I never said that there would be no additional maintenance, overhead, or cost at all. I dismissed the claim that it would cost millions upon millions of dollars. Nice straw man.

To practice the basics of server-client communication I’ve written an HTTP(S) server from scratch, in a few different languages, and an email server as well. I have degrees in computer science and engineering.

> Every player, be it on an illegal private server or on their servers, is using this game engine to play.

> They just cracked old content and gave away for free (or for donations for a brief time) what Blizz charges others to play.

> There is no way to prove how many people would be willing to pay for a subscription to play legacy WoW unless such a thing actually happened, and we could see for sure. It’s very easy for people to be “interested” in something without actually following through and paying cold hard cash for it.

In a way, but it would start out as something which would be compatible with WoW clients. It would almost be like an entirely unique custom expansion. Oh and a lot of the content can remain the same, because while very specific structure of the story, etc might fall under copyright, the general concepts would not be…

> First off, you need to decide what you’re licensing. Which legacy version of WOW? Because the game engine has been updated with every expansion...

Alright. I apologize. Now can you show that I was wrong and respond to my position with anything reasonable? I mean, I can’t really put much faith in your knowledge of this topic, if you are not even aware that software firms release versions of their IP, under free to use licenses, all the time.

> 1. It’s not an older IP; it’s a current IP

> Well, seems to me you know an awful lot about game development and product cycle. Not to mention the business acumen of one who has been there and done that...

> And yes, it is their IP even if freeware.

> How many of those 150,000 plus would pay for monthly access?

> IP and trademark law requires them to actively protect them

> The biggest and only real issue with “hiring” those folks who spent years hosting and maintaining their own Vanilla server is that Blizzard would then be on the hook if that staff simply up and left.

Nope. But you know that the number of people who think a certain way is generally a lot higher than the number of signatures on a petition as well, right?

They were getting too much flack to not even put out an olive branch. So many different media outlets covered the petition, and one of the original lead developers of WoW even signed it. So far it’s gone nowhere.

> Vasshu, you are creating realities that don’t exist. 250,000 players, while not trivial, is a minority...

> All WOW maps are proprietary and the game engine uses .dbc to manage all their assets. Assuming you did manage to run it - Blizzard would have you by the balls for theft, trademark violations and copyright infringement. Any host would be DMCA’d and taken down or sued into poverty.

Petitions to get the government to stop murdering people don’t even get that level of support.

> Is it worth their time to maintain 150,000 people? It is worth it to split development and fix bugs, monitor the two games?