it was over as we were all disconnected.

I have my blog to record my personal adventures, but the Turtle WoW devs also put up a website for people to share their own most memorable moments on the servers, which can be found on theturtlegrove.com. I do think this server will stand up there with Nostalrius as one of the big WoW private servers that really made an impact. We'll see whether there'll be any traces of it in what Blizzard does next for Classic, though I'm not particularly hopeful, not because I don't think the devs are capable but because I simply don't think Blizzard is interested in catering to this particular niche.

One thing I haven't changed my mind about in regards to a potential Classic+ is that it will be impossible to make everyone happy, and that applied to Turtle WoW as well! It just happened to really hit the points that I personally love. While they also created new raids and did things for PvPers for example, you didn't hear nearly as many people talk about that because it simply wasn't as popular. If all you wanted to do was PvP, there were probably better places for you to do so. You just didn't hear that much negativity about Turtle WoW because if someone didn't like it there, they just moved on to somewhere else. It's not like with official WoW, where there's a whole economy around publicly ranting about how terrible everything is and people can make a living off that.

Turtle was focused on the world, the old Warcraft RTS lore, roleplayers, community and levelling above all else, and they did those things exceptionally well. I don't think anyone currently in power at Blizzard shares those interests in the same way, so I suspect it's unlikely that we'll see anything close to this level of investment in those areas again.

Not that nobody is going to try at all, of course. People have been joking that surely the server will spring up again somewhere else as soon as it's shut down. I'm not on the Turtle WoW Discord, but I've seen some comments about how people should keep an eye on it for some sort of special announcement about the future later down the line.

Meanwhile I've also been hearing talk about a server called "Octo WoW" run by different people, which is based on a leaked older version of Turtle and apparently they've been trying to get some of the newer content back onto it as well. I've not got any personal interest in that, but I'm sure some people will jump right onto it. Plus there are the usual rumours about a rogue dev running off with the code and wanting to spin up his own project.

For my part, I'll just have one more "post mortem" post about Turtle WoW so to speak, to talk about my experiences with the last custom zone I played through, which was their version of Gilneas. Then I'll close the book on the subject of private servers again for the time being. That said, I've certainly made a lot of memories on this one for the relatively short time I played there.

Turtle WoW: Notes from a Dying Server

At the time of me writing this, Turtle WoW has less than a week left to live. I haven't dropped everything to binge Turtle above everything else, but I've been happy with the number of hours I've been able to get in. My high elf hunter is level 43 and I'm hoping to wrap up one last custom zone before the server goes down.

The moment I hit level 40 I bought my blue racial mount. Call me basic but I enjoy an elf on a unicorn.

After the initial wailing and gnashing of teeth that followed the shutdown announcement, the server has been getting a lot quieter. Nordanaar used to have thousands of concurrent players, but within days it was down to a few hundred whenever I checked, and has remained at that level pretty consistently since then. To be clear, I've played on servers that size before and it's actually a perfectly fine population level to have a good time with - it's just sad here in the context of how quickly and sharply activity dropped off. The same applies to the auction house, which still had 50k+ listings the day of the shutdown announcement, then half of that, then half of that, and with only a week to go we're down to about 5k active auctions.

The people who were already pretty invested in the server and its community have mostly tried to pack up and move somewhere else as a group from what I can tell. The guild message of the day has been "AQ40 8/9 - Great Job - C'thun kill Monday" for weeks. I wonder whether they ever did go back for C'thun, but I kind of doubt it. The one officer (?) who still checks in did a bunch of promotions the other day, which resulted in my level 43 becoming a "Core-Raider", which amused me. I'm guessing it was just a simple way to increase everyone's guild bank permissions for the final weeks or something.

I think most of the people who remain are in a similar situation to me and just want to see some more of the content/enjoy some more of the vibes before it all goes away. I'm grateful for those who still put things up for auction, not to get rich but to help out other adventurers who might still benefit from certain items on their journeys. I remember when I used to vendor all my iron ore because there was just too dang much of it circulating - over the last few days I went back to listing everything I mined and sold all of it for a decent profit, though I primarily hope that it's simply been useful to someone. I've also been on the other end of this as I had to buy some green trousers after accidentally vendoring my previous pair, purchased an enchanting material I needed for a quest, and a player-crafted item that was required to continue levelling my jewelcrafting.

In general, while my focus has been on doing some more exploring, I haven't been "min-maxing" the experience in that respect. I still pause to fish here and there and do some crafting. At one point I did the quests to unlock the last rank of cooking and first aid. For what purpose? Because it was fun.

