T w e n t y S i d e d
Just a short news update, I think. Turtle WoW, which I talked about last week, has issued a public letter to Blizzard as their (known, anyway) response to Blizzard’s lawsuits. The letter basically details how other publishers have embraced whole-game modding, why can’t Blizzard?
This particular tactic has not only been tried multiple times, it’s basically a long-standing argument. Major portions of this perspective are even inherently invalid. Some of the games and publishers quoted as examples, say; Minecraft, have been designed from the beginning using a different model. When you run a Minecraft “private server,” it’s NOT YOUR SERVER. It’s Minecraft‘s. Er, Mojang’s. Microsoft’s. You just have permission to use their code and approved tools. Yes, you can get into the weeds on the “approved tools” part, but generally the entire system works differently.
Of course, the “public letter” isn’t necessarily their legal response. I would expect this is mostly for players, not Blizzard. Regardless, I don’t expect Turtle WoW to go down overnight. At the very least, there is some foreign ownership tied into the servers that Blizzard may not be able to touch effectively. Considering how easy it was to get Turtle WoW running, though; I have started looking at other private servers to see how easy it is to get any of those working on Linux. World of Warcraft live was simple enough to run until recently, and I’m not remotely interested in any of the recent content, so I expect there may be a good solution.
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Before your article last week, I had never heard of Turtle WoW. I don’t know how I managed to miss this for the past 7 years!
I tried playing Blizzard’s WoW last year and gave up in disgust after about a month. It made me sad at just how bloated and confusing the game has become over the years.
And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why my rogue kept dying so often, considering the fact that I had leveled up a rogue 15 years ago without any problems.
I just downloaded Turtle Wow and am thrilled to play again the original game that I had once enjoyed. Thank you!
I hope it’s able to last. The good news is finding a “Blizz-like” Vanilla server isn’t too hard, but sometimes you have to check if they have a specific client or some choice you have to make to get on the Blizz-like server rather than the accelerated servers.
The minecraft server code is available. You can download it and run a server that you own on hardware that you own. The “private servers” you can easily access through the launcher are as you describe, but there’s a whole world of truly private Minecraft servers all over the place. They all run Minecraft Java edition, of course.
You’re right; the reference was that most people consider a “Minecraft server” to be those you’re allowed to run as part of the game. At least, that seems to be what I’m reading. Actual independent servers seem to get treated the same by Mojang as WoW independent servers. As long as they are small and don’t draw attention, the publisher ignores them. Once they start getting lots of use (or get featured in a news story); they tend to get sued.
Hmm, that has not been my impression. The server runtime is available on https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server where you can download the server – they even have a tutorial – and install and run it on your hardware, with whatever mod packs you wish. The servers Mojang have shut down that I have seen are commercial servers that break their EULA; when I think “private server” I always connect it with “free of charge” because that’s all the private servers I have ever played on. Also they would not list private 3rd party servers on their official server list that break the community guidelines, but unless you are charging for access (that’s where Mojang is very strict – you cannot even stream Minecraft if your stream is behind a paywall like Youtube memberships) I haven’t seen Mojang take any action against private server operators.