Just background in case you don't know: Turtle WoW tried to turn Classic World of Warcraft into a Roguelike, but in doing so wound up creating a bunch of new mechanics, and a gameplay loop that was quite unique even relative to other Roguelikes.
So my position on this is; two things can be true at the same time:
- Turtle WoW violated Blizzard's copyright, tried to charge money for some services, and Blizzard are well within their legal (and moral) rights to shut that down.
- Turtle WoW is more compelling than anything Blizzard has done with Classic WoW in years, and they should be commended for that.
So it was foreseeable, just a shame for what was lost.
How is that supposed to work when the main product is nostalgia? It's a mod for people who think the first-party expansions aren't true to the core of the original game - how could an independent game with completely new IP ever have the same draw?
You really can't compare this to something like DotA, where the original engine and IP was basically set dressing for the new game built within it. People were primarily interested in the mechanics - which is why DotA-the-game and League of Legends were able to become so popular.
No many hit games started as mods. League of Legends is the one that immediately jumps to mind, but I know there are many more coming from Quake and Doom mods etc.
Why not just buy it then? It reminds me of Valve’s treatment of Black Mesa, which made the community love the company even more. It’d be hilariously easy for Blizzard to spend some money on the thing and just buy the devs out, fans love you for it and it builds good will with a fanbase. Corporations can’t see past the legal aspect of things I guess.
HL's engine GoldDrc was originally a mod for Quake. Team Fortress Classic was based on a quake mod. Counterstrike was a HL mod they bought out. Portal was a student game they bought. Dota 2 was based on a WC3 map. Left 4 Dead was a mod made by Turtle Rock while working on CS:CZ (so, yet again a mod, although a mod based on their own engine this time and build in house). Underlords was based on a Dota 2 mod.
Deadlock is original, but based on characters and lore from the game they made from the WC3 map.
Deadlock and L4D are arguably the only true original creations.
Valve knows their bread is buttered by outside creation using tools and platforms they can provide and then fold in if it catches their attention.
I feel like every large public corporation inevitably turns into a rent seeking parasite. How do we build a system that has more calves and fewer blizzards? How do we incentivize that?
I think you're confusing this with Ascension which is a different server. Turtle was more like Classic WoW but with additional content that fits in as if the official expansions had never existed. So basically it's like Old School Runescape for WoW.
That's one of the things that Blizzard does so bad and private servers try to solve, which is previous expansion content:
Let's say you loved playing Battle for Azeroth. Later Blizzard launches Shadowlands, the content for BfA gets irrelevant, the raids are not doable anymore at the same difficult, the power creep feeds in. Even if you buy the expansion just to get the “feel” on how it was, it's impossible.
MMOs like GW2 and even SWTOR does it way better, in GW2 content from Path of Fire is still relevant in the gameplay of the current expansion, while their PvE/PvP content is done by all players.
I feel Blizzard should just keep per expansion servers up and people can play “over and over again” the same expansion as much as they like.
FFXIV's level/stat sync system is also pretty cool for keeping the older stuff playable long past its original release, players get levels and stats and skills scaled down to the max level appropriate for the content
4-player dungeons still end up being a bit of a faceroll, but it's definitely possible to wipe on the 8-player bosses if mechanics are not observed
So it's similar to Defence of the Ancients that resulted in DotA and other MOBAs. It wonder if they'll be able to create a version of this with the new mechanics/gameplay loop but with different art/assets.
I am curious, can you elaborate more on these Roguelike features and mechanics. Its up for 1 more month, i might be interested in trying them out before it shuts down.
> Blizzard are well within their legal (and moral) rights to shut that down.
Legal rights, sure. Moral rights, you're gonna have to explain yourself, because I see no moral objection here. Culture advances through remixes, and while we can grant artists some exclusive period to profit through their work, we're not morally obliged to let them have a stranglehold on culture forever. People of my generation might not want to hear this, but Classic WoW is a retro game. We, here in 2026, are as far from WoW vanilla as WoW vanilla was from Ultima II. A year from now, replace Ultima II with Ultima I. A year from then, replace that with motherfucking Rogue itself! Morally speaking, Blizzard^W Activision^W Microsoft can go eat their own ass.
Oh yeah, I remember when they abandoned it for years, third party servers revived it, Blizzard realized they can make money off it and shut the third party servers down.
