If you’ve played an MMO for very long, you’ve almost certainly heard the siren song of the private server. These fan-operated servers come in all varieties—some keep dead games alive, some provide a window to a past build of an aging game, and some have even gotten the green light to keep going from the game’s publisher.
Historically, Blizzard has not been so keen on this practice which, in all fairness, involves making big parts of its game playable for free. Its action against Nostalrius, a server that took World of Warcraft back to a 2006 build before that option existed officially, is one of the more notorious private server closures in history.
There’s nothing new under the sun, as Turtle WoW—a private server that launched in 2018 and has reached concurrent player peaks of over 70,000 since, according to its developers—was named in a complaint Blizzard filed Friday that claims the Turtle WoW team has “built an entire business on large scale, egregious, and ongoing infringement of Blizzard’s intellectual property.”
The Turtle WoW build is an altered version of 2006-era WoW offering new playable races, zones, instances, and so on. While it is free to play, it also has an in-game shop that allows donations to the dev team to be converted into store currency. But the more pressing issue is obviously the whole copyright infringement thing, which the lawsuit hammers home hard.
The complaint continues: “These unauthorized private servers drive away otherwise dedicated WoW players, introduce security risks to players, fragment the WoW player community, and create confusion as to what are official, supported
versions of WoW … private servers such as Turtle WoW also encourage and facilitate video game piracy by allowing players to avoid paying for the game experience that Blizzard has invested so much time and money to create.”
Turtle WoW wasn’t exactly in hiding. You may have seen its advertisements on YouTube or on X, where it regularly teases major updates and its impending move to Unreal Engine 5. The team recently launched a new realm, Ambershire, which itself hit an early peak of over 11,000 online players. These are the sort of numbers and ambitions that some officially active MMOs can’t match.
On the server’s fan Discord, team member Torta issued a statement the day after the suit was filed: “Turtle WoW is here to stay. Challenges come to us often, and each time we are prepared to face them. We remain fully committed to delivering the Turtle WoW experience that you’ve come to love over the years.”
As a lifelong fan of “vanilla” World of Warcraft who watched Turtle WoW’s development with great interest, it hurts to see so much passionate work and modding ingenuity get tangled in a legal mess. On the other hand, Blizzard has already proven itself litigious with this sort of thing, and it’s hard to say how the team will keep it going. Private servers have a way of persevering for exactly as long as they can evade the wrong attention.
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