Touring some of the old zones for the cooking quest was a reminder of just how much Turtle WoW modified in those as well. In the Hinterlands I found a narrow mountain path that led me all the way up to a troll village that was located on a sort of overhang from the Hinterlands into Arathi, which did make me a bit wistful about the many more things I now wasn't going to get a chance to see.

A few days ago, the Turtle WoW devs also launched the "Fantastical Farewell Faire", a little event to allow players to get together one more time for the server's shutdown. A faire barker in town will offer to teleport you to Moonwhisper Coast, another custom zone, this one located north-east of Winterspring. They put up some Darkmoon Faire style tents and activities there that allow you to earn a currency called "Turtle Coin", with which you can buy some random items like pets and mounts.

I'm sure many must wonder why people would bother with any of that at a point when the shutdown is so near, but I found it a nice gesture. There's also a vendor who sells all kinds of raid consumables for cheap, presumably to help those players who are trying to get a few more clears in and might find the auction house no longer a source of sufficient supply. Additionally, there are a couple of quests, including one to light the way for the "Great Turtle Spirit", which actually made me tear up a bit.

I'd kind of like to be there when the server shuts down for good, to take one last screenshot and see who else is there for one last hurrah, but I don't know if that will align with my work hours. We'll see.

The Grim Reaches: TWoW's Take on Twilight Highlands

While I was trying to get into a group for Stormwrought Castle, I quested my way through another one of Turtle WoW's custom zones: the Grim Reaches. Designed for levels 33-38 according to the Turtle WoW Wiki, the Grim Reaches are located east of the Wetlands and Loch Modan, around where the Twilight Highlands were added with the launch of Cataclysm.

The Grim Reaches are lacking said Twilight influence, but aside from that there are similarities between this zone and its retail counterpart, at least in the sense that it's a hilly green region inhabited by Wildhammer dwarves and Dragonmaw orcs. Visually I'd describe it as a desaturated version of Loch Modan, with similar grass and trees, just a lot less vibrant and kind of dull looking in terms of colour. I'm definitely noticing a theme in that regard, which makes me wonder if this artistic choice was simply motivated by a sense that higher level zones should look less appealing/idyllic or by a desire to strongly distinguish Turtle's world from the way Blizzard leaned heavily into more cartoony aesthetics as time went on.

Regardless, this was not one of my favourite custom zones. It wasn't bad, mind you, it just kind of... was, lacking the clear identity and strong vibes of the previous custom zones I'd played through. The quests from different dwarves asking me to slay orcs, troggs, raptors and murlocs all kind of blended together, with few NPCs actually being memorable to me, such as the crazy dwarf by the lake who asks you to kill crocs, and the family of blacksmiths down south.

What stood out to me by its absence was the subject of gryphons. How can a town of Wildhammer dwarves not have a single quest related to gryphons? I'm not saying they need to be flanderised to the point of caring about nothing else, but the complete omission of the subject struck me as odd. 

There were also at least three occasions where I was sent into a cave or fortress to kill stuff, encountered a named NPC at the end and thought to myself "I bet the next quest will send me back here to kill that guy" and it was true every time. That's not exactly a complaint, but more of an observation on how devoted to certain aspects of the vanilla formula the Turtle WoW devs are, even ones that have been widely criticised over the years.

At the very northern end of the zone I encountered a skull level elite hydra at the beach, which I thought might be a world boss, though on doing some more research on it, it turned out to be just a normal max-level elite with an unknown purpose.

In the interest of full disclosure, I feel I have to mention that I ultimately didn't "complete" this zone, since I left with two group quests still in my log that asked me to kill some more orcs, but for which I couldn't find a group and I expect no longer will at this point. There was also a prettty large area in the south filled with hostile dwarf ghosts whose purpose I couldn't make out, but maybe that area is part of the intended Horde experience - there was a Horde outpost in the zone that clearly had its own things going on.

One final thing I wanted to note about the Grim Reaches was that the flight pathing to it was weirdly horrible, which made me wonder whether this is something the Turtle devs had issues with. As you can see on the map above, the dwarven settlement of Dun Kintas is pretty much straight east of Loch Modan, with just mountains separating them, but for some reason, the gyphon taxi wouldn't go over them, but instead insisted on looping all the way up to and through the Wetlands just to then go back down from the north, which made the zone very tedious to travel to for how close it actually was to Ironforge.

Turtle WoW Dungeons: Crescent Grove vs. Stormwrought Ruins

Let's talk more Turtle WoW while it's still around, shall we? Next on my list to explore and write about were the two custom dungeons Crescent Grove and Stormwrought Ruins.