Turtle WoW was also porting their fork to Unreal Engine 5 [1] but that got cancelled ~6 months ago due to a Blizzard lawsuit.
For anyone unfamiliar with WoW, private servers have been a thing for most of WoW's history. It's unclear to me where the source code came from. I've heard different stories (eg from Chinese servers) and also that it was a greenfield development reverse-engineered from the client. All of this was a copyright violation of course and Blizzard have shut down such servers in waves.
WoW originally released in 2004 and has changed every ~2 years with an expansion and the game now is vastly different to what it was originally, which is now called "vanilla". In the 2010s there was a lot of people calling for what became "classic WoW". Most private servers used an early version of the game (either vanilla or one of the first 2 expansions). A lot of people argued that game was more fun at that time and all the changes since have made the game worse.
This issue just didn't die and the game director was famously asked (by a still unidifentied fan AFAIK) if there were any plans to re-release the original game and he famously responded with "you think you do but you don't" at Blizzcon 2013 [2].
This just wouldn't die. There was one particularly famous private server called Nostalrius that got shut down by Blizzard but Blizzard ended up bringing that team in and by 2017, Blizzard announced Classic WoW [3], which launched in 2019 and for several years seemed to have more players than the current version of the game (called "retail") although that's tapered off now.
So Turtle WoW fit into a long history of wanting to play the original game. There's also a movement called "Classic+", which is to fork from the vanilla version of the game and make changes from that. Turtle WoW probably fit into the Classic+ model.
I mean they use the same game client and assets / quests on the server. It is stolen material. On top of that you can pay for it, they have a business model based on intelectual property from another compagny.
The people who built Blizzard are no longer at Blizzard. Blizzard is a kin to Google now. Looks similar from the outside, completely different from the inside.
I ran a private server years ago. Two things people in this thread are getting wrong:
The engineering is way harder than anyone gives credit for. You're reverse engineering a server protocol from the client binary, writing your own spell systems (thousands of spells, each with edge cases), pathing, instancing, combat mechanics. Then scaling it for a few thousand concurrent players on hardware you're paying for out of pocket. Turtle WoW went further and built new raids, zones, races on top of all that. That's not modding, that's game development without any of the tools the original team had.
The "they made millions" framing is always misleading. You start as a hobby, players show up, hosting costs get real, you take donations to keep it running, and at some point your paypal has six figures running through it over a few years. None of that is profit, it's servers and bandwidth and people helping keep the thing alive. But in the lawsuit it gets presented as revenue from a commercial enterprise.
Blizzard is right to protect their IP. But calling this a simple piracy operation misses what actually happened.
Sounds very similar to The Heroes Journey, which was a heavily modified EverQuest emulation server that got destroyed in court by Daybreak Games, the current owners/operators of EQ.
THJ was sort of like arcade mode EQ and became wildly popular (relatively, for such an old game) and started making real money off donations and in-game transactions. They likely flew too close to the sun by making money off it, but it demonstrates that there is real creative opportunity with these old IPs if only given the chance. See also the rise of classic and progression servers for the likes of EQ & WoW, which also started as a community emu effort but have now been officially launched and monetized by the IP owners.
And now Daybreak is launching their own THJ-alike but without any of the community goodwill so we'll see how that goes.
I'm just over here holding out hope that some aspect of the agreement includes Blizzard taking control of the many assets the Turtle WoW devs created, and that they use those to make lots of new content for the upcoming Classic+, whatever that ends up being.
hobbyist server turned commercial enterprise, according to court documents Blizzard claims AFKCraft Ltd. (Turtle WoW) made millions of dollars over 2018–2026 period.
but then how is PokeMMO still operating ? Weren't they both using game assets and creating an emulator essentially? Or did Turtle step out of bounds? It's a legally gray area so hard to find more details.
PokeMMO does not include any game assets itself. It is also not an emulator but its own engine. You’ll need to obtain the ROMs from elsewhere and place them in the appropriate folder so that the PokeMMO client can extract the files. In many countries it is legal to recreate a game as long as you do not use any code or assets from the original. The player is the one committing copyright infringement if they do not dump the ROM from their own cartridge.
I see. What about modifying a memory of a loaded ROM with like hex codes? Is that what PokeMMO is doing as well to change gameplay like show another player's location and inventory?
