Blizzard Drops the Hammer on Popular Vanilla World of Warcraft Nostalrius Private Servers
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The "literal amount of dungeons" is a meaningless value without context. If it wasn't then for Legion Blizzard could just copy-paste the same dungeon 100 times, slightly change the enemy layout each time, give each one a different dungeon quest and then claim that it has more dungeons than the whole of WoW prior.Bradmaster Flash said:
That argument would work better if the content in question actually was vastly different. Dungeons (and arguably some of the raids) in old WoW weren't exactly big on complex bosses, and even less big on regular enemies that weren't just damage-dispensing blocks of HP. Basically the only difference between, say, the Mechanar and the Botanica besides the layout was the fact that the in the former the generic trash mobs/tank-and-spank bosses were a mix of Blood Elves and Constructs and in the latter they were a mix of Blood Elves and Plants.
Depends on how aggressive your playstyle was. In Vanilla I pretty much always mentally added 1 mob to any pull I made (so when I pulled 1 mob I considered myself as having pulled 2) to avoid that sort of situation.
As for the "respawns, etc.", I think you're overstating their danger just a tad. The only enemies I can think of were you had to worry about that sort of thing off the top of my head were Murlocs (there's probably a better example, but Murlocs are by far the most iconic one.)
Depends on whether we're defining a group as a full party of 5 or just 2 or more players. If it's the former than I'll give you that one, but if it's the latter then just about every zone in WoD has at least one area full of elite mobs that you couldn't feasibly solo unless you're massively overgeared. And I know that Shadowmoon Valley has some good old "Go hunt down this elite mob, bring a friend!" quests. I can only assume Frostfire Ridge does too.
So what just let this Private Server continue underhindered resulting in potential losses from the official World of Warcraft because Nostalrius was getting as close as 1 million user player base.Arnoxthe1 said:
Look I get you are trying to apply socialist logic here, the whole "Sticking it to the Rich, Greedy, Artless, Corporations"
I used to think like that alot but now I grew out of that. Besides there are bunch of World of Warcraft users I have seen in the forums and a majority of them are very against the idea of Private Legacy Servers.
Actually, I know exactly what you're saying. And trust me when I say I'm not being like that at all. Quite the contrary. I think Capitalism is a great system. When it's deployed properly. It's like nuclear power. You can use it for good to power millions of homes like nothing but if it's mishandled too much, you get massive nuclear meltdowns that after just a bit make the entire area uninhabitable.Samtemdo8 said:
But anyway. Let's be honest. Activision is only doing this because they think Nostalrius is detrimental to their WoW subscription counts. If this was truly an issue of IP misuse, they would have and should have filed this a LONG time ago. But now, conveniently, when WoW is FINALLY beginning to drop in numbers, they do this? Yeahhh...
But hey, let's assume Activision did do this much sooner. They're still in the wrong because Nostalrius is not make any money off of this whatsoever besides the donations they get. In fact, I heard they were a little in the red. Nostalrius is simply providing another way to experience Blizzard's IP for no money down. You might say it falls right into the realm of fanfiction.
Andrew Ryan said:
And now we have Jontron stepping into the ring on this too:
Someone at Blizzard should make the effort to cross the aisle.
Someone at Blizzard should make the effort to cross the aisle.
But what if that fanfiction ends up becoming SO POPULAR that it ends up taking away people from seeing the real offical and original one? One of the concerns is that it will fracture the community and take away resources to make new content.Arnoxthe1 said:
And I have heard this Nostalrius Private Server has been here since around 2013-15?