Crescent Grove is a level 32-38 dungeon located in southern Ashenvale. I actually played through this one last year already, and did originally mean to write a post about it at the time - but then it turned out to be kind of boring, and I was like "wow, this is not enough material for a post, I'll have to bundle it up with whatever the next dungeon on the list is and write about them together". And then I lost interest, naturally.

To be clear, Crescent Grove is not a bad dungeon. I had a perfectly fun time running it with a friendly pug. It just seemed pretty uninspired, especially after my previous experience in Dragonmaw Retreat. I couldn't help but think that it must've been one of the first dungeons the Turtle WoW devs built by themselves, as it actually didn't feel very dungeon-like and nothing about it felt in any way original. To me it kind of felt like someone was just familiarising themselves with the devs tools and played around with Ashenvale assets, adding a little vale to the map where they tried out all the different environmental textures available in the zone and populated it with matching mobs, such as furbolgs, satyrs and demons.

I checked the Turtle WoW Wiki and according to that, Crescent Grove was added at the end of 2021 - compare that to Dragonmaw Retreat coming out in 2025. It makes sense that they would've learned some things about how to do more interesting things with the tools available to them over the course of four years.

Stormwrought Ruins on the other hand, a level 35-41 dungeon, came out in the same patch as Dragonmaw Retreat, and boy, does it show. The first time I zoned in and opened the map, I was stunned by how massive it was. It's not quite as sprawling as BRD, but in terms of number of bosses it certainly comes close.

I'd been aware from the group finder that it had two Stormwrought instances listed, Castle and Descent, but I hadn't realised that it was effectively one giant dungeon that they'd just split into parts for the sake of the queue. I was quickly introduced to how that worked as the first group I got into only wanted to do the higher-level half and headed straight for the back door, even though I'd specifically queued for the first half. I didn't feel like I was in a position to complain and was just happy to take in whatever sights they were willing to show me.

Like Dragonmaw Retreat, Stormwrought Ruins goes extremely hard on the ambience. The custom music featured what sounded like church bells, choirs and... synthesisers? I don't know, music is not my area of expertise. But it was very loud and basically screaming "epic and scary stuff is happening here" (you can listen to some of it on this playlist).

Like everything else on Turtle WoW, all the environments and bosses were strongly reminiscent of existing dungeons, but unlike in the Crescent Grove example above, existing assets were put together in a way that still felt refreshing and new, even if it was clearly a derivative creation. The first half set in the castle reminded me of Shadowfang Keep and Scarlet Monastery in places, which makes sense when you think about it. That didn't change that the Duke's throne room looked pretty cool and impressive.

Also, the mobs were mostly (Stormreaver) orcs, which did make for an interesting combo with the human architecture. One of the bosses was Oronok Torn-Heart, and I've got to admit that with this one, I definitely felt a bit bad about killing him, recalling his canonical retirement in Outland as a peaceful boar farmer.

The mid section of the dungeon, where the two halves meet, is dominated by wetness and fungal decay, reminiscent of Maraudon or the Naxx plague wing. There's a room with a death knight boss that was pretty intimidating.

You encounter members of the Shadow Council as trash mobs throughout, but the final section of the instance is dedicated to them in specific being, well, horrible, conducting human sacrifices and shit. The penultimate boss was a giant red blob called "Remains of the Innocent" and there's a quest that has you confirm that this used to be the missing son of a grieving mother in Northwind. It strongly reminded me of Scholomance, but even that has less of a downer ending, because at least you give the ghosts some peace at the end.

The second group I ran with did the full dungeon from start to finish and it took us something like two and a half hours. At the end, people wanted to pose for a screenshot together, which I thought was cute. A true adventure! In both runs, the more experienced players had been more than happy to explain to us newbies how everything worked as well, which was very much appreciated.

The Twilight of the Turtle

When I decided to get back into Turtle WoW for one last hurrah before the project gets shut down (for real this time), I still remembered exactly where I'd left things off last time and what I wanted to pick up again. However, I was surprised to find that my hunter's talent points had been reset, a couple of my abilities had gone missing, and my tent-making profession had been reset to one. I guess that's one of the risks of playing a variant of Classic WoW that's not static but receives (or used to receive, anyway) continuous development. Things can change. Though resetting a profession that I'd invested time and money into levelling still sucked in my opinion.

Anyway, last time I played I'd just started on the custom zone Grim Reaches, and was trying to get into a run for the custom dungeon Stormwrought Castle. So... I went right back to that! I'd had good luck with the game's automated dungeon finder in the past, so I put myself in the queue for Stormwrought and started questing. I figured that there'd still be plenty of people around, wanting to make the most of Turtle WoW's remaining uptime to see more of the content unique to the project.

