You CAN'T play the original WoW on the retail servers... they completely changed the world, the quests, the mechanics... nothing but name remains of the former. That is the issue.
And it is not your place or any other person's place to steal their ideas with regard to World of Warcraft. The right to how the game is today is only in the hands of one group: Blizzard. It isBlizzard's right to do what they will with their property. It is no one else's.
Even giving a big long mile here and assuming that these people "coded
their own version of vanilla" (and that really tests the bounds of
credulity), nothing else belongs to them -- not the NPCs, not the
quests, not the creatures in the bestiary, not even Azeroth itself.
That, in a nutshell, is theft of intellectual property.
MMOs are not meant to stay static entities. They are designed to move forward. Vanilla's time is over as far as Blizzard is concerned, at least for the time being. Blizzard is not going to tackle this issue until after Legion launches, if it ever does.
Not as cut and dried as you would like to believe. There are still many precedents to be written as yet when it comes to copyright law
That really doesn't get to the crux of it though, as while fair-use does have it's allowances, the biggest factor is C&D and the inevitable litigation that follows if the company wants to fight against that use.
That's where these Corporations like Blizzard win. Because while the little guy might have an argument under fair-use, they can't handle the financial burden of fighting it. so 9.9 times out of 10, they adhere to the C&D and abandon the project.
Look at MERP as an example, if you're unfamiliar, it was a mega LOTR mod for SKyrim that was essentially recreating middle earth and the LOTR story within Skyrim's creation kit, all original coding/art work yet still shutdown. Even though there was no product it would have been competing against. It was simply a mod.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
The assumption is always made that the 4-5M players currently involved in WoW are somehow less significant than those who might like to see vanilla servers. That's simply not so. People don't play live versions of WoW because they have to, but because, believe it or not, they want to. Not everyone was enamored of vanilla either.
Also often dismissed are some of the other amazing moments in WoW's history including what many others (see what I did there?) feel is the best expansion ever, Wrath of the Lich King.
The bottom line is that the expansions since vanilla and up through Cata have been very successful and even through WoD, players continue to play and not because they "don't know better" or never experienced vanilla, which is an elitist line of thought. Many people today play WoW because it's fun an enjoyable to them. Who's to say that vanilla is better or worse, for that matter. They are two different states of the same game, much as raw cookie dough is a different state than the baked thing. Both have good flavor but don't appeal to everyone.
With Legion's launch less than 6 months away, it's unlikely that anything will come out of all of this for at least another year.
ANd thats tottaly wrong, i still play WoD because i smartly bought many coints when they were around 28k(not they are 84 bloody hell).I will still play the game for some achievements, that wont change my opinion that this expansion is easily the worse sit in your garisson press the LFR button and sent some workers on jobs.
Actually Nostalgia is the only reason that made me buy the game, i hoped it would be good and i am long fan of Blizzard and their games, but at the end of the day(except the leveling expirence which was above average with great cinematics and flow)it sucked
I doubt there are 5 even 4 million currently my guild is almost empty since the 5.6 announcement like a year ago
THats the first time i will wait for reviews for legion before i buy it, Blizzard exploited my trust with WoD
I wanted to chime in on this discussion, I don't respond much but I don't agree with what this article says. I guess I am looking at it from a completely different perspective than most. I only played WOW during vanilla. I never really gained much interest in the expansions and preferred to play EQ/EQ2 back then.
I don't believe for one minute that opening Vanilla Servers will do much to destroy the future expansions. What everyone knows about the past expansions is that while some may have been good or even great, they don't give you the same feeling you had when playing Vanilla WoW. I've read a lot of responses and i've read a lot of articles that talk about the same thing and from the sound of it, Blizzard has already damaged their brand, irreparable damage at that. All I mean by that last comment is that they will never get back to the same numbers they had years ago. This is not only because Blizzard did great or less than stellar expansions but because the players have changed. Folks always talk about how there are no really good MMORPGs to play but everyone wants something different.