Well lets if the power of internet celebraties is enough to sway Blizzard to release official private servers.Redlin5 said:
So, a couple things. Nostalrius isn't actual "true" WoW as it is now. Not even close. They're actually not selling the same product really that Blizzard is selling right now. Furthermore, people wanted to play on Nostalrius. They didn't want to play actual WoW. If they did, they would have. And shutting the down ISN'T going to change this. And besides. Nostalrius only has 150,000 active players as compared to the millions that actual WoW has. It's such a small fraction of players that it's hardly worth going after individually. So no, there is no danger, or barely any, of Nostalrius stealing players.Samtemdo8 said:
If the derivative product is actively drawing attention away from the original, then that means that, at minimum(legal or not), the derivative product is doing a better job of appealing to the demographic than the original is.Samtemdo8 said:
Smart business operators would look at the nearly million people playing the Vanilla WoW server and go "Man, that's a lot of people. We could spool up a server or two, make it official, and get a lot of business from that because people obviously want it", superseding the derivative product and getting themselves money while making the derivative irrelevant.
In the case of the fan fiction example, if the fanfic is SO popular it's beginning to overshadow some of the original book's, then the smart play would be to buy it out and officially market it as a sidestory to earn money off of it, rather than spending money on legal to nuke it out of existance, pissing off a bunch of potential customers and getting negative PR all while not earning any additional money.
Instead, they nuked the derivative via legal means, putting out almost a million potential customers in a spite maneuver.
"Some people are providing something for free, so clearly there's a market for the exact same thing, only not free." Is smart business practice now?Areloch said:
And even if that wasn't the case, I do have to ask: How do you go about making Private Classic Servers irrelevant when the entire point of Classic Servers is that they'll never change?
But these people are still a minority.Areloch said:
As of the last sub numbers it reported Live WOW had about 5 million users.
And regarding the whole fact that "vanilla wow is better then Live WOW" there are plenty of people in the WOW Community that does not want to go back to the gameplay of Vanilla WOW because of how egregiously designed and dated it is.
I can go through many amount of details as to how Vanilla is very dated and would not work for a mainstream audiance.
Well, the only reason the server exists is because if offers a game configuration that WoW no longer offers. I have no doubts that people would be fine with paying for upkeep on an official version of that with better support, active GM's, etc. Maybe not everyone, but quite a number, I'd imagine.Aeshi said:
The people are there for the vanilla content. The reason they're playing that and not current WoW is because Blizzard is not offering it that content. If they offered it, lots of people would be more than happy to pay to consume it. Not all, but quite a lot. The ones that don't pay even at that point weren't your customers anyways.
At worst, they spool up an official server/service for those people, gauge interest, and go from there. They have a lot they could gain and very little to lose from that approach.
Except it clearly works for nearly a million people. If Blizzard set up a separate thing for that market, they'd potentially gain nearly a million customers.Samtemdo8 said:
Sure, they're the minority to the 5 million current WoW users, but gaining potentially one fifth of your current demographic in additional sales is very, very, far from a stupid investment.
They don't at all have to mess with WoW as it is, just set up a secondary service to cater to the demographic they're not currently serving but clearly want to consume content they could in fact provide.
I think you're vastly overstating the value of that "official" label. You really think most of WoW's current playerbase would still be paying a monthly subscription if there was a free WoD Private Server out there?Areloch said:
Or that people who've probably spent hundred of hours leveling their character up to 60 and getting invested in their server's community are going to put all that in the bin and start paying a subscription fee for slightly better Tech Support/GMs?
Absolutely no worse than what they're earning now, which is nothing. As said, they stand to lose just about nothing from buying out the Nostalrius guys, paying a minimal amount of money for upkeep costs(since they don't have to introduce any new content) and getting some customers back into the fold.Aeshi said:
I don't at all imagine all of them would, but I'd imagine at least enough would to make a profit overtop upkeep costs. As is, the only thing they've earned is negative PR and 0 dollars.
I've been watching a lot of YT videos and commentary on it. To summarize (as someone who is completely impartial to the whole thing and WoW as a whole.)Lightknight said:
Is that it was starting to get way too big for Blizzards liking. Many WoW streamers stated in their own chat that people were cancelling subs and simply playing on this server. When it came to playing WoW the first thing people would say is 'sign up for this private server' so while it was technically free there was documented, typed out evidence that Nostralrius was indeed hurting their sales in people quitting to pay to play vanilla.
It also doesn't help that the people in charge of Blizzard keep making fun of those who like Vanilla and all around REFUSED to listen to subscribers legitimate gripes with how their new systems are actually shit and killing the game.