After about one and a half hours of questing with no signs of life from the queue, I decided to try my luck in the LFG channel. Silence. Maybe it was /world where the action was? I couldn't quite remember as I tend to leave or hide public channels where people talk too much nonsense. It turned out that the world channel was indeed the place, though not in the way I'd expected. 

I'd seen people in guild chat talk sadly about the server's shutdown, while also discussing what other private servers everyone was planning to move on to next. (I learned the names of a lot of new ones I'd never heard about before in the process.) However, I was not ready for the level of dooming in /world. It was all the emotions I'd seen in guild chat, but amped up to eleven. Some people were saying rather uncough things about Blizzard that I'd rather not repeat, and from what I can gather, were even encouraging others to harass Blizzard employees with email spam, which was just not cool.

In more amusing developments, there was talk of a "flesh road" between Goldshire and Stormwind, which is to say that people were paving the path with the dead bodies of characters they were no longer going to play. As you do. I hearthed back to Stormwind to check this out and they were not kidding.

I don't recall whether I mentioned previously that Turtle WoW allowed hardcore characters to mingle with regular ones, and that if a hardcore character above a certain level died, they left a little gravestone behind, whose size and ornateness depended on what level the character died at. People had made use of this feature to go out with a bang (as I'd noted the night before) by building a mini Stonehenge inside the bank, and a tower at the gates that others could use like a sort of jumping puzzle.

It was certainly... something. Someone compared the situation to one of those disaster movies where the world is ending and while some people go crazy, others just continue to go about their day as normal, and that certainly seemed apt. I got kind of fed up with all the complaining and the more toxic comments though, so I soon logged off again to take a break.

When I returned later to resume my questing and try queueing for Stormwrought Castle again, I wasn't too hopeful - were there even any others like me left who still wanted to do some of the content unique to Turtle WoW while they had the chance, or was everyone just dropping the server like a hot potato? I'm all too familiar with how quickly a community can abandon a server en masse. However, I did end up getting into a dungeon run fairly quickly that time, so the server isn't entirely dead just yet and I should be able to at least get a couple more posts out of it.

Turtle WoW Is Shutting Down

This morning I woke up to the news that the owners of Turtle WoW have officially announced that the servers will be ceasing operations after the 14th of May. This shouldn't really have been a surprise, but I've got to confess: considering that the news of Blizzard's lawsuit against them broke close to eight months ago at this point, I wasn't ruling out that they would manage to get away with it somehow. Unlike other private server operators whom I've seen fold instantly the moment Blizzard's lawyers as much as looked at them, the Turtle team certainly gave evading the law a good shot. They made adjustments to the website, changed domains, and the owner supposedly deleted her old Discord account and created a new one in an attempt to not be pinned down.

All that said, it looks like the lawyers caught up with them in the end, somehow. I'll reproduce the Turtle WoW team's statement in full, since their website will eventually go dark and disappear:

Hello friends,

They say it's the journey, not the destination. How long must a journey last to be remembered fondly and warmly? We don't know. We only know that ours is coming to an end.

After almost 8 years online, Turtle WoW is heading towards shutdown. The final day of operation will be May 14, 2026, and the servers will go offline at 12:00 AM on May 15th.

Working on Turtle WoW has been the highlight of our lives. It has been an honor to build with you and for you. Whether you were exploring new stories, leveling, raiding, PvPing, roleplaying, or just enjoying a quiet moment in the world, seeing how much this game means to you has been our greatest privilege.

The adventures you had, the battles you fought, and the friends you met are what made it all worthwhile. We hope you will cherish those moments. What we leave behind are fond memories of an 8-year-long journey, and we hope you'll remember it every now and then.

Until the project's final day, we'll keep technical and in-game support active for everyone who keeps playing. All realm timelines will be immediately shifted to the final progression patch for those who want to see the new raids before the project's sunset.

We've turned off all donations until the end of the project and want to thank you sincerely for supporting us over the years.

Our website, forums, and social media will also be closed on October 16th.

Finally, we want to thank our incredible team.

Thank you for playing.

Thank you for being such a wonderful gaming community.

Thank you for your creativity and talent.

Thank you.

I logged into my high elf for the first time in a while and found that I hadn't been removed from the guild I was in despite my pretty prolonged period of inactivity. Some people were talking about where to play once Turtle WoW is gone, but others were continuing business as usual. I also saw a stream of announcements of level 60 hardcore characters dying, which I can only assume were people deciding to go out with a bang before the server shuts down, though doing so almost a month in advance seems a bit premature to me.

I'm thinking about going back to complete a couple more goals before the shutdown, such as actually hitting level 40 and buying a mount. I'd been playing with the idea for a while but it was kind of lacking in urgency. Now that the shutdown is final, it's now or never. We'll see where it ends up in my priorities over the next month.