When I started playing EQ then WoW, everything MMO was pretty new. The feelings you got while playing those first games that started it all just can't be matched with the feelings you will get from any game. You know what to expect, what's going to happen (i.e. you will run around, you will level up, you will quest, maybe later you will group up and do some dungeons, then after that you raid). After this point, everyone gets bored, and it doesn't matter how difficult the dungeons/raids get, you won't ever find one that can't be figured out by someone then the information posted online. Someone somewhere will always find the information and use it, and there goes the fun.
I may be wrong, but I think that if Blizzard were to open Vanilla Servers, and kept releasing expansions, they would just have 2+ customer bases, and would possibly make more money which is what they are trying to do.
There are tons of way they could charge people and earn money from them if they play on a vanilla server because what they realy want is PROGRESSION. Ask them for 60$ to then transfer to TBC and then another 60$ once the progression is at Wotlk . . . and PROFIT
I really don't see how WoW is "dying", necessarily, as some people believe. The main reason it has subs declining is because they're messing up in terms of content pacing, and a great deal of those subs are going to be back in Legion guaranteed. If Legion's a great improvement and they fix their content issues, WoW should have a long life span yet to come. A Vanilla server right now would ruin any momentum they'd pick up with Legion, as well as show the player base they no longer have confidence in their current game.
Not to mention splitting up the community and making queue times and other crap worse.
A Vanilla server is just not a good idea at this point. It likely won't be a good idea for many years to come. Assuming Legion isn't as much of a Facebook game as WoD turned out to be (just Garrisons in general).
Blizzard is finally starting to crash and burn. It has nothing to do with vanilla or expansions. It has to do with fans are finally moving on. The game is old and people are finally getting tired of it when there are a hundred other MMO's out there and the game companies are finally growing a clue that WoW is NOT the be all end all of gaming.
How many people were playing on Nostalrius because they wanted a vanilla experience, and how many people were playing because they wanted a free game?
Reference SBFord's graph: if the majority of folks on private servers were merely concerned with playing for free, a server that included TBC and WotLK would, far and away, be more popular than a vanilla server. It simply wouldn't make sense to withhold all that extra content that was so popular at release if you simply wanted to play without a subscription.
I agree. People want to point to Nostalrius as a reason to open vanilla servers. It's not a good comparison if people were just looking to play for free. Maybe some wanted the vanilla experience, but it's hard to tell when it's muddied by all the free in the water.
If/when WoW goes free to play, maybe they'll implement a vanilla server and charge for it... just like Everquest did with progression servers after it went free to play.
If you see a young kid walking out into the middle of the street, should you let him. No, the right thing to do is to call him back and save him.
What if that kid is an arrogant, incorrigible little brat that just convinced an entire school of other kids to walk in the street before they were plowed by oncoming traffic?
I don't think there is any convincing them of anything. "And by the way, you don't want to do that either. You think you do, but you don't."
^ Vanilla is easier to script and less data overall. Successive layers of TBC and following just add exponential stuff to reverse engineer to get working.
I play on a private wow server. I have not voted on the petition. I would play on a Blizzard server if they offered legacy ones.
If you see a young kid walking out into the middle of the street, should you let him. No, the right thing to do is to call him back and save him.
What if that kid is an arrogant, incorrigible little brat that just convinced an entire school of other kids to walk in the street before they were plowed by oncoming traffic?
I don't think there is any convincing them of anything. "And by the way, you don't want to do that either. You think you do, but you don't."
/thinks outloud "hmm I guess I shouldn't let Dullahan babysit my kids this weekend"
^ Vanilla is easier to script and less data
overall. Successive layers of TBC and following just add exponential
stuff to reverse engineer to get working.
I play on a private wow server. I have not voted on the petition. I
would play on a Blizzard server if they offered legacy ones.
Mark Kern, the former lead of the Classic WoW team had this to say:
People have to consider the costs to undertake such a project. Maintaining and devoting resources to a classic server would just distract Blizzard. They would have to pay people to maintain the servers, hire more GMs, hire more support, etc. They are better off just focusing on the future.