Personally I wouldn't mind getting into WoW now. But games like Elder Scrolls Online have spoiled me and I have no care to participate to sub games on top of buying it base price. If they go B2P and drop the price to a nice $30 I can see them alleviating somewhat their subscribers problem.
I don't know what the turnover for new users is but I figured it's very low if something like a Vanilla server genuinely threatens Blizzard.
But does it really though? Vanilla, from what I understand, is such a largely different game and most of the people playing on Nostalrius are people who specifically want to play vanilla because they don't like the current WoW, so Blizzard wouldn't have made any money form these near 1 million people anyway because they wouldn't have ever bothered to subscribe to the current game. And on top of it Tom Chillton basically says that people are just viewing vanilla with rose tinted glasses and will come running back to the current game after playing on a legacy server, so whats the threat then if he believes people will still put money into his game afterwards anyway?Samtemdo8 said:
All in all though, its ultimately Blizzard's decision and its in their right and all that legal jazz to have it shut down, I just think they're being rather mean-spirited about it though as I don't see this causing any considerable damage to them at all, but meh, that's just my uneducated view on it.
EDIT: Just read the post above me about how its growth and how people started cancelling their subs to go play on it instead started to hurt sales which lead to Blizzard closing it. That makes sense why they had to jump in and stop it, I'm curious though what the reason behind those cancelled subs are though, like is it because they genuinely want to play vanilla again or did they just think "meh, free WoW". Regardless, I agree with Dragonbums though, it says quite a bit of WoW's current state if something old like vanilla is a genuine threat to Blizzard.
I should start sending cease and dessist letters to blizzard i guess. apperently sending illegal letters is enough to shut the whole thing down nowadays. ooooh, perhaps i can kill Uplay like that!
No, they are not. The server itself is original code and blizzard has absolutely no claim to it. the ONLY break of terms of service here is the players using WOW client to play the game. This dance and game has been played many times, the reason private MMO servers exist for almost any MMO is because they are not illegal and therefore companies can do nothing about it legally. The ONLY thing they can do is either make their client work in such a way that it would never connect to those servers (realistically impossible) or go after every single player for terms of use violation of using their client to connect to 3rd party servers (cha, i would like to see them try). The servers itself are fully legal and this DMCA abuse that blizzard is utilizing (and not the first time) should actually lead to blizzard ending up in jail.Samtemdo8 said:
Legally blizzard should not be able to even fart in this servers direction. ANd if they are loosing customers (no, they are not, just like games industry isnt loosing sales to pirates, this is a false logic to begin with) then they should get better. If they fail to get better perhaps blizzard should fail as a company.Samtemdo8 said:
Then clearly the fanfiction is better product and therefore is the one that should remain.Samtemdo8 said:
Based on my experience in helping run a private server, yes, they most definitely would.Aeshi said:
No what Blizzard do is release their own official private server, just because the server is original code does not negate the fact the GAME itself is free of DMCA "abuse" the server is theirs, but "WORLD OF WARCRAFT" is Blizzard's copyright.Strazdas said:
Does not it matter how the server is utilized it is law that they should not make a server with a copyrighted game already in use which violates their terms of service.
I mean shit there is a reason why we cannot advertise Private Servers on other website forums like the Escapist.
And let me get this out of the way and say that as someone who did play on a Private WOW server just to experiance what the world of azeroth looked like before the Cataclysm, Vanilla WOW is not that great from a gameplay perspective.
Classes were unbalanced, Bosses had bullshit mechanics, it is increadibly grindy in certain areas of gameplay (such as re-specing)
It is very difficult to build a team of 40 people for raids especially if they are all geared out perfectly like say in Molten Core we needed ALL 40 people to get Fire Resist Gear and that was a ***** to farm. And many classes were not viable which means that when it comes to endgame some class specs were utterly worthless. Paladins and Bear Form Druids were not viable as Tanks only the protection Warrior. And in Nax 40 you needed 8 tanks for one boss.