And of course there's always a chance that the whole project will eventually pop up again somewhere else under a new name, which is not unusual for WoW private servers. I've also seen mutterings on reddit that the Chinese and South East Asian servers (seeing how Turtle was operating globally) might be staying up. Still, even if that's true, losing the English-speaking servers is certainly a blow.

They had it coming, but I still feel a little sad. Both things can be true at the same time: that Turtle WoW was blatantly profiting off an IP they didn't own, and that the people behind it were genuinely passionate about their product and had some great ideas. 

Classic WoW & Me in 2025

2025 has been another unexciting year for WoW Classic and me, as my play time dropped even further year on year. Based on ManicTime's numbers, only about 20% of my overall time spent playing WoW this year was spent in some flavour of Classic, while retail got the lion's share with roughly 80%.

This was already a trend last year, and I noted back then that "my play time may well continue to decline until/unless we end up getting some kind of Classic-related surprise reveal that appeals to me". That surprise didn't happen, and the wider Classic community is still sitting on pins and needles waiting for some kind of announcement about what's coming next. I was therefore not super motivated to play Classic myself, but I did dip into different modes for a few weeks at a time over the course of the year.

Cataclysm Classic/Mists of Pandaria Classic

When MoP Classic was announced, I decided that I wanted to get back in there just to explore the original version of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms that is no longer accessible in retail. Since I had last played my hunter back in Classic BC, I had some levelling to do first, but the abridged nostalgia tour through Wrath and Cataclysm content was pretty fun. Pandaria itself actually ended up being the place where I stalled since having to work my way through seemingly all the quests again just to get from 85 to 90 when I'd only just done them for MoP Remix last year was simply too much. I did finally go back and hit 90 last week though. 

Tiirr - Mirage Raceway 

• Level 90 Hunter (+20)
• 61 days, 6 hours played (+6 days, 22 hours since 2021, though not all of that would have been this past year. I did still play her a bit at the start of 2022 but then dropped BC Classic so hard that I didn't even take any notes on where I left it.)
• 600 Skinning (+225), 595 Leatherworking (+220), 596 Cooking (+221, with some progress in all the Pandaren Cuisine "ways": 535 Grill, 555 Wok, 555 Pot, 535 Steamer, 554 Oven, 591 Brew), 598 Fishing (+223), 600 First Aid (+225)

Faly - MR

• Level 71 Druid (+1)
• 19 days, 1 hour played (+5 days, 8 hours since 2021 but same deal as with the hunter)
• 386 Herbalism (+11), 380 Alchemy (Elixir Master, +12), 380 Cooking (+5), 382 Fishing (+126), 380 First Aid (+12)

Turtle WoW

Turtle WoW was the surprise curveball I didn't expect, as I had no plans to ever play on a private server ever again. However, the news of Blizzard's lawsuit against them at the end of July inspired me to download their client just to check it out before they'd be forced to shut down. (They're still up and running five months later by the way, though they were forced to move to a new domain and cancelled their Unreal Engine project so it's an ongoing battle in more than one way.) I did get pulled away and back into retail before hitting level 40, but I haven't written it off yet as long as the servers remain up. 

Tiranea - Nordanaar

• Level 38 Hunter
• 4 days, 3 hours played 
• 201 Jewelcrafting, 226 Mining, 225 Cooking, 205 Fishing, 212 First Aid, 98 Survival (Many tents! Handle it!)

Season of Discovery

At the start of the year, my interest in Season of Discovery had just seen a resurgence and I did play there for a couple of months. But as detailed in this post, Incursions seemed to weirdly break my spirit and then I just never went back to play again. 

Shintar - Wild Growth

• Level 49 Priest
• 4 days, 5 hours played (+1 day, 6 hours)
• 245 Alchemy (+57), 280 Herbalism (+75), 225 Cooking (+21), 258 First Aid (+57), 237 Fishing (+63)

Shindig - WG

• Level 31 Mage
• 1 day, 4 hours played (+4 hours)
• 102 Enchanting (+5), 185 Tailoring (+60), 103 Cooking, 90 First Aid (+15), 75 Fishing 

Classic era

At the end of the year I also finally stopped logging into Classic era altogether. Somewhat weirdly, the thing that ended up breaking my streak was (lack of) Felcloth supply on the auction house. I'd kept logging in regularly to at least make a small contribution to the community by transmuting Mooncloth every few days, but at some point Felcloth either stopped appearing on the AH at all, or it was so stupidly priced that buying it to transmute would have resulted in a loss. I took my human mage out to do some farming of my own for exactly one play session and then decided that screw it, this wasn't worth the effort to me. I also didn't log into hardcore even once this year.