People have to consider the costs to undertake such a project. Maintaining and devoting resources to a classic server would just distract Blizzard. They would have to pay people to maintain the servers, hire more GMs, hire more support, etc. They are better off just focusing on the future.
You think a company worth 19.8 billion dollars can't do this? Do they want to? No? I find it hard to believe there isn't one figure head up there now hoping to do something to fill this gap. Money aside wheres the "heres a gift to you community for all these years?"
People have to consider the costs to undertake such a project. Maintaining and devoting resources to a classic server would just distract Blizzard. They would have to pay people to maintain the servers, hire more GMs, hire more support, etc. They are better off just focusing on the future.
You think a company worth 19.8 billion dollars can't do this? Do they want to? No? I find it hard to believe there isn't one figure head up there now hoping to do something to fill this gap. Money aside wheres the "heres a gift to you community for all these years?"
People have to consider the costs to undertake such a project. Maintaining and devoting resources to a classic server would just distract Blizzard. They would have to pay people to maintain the servers, hire more GMs, hire more support, etc. They are better off just focusing on the future.
You think a company worth 19.8 billion dollars can't do this? Do they want to? No? I find it hard to believe there isn't one figure head up there now hoping to do something to fill this gap. Money aside wheres the "heres a gift to you community for all these years?"
You do realize that ATVI is valued at 19.8 .. Not Blizzard... Blizz is PART of Activision
You do realize that they have many many , investors to answer to ....
They severely need some kind of experience that caters to fans of the original game. I subbed, tried to like WoW again with WoD, and just unsubbed because it was just a solo fest waiting in an endless dungeon queue.
People have to consider the costs to undertake such a project. Maintaining and devoting resources to a classic server would just distract Blizzard. They would have to pay people to maintain the servers, hire more GMs, hire more support, etc. They are better off just focusing on the future.
You think a company worth 19.8 billion dollars can't do this? Do they want to? No? I find it hard to believe there isn't one figure head up there now hoping to do something to fill this gap. Money aside wheres the "heres a gift to you community for all these years?"
Let's all be real honest here, cost, not having the code, you think you do but you don't are all complete bullcrap as proven by private servers run by volunteer teams with no funding pulling in tens of thousands of players.
"You CAN'T buy ships for RL money." - MaxBacon
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Let's all be real honest here, cost, not having the code, you think you do but you don't are all complete bullcrap as proven by private servers run by volunteer teams with no funding pulling in tens of thousands of players.
So Blizzard should just tell their devs to work for free...?
Or how about telling their current customers that once legion is out there will be a delay of a extra year or more for the next expansion because 40-50k [mod edit] demands a vanilla server... I am sure that will go down smooth.
The beauty of people working for free is that they have no accountability. Everything can be excused by "but we are doing it for free"
Let's all be real honest here, cost, not having the code, you think you do but you don't are all complete bullcrap as proven by private servers run by volunteer teams with no funding pulling in tens of thousands of players.
So Blizzard should just tell their devs to work for free...?
Or how about telling their current customers that once legion is out there will be a delay of a extra year or more for the next expansion because 40-50k entitled brats demands a vanilla server... I am sure that will go down smooth.
The beauty of people working for free is that they have no accountability. Everything can be excused by "but we are doing it for free"
What like they can't afford to pay them?
You think it would only be 40-50k on official legacy servers? LOL that's funny.
What's next is it going to cost them millions to do too?
"You CAN'T buy ships for RL money." - MaxBacon
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Let's all be real honest here, cost, not having the code, you think you do but you don't are all complete bullcrap as proven by private servers run by volunteer teams with no funding pulling in tens of thousands of players.
So Blizzard should just tell their devs to work for free...?
Or how about telling their current customers that once legion is out there will be a delay of a extra year or more for the next expansion because 40-50k entitled brats demands a vanilla server... I am sure that will go down smooth.