>if they do not dump the ROM from their own cartridge
That is a common myth. It can even be more illegal in the case of DS games as you also break the DMCA by circumventing the DS's protection scheme of their games.
Nintendo is probably THE most aggressive company in the industry in terms of going after people for using their IP in unauthorized ways. They don't have a blind eye.
Perhaps they want to leave Russia at some point in the future and being wanted by the US government for not respecting a judge's order would make that problematic.
The irony is that the Turtle team released what was probably the best version of WoW, ever. Blizzard had to get it shutdown because it was fucking embarrassing that a fan project more artistically cohesive and more fun to play than anything Blizzard could spit out in decades despite having virtually unlimited resources.
Obviously, the most competent people at Blizzard are lawyers. That Turtle would eventually shutdown was expected.
No, Blizzard had to get it shut down because they're greedy bean counters. They could have spent less money than they spent on legal fees to hire the team and had them produce an even better version, but why do that when you can destroy things and replace them with mediocre slop instead?
Just background in case you don't know: Turtle WoW tried to turn Classic World of Warcraft into a Roguelike, but in doing so wound up creating a bunch of new mechanics, and a gameplay loop that was quite unique even relative to other Roguelikes.
So my position on this is; two things can be true at the same time:
- Turtle WoW violated Blizzard's copyright, tried to charge money for some services, and Blizzard are well within their legal (and moral) rights to shut that down.
- Turtle WoW is more compelling than anything Blizzard has done with Classic WoW in years, and they should be commended for that.
So it was foreseeable, just a shame for what was lost.
Many hit games originated as mods. If the Turtle WoW team really are on to something, they should pursue it as an independent game.
How is that supposed to work when the main product is nostalgia? It's a mod for people who think the first-party expansions aren't true to the core of the original game - how could an independent game with completely new IP ever have the same draw?
You really can't compare this to something like DotA, where the original engine and IP was basically set dressing for the new game built within it. People were primarily interested in the mechanics - which is why DotA-the-game and League of Legends were able to become so popular.
I don't think this is true. I think what you may be thinking of is many hit games did not create their own game engine.
No many hit games started as mods. League of Legends is the one that immediately jumps to mind, but I know there are many more coming from Quake and Doom mods etc.
Famously Counter Strike as well.
You don't need to make your own engine to make a hot game from a mod though?
Ever heard of Dota 2? PUBG? Team Fortress 2?
Why not just buy it then? It reminds me of Valve’s treatment of Black Mesa, which made the community love the company even more. It’d be hilariously easy for Blizzard to spend some money on the thing and just buy the devs out, fans love you for it and it builds good will with a fanbase. Corporations can’t see past the legal aspect of things I guess.
You understand that the people playing Turtle don't pay for it, they don't use the official game because they don't want to pay.
That seems to conflict with the idea that Turtle's problem was that they charged money for services related to the game.
They will could have shut down the free service but brought the new gameplay to retail.
Valve aren't owned by private equity and other giant corporations so they make good decisions and do things fans like.
A lot of their entire platform is built on mods they've bought and turned into proper 1st class games (cs, dota, Garys mod etc)
Their entire company owes its history to mods.
HL's engine GoldDrc was originally a mod for Quake. Team Fortress Classic was based on a quake mod. Counterstrike was a HL mod they bought out. Portal was a student game they bought. Dota 2 was based on a WC3 map. Left 4 Dead was a mod made by Turtle Rock while working on CS:CZ (so, yet again a mod, although a mod based on their own engine this time and build in house). Underlords was based on a Dota 2 mod.
Deadlock is original, but based on characters and lore from the game they made from the WC3 map.
Deadlock and L4D are arguably the only true original creations.
Valve knows their bread is buttered by outside creation using tools and platforms they can provide and then fold in if it catches their attention.
I feel like every large public corporation inevitably turns into a rent seeking parasite. How do we build a system that has more calves and fewer blizzards? How do we incentivize that?
I can imagine naked licensing being a factor.
I don't think we needed any more proofs that blizzard is ran by actual assholes, but here be are.
I think you're confusing this with Ascension which is a different server. Turtle was more like Classic WoW but with additional content that fits in as if the official expansions had never existed. So basically it's like Old School Runescape for WoW.