Just noting down what little play time I did accumulate from crafting and such for potential future reference:

• Shika - Pyrewood Village: 34 days, 2 hours played (+10 hours)
• Shintau - PV: 8 days, 20 hours played (+2 hours)
• Shinny - PV: 5 days, 3 hours played (+13 hours)
• Tirr - Nethergarde Keep: 36 days, 12 hours (+3 hours)
• Jehna - NK: 7 days, 23 hours (+7 hours)

Everyone seems to be in agreement that next year, Blizzard will have to have some interesting new reveal about Classic coming - we'll see how that will affect my interest in this mode! 

Turtle WoW: Interesting Changes for a Slightly Different Sort of Vanilla Experience

I've mostly written about Turtle WoW in terms of their custom content and how it compares to real Vanilla WoW, but I wanted to also dedicate some time to writing about mechanical and quality of life changes they've made to the game because I think they've made some interesting decisions in that area.

To begin with, what we call "Turtle WoW" actually runs three servers in the West at the moment, two designated as RP-PvE and one PvP. (There are some Chinese servers as well, but I don't really know much about those.) I actually find it interesting that there are no "normal" PvE servers - you've got to be accepting of roleplaying or GTFO. Now, I don't know how much RP actually happens on these servers - I've occasionally seen people that looked like they might be roleplaying but nothing I could identify as such with certainty. However, it sends a message that the devs support RP and immersion and I kind of like that. It strikes me as a virtual application of the broken windows theory - show that you care about the small stuff and it makes a better environment for everyone.

My hunter is on the older of the two PvE servers because I wanted to avoid the new server crowds on the more recently launched server. It's still plenty busy where I am and I've had no issues finding people to group with.

I also accepted a random guild invite at one point just because I thought the name looked kind of neat and I was curious whether there were any new guild-specific features to discover. The answer to that was yes. I wasn't surprised that guild banks are a thing, considering that's one of those features that everyone but the most hardcore Vanilla purists would be quite happy to import from Burning Crusade, however my ears perked up when I saw people mention a "guild house". My first thought was, WTF, Turtle WoW has housing? How come nobody mentioned that before? Well, the reason is that it doesn't really. What it does have is the ability for a guild to designate an existing inn as their guild's "base of operations" so to speak, and your guild tabard then serves as a second hearthstone to that inn. In that same building, you also gain rested XP at a heavily accelerated rate, similar to what you get while standing under a tent. It may not be "housing" but it's still a neat feature. 

Speaking of tents, I previously mentioned benefiting from the rested XP boost of a tent in Darkshore, but I didn't go into any detail about them (to be fair, at the time I also didn't really know much more about them than that standing under one was beneficial). The Turtle devs added a secondary profession called survival, which is not very fleshed out to be honest - but it does allow you to craft this item called Traveler's Tent, which you can plop down anywhere in the world to let people benefit from a quick boost to their rested XP. There's a two-hour cooldown on crafting them and you can only carry one at a time, so you can't spam them, but there's pretty much always at least one active right outside the gates of Stormwind.

It's a lovely way of encouraging player interaction and makes breaks feel more meaningful, but I also like that it's just one more way in which Turtle WoW let's you fine-tune the rate of your XP gains. Basically the tents allow you to almost permanently have an XP boost up if you want it and plan for it, but there are also levelling challenges that intentionally reduce your XP, and you can toggle XP gains on or off entirely via your portrait at any time. Giving players this much agency about just how fast or slowly they want to level has felt very refreshing to me compared to Blizzard's accelerationist approach that likes to just apply huge XP bonuses to everyone to get them to the end already. In Turtle, I made a lot of use of tents earlier on when I just wanted to get to the newer content, but recently I've stopped as I started to feel like I was going too fast. I appreciate the implicit acknowledgement that not all players like to level at the same speed, and that even the same player may prefer to go slower or faster at different points depending on their mood.

Aside from obvious XP adjustments, other changes to questing make it feel smoother and more fun than in "normal" Vanilla, without jumping straight to the extreme streamlining that was introduced in Cataclysm. For example, just the addition of all these new zones with things to do helps to ease any potential stresses about where to go and how to get to the next level. I often hear people say that back in Vanilla, there weren't even enough quests to get you to max level so you had to grind mobs to get there, which was never my own experience. What is definitely true though is that as the available quests become more sparse, you spend more time running around for fewer rewards, and if it's not your first character, you'll be going through a lot of the same quest lines and zones over and over.