The beauty of people working for free is that they have no accountability. Everything can be excused by "but we are doing it for free"
What like they can't afford to pay them?
You think it would only be 40-50k on official legacy servers? LOL that's funny.
What's next is it going to cost them millions to do too?
ofc they can afford to pay them... But that money will have to come out of some other part of WoW development. Because that is how budets work.
No i am sure there would be more people once the service is live... 40-50K is my estimate of how many of the people who signed the petition that will actually be willing to pay for said service.
Yeah... it might actually cost them millions to do... and here is why....
- A new dev team to make sure the code is solid and play well with the current servers. - A new support and QA team to make sure that said code is tested and not buggy. - A new or expanded CSR team to manage customer requests. - New servers and bandwidth allotment.
And then you add time to that as a multiplier. Or you cut the costs on it and instead make the main game even more content starved between expansions.
Let's all be real honest here, cost, not having the code, you think you do but you don't are all complete bullcrap as proven by private servers run by volunteer teams with no funding pulling in tens of thousands of players.
So Blizzard should just tell their devs to work for free...?
Or how about telling their current customers that once legion is out there will be a delay of a extra year or more for the next expansion because 40-50k entitled brats demands a vanilla server... I am sure that will go down smooth.
The beauty of people working for free is that they have no accountability. Everything can be excused by "but we are doing it for free"
What like they can't afford to pay them?
You think it would only be 40-50k on official legacy servers? LOL that's funny.
What's next is it going to cost them millions to do too?
ofc they can afford to pay them... But that money will have to come out of some other part of WoW development. Because that is how budets work.
No i am sure there would be more people once the service is live... 40-50K is my estimate of how many of the people who signed the petition that will actually be willing to pay for said service.
Yeah... it might actually cost them millions to do... and here is why....
- A new dev team to make sure the code is solid and play well with the current servers. - A new support and QA team to make sure that said code is tested and not buggy. - A new or expanded CSR team to manage customer requests. - New servers and bandwidth allotment.
And then you add time to that as a multiplier. Or you cut the costs on it and instead make the main game even more content starved between expansions.
Let's all be real honest here, cost, not having the code, you think you do but you don't are all complete bullcrap as proven by private servers run by volunteer teams with no funding pulling in tens of thousands of players.
So Blizzard should just tell their devs to work for free...?
Or how about telling their current customers that once legion is out there will be a delay of a extra year or more for the next expansion because 40-50k entitled brats demands a vanilla server... I am sure that will go down smooth.
The beauty of people working for free is that they have no accountability. Everything can be excused by "but we are doing it for free"
What like they can't afford to pay them?
You think it would only be 40-50k on official legacy servers? LOL that's funny.
What's next is it going to cost them millions to do too?
ofc they can afford to pay them... But that money will have to come out of some other part of WoW development. Because that is how budets work.
No i am sure there would be more people once the service is live... 40-50K is my estimate of how many of the people who signed the petition that will actually be willing to pay for said service.
Yeah... it might actually cost them millions to do... and here is why....
- A new dev team to make sure the code is solid and play well with the current servers. - A new support and QA team to make sure that said code is tested and not buggy. - A new or expanded CSR team to manage customer requests. - New servers and bandwidth allotment.
And then you add time to that as a multiplier. Or you cut the costs on it and instead make the main game even more content starved between expansions.
Comments
That's where these Corporations like Blizzard win. Because while the little guy might have an argument under fair-use, they can't handle the financial burden of fighting it. so 9.9 times out of 10, they adhere to the C&D and abandon the project.
Look at MERP as an example, if you're unfamiliar, it was a mega LOTR mod for SKyrim that was essentially recreating middle earth and the LOTR story within Skyrim's creation kit, all original coding/art work yet still shutdown. Even though there was no product it would have been competing against. It was simply a mod.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
ANd thats tottaly wrong, i still play WoD because i smartly bought many coints when they were around 28k(not they are 84 bloody hell).I will still play the game for some achievements, that wont change my opinion that this expansion is easily the worse sit in your garisson press the LFR button and sent some workers on jobs.