That's one of the things that Blizzard does so bad and private servers try to solve, which is previous expansion content:
Let's say you loved playing Battle for Azeroth. Later Blizzard launches Shadowlands, the content for BfA gets irrelevant, the raids are not doable anymore at the same difficult, the power creep feeds in. Even if you buy the expansion just to get the “feel” on how it was, it's impossible.
MMOs like GW2 and even SWTOR does it way better, in GW2 content from Path of Fire is still relevant in the gameplay of the current expansion, while their PvE/PvP content is done by all players.
I feel Blizzard should just keep per expansion servers up and people can play “over and over again” the same expansion as much as they like.
FFXIV's level/stat sync system is also pretty cool for keeping the older stuff playable long past its original release, players get levels and stats and skills scaled down to the max level appropriate for the content
4-player dungeons still end up being a bit of a faceroll, but it's definitely possible to wipe on the 8-player bosses if mechanics are not observed
So it's similar to Defence of the Ancients that resulted in DotA and other MOBAs. It wonder if they'll be able to create a version of this with the new mechanics/gameplay loop but with different art/assets.
Yeah, that seems like the logical next step here.
What did they do that was different from other roguelikes?
I am curious, can you elaborate more on these Roguelike features and mechanics. Its up for 1 more month, i might be interested in trying them out before it shuts down.
Blizzard should’ve offered the team making Turtle a job, and payed them to develop the next big WoW game.
Unfortunately blizzard is not Valve.
> Blizzard are well within their legal (and moral) rights to shut that down.
Legal rights, sure. Moral rights, you're gonna have to explain yourself, because I see no moral objection here. Culture advances through remixes, and while we can grant artists some exclusive period to profit through their work, we're not morally obliged to let them have a stranglehold on culture forever. People of my generation might not want to hear this, but Classic WoW is a retro game. We, here in 2026, are as far from WoW vanilla as WoW vanilla was from Ultima II. A year from now, replace Ultima II with Ultima I. A year from then, replace that with motherfucking Rogue itself! Morally speaking, Blizzard^W Activision^W Microsoft can go eat their own ass.
WoW vanilla is being sold right now by Blizzard themselves, under a subscription model.
Oh yeah, I remember when they abandoned it for years, third party servers revived it, Blizzard realized they can make money off it and shut the third party servers down.
Turtle WoW was also porting their fork to Unreal Engine 5 [1] but that got cancelled ~6 months ago due to a Blizzard lawsuit.
For anyone unfamiliar with WoW, private servers have been a thing for most of WoW's history. It's unclear to me where the source code came from. I've heard different stories (eg from Chinese servers) and also that it was a greenfield development reverse-engineered from the client. All of this was a copyright violation of course and Blizzard have shut down such servers in waves.
WoW originally released in 2004 and has changed every ~2 years with an expansion and the game now is vastly different to what it was originally, which is now called "vanilla". In the 2010s there was a lot of people calling for what became "classic WoW". Most private servers used an early version of the game (either vanilla or one of the first 2 expansions). A lot of people argued that game was more fun at that time and all the changes since have made the game worse.
This issue just didn't die and the game director was famously asked (by a still unidifentied fan AFAIK) if there were any plans to re-release the original game and he famously responded with "you think you do but you don't" at Blizzcon 2013 [2].
This just wouldn't die. There was one particularly famous private server called Nostalrius that got shut down by Blizzard but Blizzard ended up bringing that team in and by 2017, Blizzard announced Classic WoW [3], which launched in 2019 and for several years seemed to have more players than the current version of the game (called "retail") although that's tapered off now.
So Turtle WoW fit into a long history of wanting to play the original game. There's also a movement called "Classic+", which is to fork from the vanilla version of the game and make changes from that. Turtle WoW probably fit into the Classic+ model.
[1]: https://turtlecraft.gg/remastered
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghnLIc8EFIM
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUSRkBwQdc8
I mean they use the same game client and assets / quests on the server. It is stolen material. On top of that you can pay for it, they have a business model based on intelectual property from another compagny.
Couldn't be more clear violation from a legal standpoint.
Though its quite sad that the community had more creativity (and engineering talent) to develop classic(+) wow.
Everything Blizzard now touches is bland, lacks soul, or is straight up bad.