On Turtle WoW, due to my exploration of their mid-level custom zones, my hunter is approaching 40 without ever having stepped foot into the Scarlet Monastery or having done any questing in any of the traditional level 30+ zones. It's kind of remarkable what that does for pacing and personal motivation, as this freedom to go to half a dozen different places helps maintain that early explorer energy you have coming out of the starting zones, and you never get that feeling of "oh well, guess it's time for [insert zone you're not particularly fond of] because there's not much else left to do in my level range". It genuinely made me wonder for the first time how WoW's history would have gone differently if they had made the first expansion a lateral one instead of adding ten more levels on top.

Another thing that contributes to a smoother questing experience is a change that took me some time to notice - that quests never go grey; they always stay green. (Or rather, I technically don't know about never at this point, but as I mentioned I'm getting close to 40 and haven't seen one go grey yet.) In line with that, the exclamation marks for low-level quests never disappear, which I feel sends an interesting message: that it's more important to make sure players know where there are stories to see than that they only see what gives them the best XP per hour for their level. I've gone back and done some random low-level quests a couple of times, and while a level five quest won't move your bar much past a certain point even if it's technically green to you, it still felt nice to me. I also noticed that this gets rid of the sometimes disappointing experience of completing a green quest, levelling up before you hand it in and then seeing it go grey and close to "reward-less".

Also filed under "subtle but interesting levelling changes" we have rented mounts. I've written about the turtle mount you can get at level 18, but at some point I also started to occasionally notice low-level players riding around on slow horses with odd tooltips on their buff bar. I eventually figured out that at the gates of some towns, you can rent a mount for a few copper, which then puts you on a horse for five minutes. This may not sound like much, but again, if you're a lowbie wanting to get from Menethil harbour to the other side of the Wetlands, it's actually a worthy investment! It's just another small thing that gives low-level characters more options without completely trivialising travel.

Another unrelated quality of life change that surprised me and made me think "it's actually weird that Blizzard never did this" is changed icon art for some items. Now, it would be unreasonable to expect every single item in the game to have unique icon art and for the devs to never recycle anything ever, but there have definitely been instances of this that tend to feel worse than others. For example the drinks Bubbling Water and Morning Glory Dew share the same icon, but while one is only useful for characters around level 20, the other is an endgame consumable. I have definitely been in situations where I got these mixed up in my bag, sometimes with even more items that share the same icon.

Not on Turtle WoW though, as they gave Bubbling Water a new, different icon. Same with all the spices on the trade goods vendor - I remember back in the day I used to buy the wrong spices by accident a lot, because it was just so easy to get them mixed up since they all look the same. This is a lot less of a problem on Turtle WoW, with each spice packet having been given a different colour. Again, I'm kind of surprised Blizzard never seems to have given this any thought, especially after I heard stories of people using recycled icons to scam people in retail. (The specific case I heard about was during BfA when someone would make people believe they were buying valuable Midnight Salmon but would then trade them comparatively worthless Darkmoon Daggermaw at the last second.)

The way things look makes for a good segue to the subject of transmog, which is another thing that Turtle WoW has. Personally I'm someone who enjoys transmog in retail, but at the same time I like Vanilla not having it as I do think it changes the feel of the world around you, so I was quite surprised (and initially a bit put off) that this was a feature that the devs included. However, as I've learned more about it, I've been finding it kind of interesting.

In a nutshell it does not work like in retail where you can transmog very freely by simply paying some gold. Instead every piece of gear requires a special token to change its appearance. These tokens can be bought in the cash shop (naturally) but they can also be acquired via certain material hand-ins and as drops from higher-level dungeons. This means that the feature is generally not used much by levellers and more of a sign of prestige at high level. As a result of that, most people ambling about in town look like you'd expect random Vanilla WoW levellers to look, and only the high levels stand out through their transmogs, and only a very small number of them are ridiculous Playboy bunny style outfits. I'm not sure how I'd feel about this in the long run, assuming that the population at high level and the number of ridiculous outfits increases, but at least superficially this system seems to strike an interesting balance between giving people more options to change their appearance while also preserving a good-looking outfit as something to aspire to.

Finally, the last thing on my list of changes to discuss (for now) is the day/night cycle, which was again something that I only became aware of slowly over time, after first getting confused because I noticed that it wasn't what I expected but couldn't quite figure out yet why that was. Basically what Turtle WoW has opted to do is to treat Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms as opposite sides of the planet - meaning when it's night time on one, it's day on the other. I'm not sure of the reason behind this change to be honest. In retail we're not even 100% sure that the map of Azeroth we use is actually showing us the entirety of the planet. I remember there's a globe decoration in Halls of Lightning that people used to cite as "proof" for a while that the continents we know are all there is, but nothing has ever been stated explicitly and you'd think that if there was nothing in the way, there'd be some boat routes connecting the western part of Kalimdor with the eastern coast of the Eastern Kingdoms. Either way, the Turtle WoW devs have locked in on the map we know being all there is to the planet.