Actually Nostalgia is the only reason that made me buy the game, i hoped it would be good and i am long fan of Blizzard and their games, but at the end of the day(except the leveling expirence which was above average with great cinematics and flow)it sucked
I doubt there are 5 even 4 million currently my guild is almost empty since the 5.6 announcement like a year ago
THats the first time i will wait for reviews for legion before i buy it, Blizzard exploited my trust with WoD
I don't believe for one minute that opening Vanilla Servers will do much to destroy the future expansions. What everyone knows about the past expansions is that while some may have been good or even great, they don't give you the same feeling you had when playing Vanilla WoW. I've read a lot of responses and i've read a lot of articles that talk about the same thing and from the sound of it, Blizzard has already damaged their brand, irreparable damage at that. All I mean by that last comment is that they will never get back to the same numbers they had years ago. This is not only because Blizzard did great or less than stellar expansions but because the players have changed. Folks always talk about how there are no really good MMORPGs to play but everyone wants something different.
When I started playing EQ then WoW, everything MMO was pretty new. The feelings you got while playing those first games that started it all just can't be matched with the feelings you will get from any game. You know what to expect, what's going to happen (i.e. you will run around, you will level up, you will quest, maybe later you will group up and do some dungeons, then after that you raid). After this point, everyone gets bored, and it doesn't matter how difficult the dungeons/raids get, you won't ever find one that can't be figured out by someone then the information posted online. Someone somewhere will always find the information and use it, and there goes the fun.
I may be wrong, but I think that if Blizzard were to open Vanilla Servers, and kept releasing expansions, they would just have 2+ customer bases, and would possibly make more money which is what they are trying to do.
Not to mention splitting up the community and making queue times and other crap worse.
A Vanilla server is just not a good idea at this point. It likely won't be a good idea for many years to come. Assuming Legion isn't as much of a Facebook game as WoD turned out to be (just Garrisons in general).
I agree. People want to point to Nostalrius as a reason to open vanilla servers. It's not a good comparison if people were just looking to play for free. Maybe some wanted the vanilla experience, but it's hard to tell when it's muddied by all the free in the water.
If/when WoW goes free to play, maybe they'll implement a vanilla server and charge for it... just like Everquest did with progression servers after it went free to play.
What if that kid is an arrogant, incorrigible little brat that just convinced an entire school of other kids to walk in the street before they were plowed by oncoming traffic?
I don't think there is any convincing them of anything. "And by the way, you don't want to do that either. You think you do, but you don't."
I play on a private wow server. I have not voted on the petition. I would play on a Blizzard server if they offered legacy ones.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
Mark Kern, the former lead of the Classic WoW team had this to say:
It is a lot cheaper than creating an expansion.
You do realize that they have many many , investors to answer to ....
The best part is the 'wounds are still fresh.' LOL wow.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/20743054405?page=1#new-post
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/So Blizzard should just tell their devs to work for free...?
Or how about telling their current customers that once legion is out there will be a delay of a extra year or more for the next expansion because 40-50k [mod edit] demands a vanilla server... I am sure that will go down smooth.
The beauty of people working for free is that they have no accountability. Everything can be excused by "but we are doing it for free"
This have been a good conversation
You think it would only be 40-50k on official legacy servers? LOL that's funny.
What's next is it going to cost them millions to do too?
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/No i am sure there would be more people once the service is live... 40-50K is my estimate of how many of the people who signed the petition that will actually be willing to pay for said service.
Yeah... it might actually cost them millions to do... and here is why....
- A new dev team to make sure the code is solid and play well with the current servers.
- A new support and QA team to make sure that said code is tested and not buggy.
- A new or expanded CSR team to manage customer requests.
- New servers and bandwidth allotment.
And then you add time to that as a multiplier. Or you cut the costs on it and instead make the main game even more content starved between expansions.
This have been a good conversation
This have been a good conversation
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.