The people who built Blizzard are no longer at Blizzard. Blizzard is a kin to Google now. Looks similar from the outside, completely different from the inside.
I ran a private server years ago. Two things people in this thread are getting wrong:
The engineering is way harder than anyone gives credit for. You're reverse engineering a server protocol from the client binary, writing your own spell systems (thousands of spells, each with edge cases), pathing, instancing, combat mechanics. Then scaling it for a few thousand concurrent players on hardware you're paying for out of pocket. Turtle WoW went further and built new raids, zones, races on top of all that. That's not modding, that's game development without any of the tools the original team had.
The "they made millions" framing is always misleading. You start as a hobby, players show up, hosting costs get real, you take donations to keep it running, and at some point your paypal has six figures running through it over a few years. None of that is profit, it's servers and bandwidth and people helping keep the thing alive. But in the lawsuit it gets presented as revenue from a commercial enterprise.
Blizzard is right to protect their IP. But calling this a simple piracy operation misses what actually happened.
Sounds very similar to The Heroes Journey, which was a heavily modified EverQuest emulation server that got destroyed in court by Daybreak Games, the current owners/operators of EQ.
THJ was sort of like arcade mode EQ and became wildly popular (relatively, for such an old game) and started making real money off donations and in-game transactions. They likely flew too close to the sun by making money off it, but it demonstrates that there is real creative opportunity with these old IPs if only given the chance. See also the rise of classic and progression servers for the likes of EQ & WoW, which also started as a community emu effort but have now been officially launched and monetized by the IP owners.
And now Daybreak is launching their own THJ-alike but without any of the community goodwill so we'll see how that goes.
Positioning for the Classic+ announcement in November.
I'm just over here holding out hope that some aspect of the agreement includes Blizzard taking control of the many assets the Turtle WoW devs created, and that they use those to make lots of new content for the upcoming Classic+, whatever that ends up being.
hobbyist server turned commercial enterprise, according to court documents Blizzard claims AFKCraft Ltd. (Turtle WoW) made millions of dollars over 2018–2026 period.
but then how is PokeMMO still operating ? Weren't they both using game assets and creating an emulator essentially? Or did Turtle step out of bounds? It's a legally gray area so hard to find more details.
PokeMMO does not include any game assets itself. It is also not an emulator but its own engine. You’ll need to obtain the ROMs from elsewhere and place them in the appropriate folder so that the PokeMMO client can extract the files. In many countries it is legal to recreate a game as long as you do not use any code or assets from the original. The player is the one committing copyright infringement if they do not dump the ROM from their own cartridge.
I see. What about modifying a memory of a loaded ROM with like hex codes? Is that what PokeMMO is doing as well to change gameplay like show another player's location and inventory?
They aren't modifying the ROM. They've rebuilt all the mechanics from scratch. The ROMs are only there for the graphical assets.
>if they do not dump the ROM from their own cartridge
That is a common myth. It can even be more illegal in the case of DS games as you also break the DMCA by circumventing the DS's protection scheme of their games.
Nintendo/TPC just turns a blind eye, i suppose
Nintendo is probably THE most aggressive company in the industry in terms of going after people for using their IP in unauthorized ways. They don't have a blind eye.
WoW servers existed for years, it's funny blizzard still tries after this many years.
Do they still exist? I remember spending a few weekends on them back when I was 13 or so and couldn't afford a subscription.
It’s almost as if their sales are plummeting and they’re desperate or something.
Best way to solve that is to waste more money on lawsuits
I have no idea why it is shutting down if the operator is living in Russia.
Perhaps they want to leave Russia at some point in the future and being wanted by the US government for not respecting a judge's order would make that problematic.
Blizzard should’ve just shut down. It’s lived long enough to see itself become a monster.
The irony is that the Turtle team released what was probably the best version of WoW, ever. Blizzard had to get it shutdown because it was fucking embarrassing that a fan project more artistically cohesive and more fun to play than anything Blizzard could spit out in decades despite having virtually unlimited resources.
Obviously, the most competent people at Blizzard are lawyers. That Turtle would eventually shutdown was expected.
Hats off to them. I had fun.
No, Blizzard had to get it shut down because they're greedy bean counters. They could have spent less money than they spent on legal fees to hire the team and had them produce an even better version, but why do that when you can destroy things and replace them with mediocre slop instead?