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.

Paige Francis He/him