There may be more interesting things to discover but these were just some that stood out to me. Most of them are positive in my book, and whatever else you may think of Turtle WoW, I think they've displayed a great understanding of how certain aspects of Vanilla can be improved without harming the overall experience. I wish the WoW Classic dev team was similarly creative with their innovations instead of just coming up with new ways to tweak dungeons and raids.

Turtle WoW: Can't We Be Friends, Blizz?

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...

The Island of Balor

After finishing Northwind, my Turtle WoW hunter continued straight on to the private server's next custom zone, which is in fact designed for the same level range: the island of Balor.

Balor is located west of Stormwind, roughly where Vashj'ir is placed in retail. However, design-wise it's got more in common with the more northern Tol Barad, in the sense that both are fairly dreary islands full of ruins and ghosts. That's not to say that Balor is Turtle WoW's version of Tol Barad though - reading around a bit, I found out that the inspiration for it actually came from the map of Azeroth in the Warcraft II manual. It has an island called Balor right there! Honestly, that only increased my respect for how well the Turtle WoW devs know their Warcraft lore.

In terms of what it offers in game, I'd heard mixed opinions about this zone. Some liked it, but a common criticism was that the quests required too much running around, or even swimming. The latter would then usually lead to someone pointing out that there's a vendor offering swim speed potions, which should alleviate that particular issue. I'm glad I knew about this going in, though I'll say right off the bat that I don't think the swim speed potions were that much of a help, at least not the first time around. They seem to count as conjured items specific to the zone or something, so you can't stock up on them if you ever plan to hearth out, as they'll just vanish the moment you do that. They also last only five minutes, which is fine if you know that you need to swim from one end to the island to the other with no interruptions, but in the early stages where you might pause at various points to pick up quests or just explore, you'll just end up wasting a lot of the timer on the effect.

Anyway, let's back up for a moment: What is Balor? One of the quests in Northwind actually teaches you a lot of lore about the island if you pay attention. It's basically an off-shoot of Stormwind that got rich from the local gold mines, but then something bad happened there and we're not sure what. As Alliance you start on a little bit of rock off the main island, where SI:7 has erected a base, and from there you basically set out to explore.

The main island is indeed a royal pain to uncover, with steep cliffs all around so that you can only actually go inland at around four different points on the map. The actual land mass then follows a similar pattern of steep, winding paths that make you loop around a lot with minimal shortcuts. I can see why people would find that annoying, but I actually kind of loved it because it made the place a proper challenge to fully explore. Just when I thought I'd already been absolutely everywhere, I made it to the very end of yet another narrow path to find a little camp with a dwarf and a night elf quest giver in it. It was delightful!

(Side note, after being unable to fish in Northwind, I was also pleased to find that fishing worked in this zone, and there were plenty of pools to both level up my skill and add to my gold stockpile.) 

Mind you, all this did make my first-time questing experience extremely slow and inefficient. For example I got sent into the exact same cave to kill the exact same demons twice in a row - if only I had known and had picked up both of those quests at the same time! I imagine that if one were to come back on an alt and with knowledge of what to do in what order, things would speed up by quite a lot, but it's probably still one of the less efficient zones in terms of XP earned for time spent. It does however get an A+ from me for exploration and vibes, which I think is worth a lot by itself.

If I had to describe the overall feel of the zone, I'd say it's as if Deadwind Pass and Swamp of Sorrows had a baby. Everything's grey and wet and broken. I'm actually not sure we ever learn what exactly ruined everything on the island. There are Stormreaver orcs everywhere, so presumably they played a big part in it, but there are also demons and undead and at least one quest giver talks about a deeper corruption of the land, so there might be more going on. I'm okay with not knowing for sure either way, as it just adds to the island's air of mystery.

I felt the need to look up the Stormreaver clan since their name didn't ring a bell, and apparently they are another thing from Warcraft II, though most of them supposedly died at the Tomb of Sargeras. A survivor and hermit called Dark'thul made an appearance in Warcraft III and Legion, and can also be found in a hut far off the main coast of Balor in Turtle WoW, where he gives you some quests.

I'm not sure I understand how all of this ties together lore-wise, but the zone still gets two thumbs-up from me. If I had to criticise anything at all, it would be that at least one of the Turtle quest writers clearly has a thing for body horror (which comes out in the descriptions of several dying or dead people you encounter on your journey across the island), which I honestly thought was a bit much.