Warcraft fans' fury at Blizzard over server closure
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444122
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11448908
What is interesting is that they will apparently be releasing their work as open source:
"With that said, as far as we are concerned, this amazing journey would not have been possible without the contribution of the open source World of Warcraft community, especially those who were behind MaNGOS. We believe that we significantly improved their code base, with several interesting algorithms (for example the ongoing work on clustering). For now, our source code may be release 30th of April (educational purposes only) in the hope that it will be useful, and that it may help developers understand how a big project like ours was handled from the inside."
(from https://forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=43600)
Apparently there were ritualistic suicides of in-game characters on the server in light of the news, among other things: https://reddit.com/r/wow/comments/4e6zee/nostalrius_memories...
It reminds me of watching an MMO I loved, The Realm Online, die slowly. It's still technically around, but development has all but ceased and the player count is ~25. IIRC it was purchased by a family who eventually let all the programmers and artists go.
I also loved all the boards an things you could do on UT, teleport disk and jumpboots for flag running etc.
(1)By calling it a realm instead of a server I suppose I out myself as a former WoW GM.
(2) Fairly typical player density early in Vanilla (in an atypical and hillarious situation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ_WdYvwrDA
Their second server was also reaching ~5,000 players at the time they were shut down.
I have always thought of source as either open (with many flavors of licensing) or closed.
"Closed source" is the standard term. Since you seen to not like that term, you could go with "proprietary".
Your definitions go contrary to the understandings and usages of every non-F/OSS person on the Internet.
For example, both "closed source" and "proprietary" are used to mean source-code-not-available in gaming circles.
Perhaps the open source movements should seek intuitive definitions of terms rather than invent vague nomenclature that only makes them unable to communicate with normal users.
It's unavoidable that people will be confused about terms outside their area of expertise. Since you mentioned gamers: I shudder at the vast multitude of confusing terms the various gamer communities use, like for example in WoW.
However, I think you're overstating your case: I suspect few gamers, if any, will confuse leaked source code or code which you're not allowed to use in any way as "open source". I don't expect them to undestand every nuance, but surely even they understand source code you're not allowed to run or modify is not "open" in any meaningful interpretation of the term :)
"Run" or "modify" are not requisites in the common understanding of "open source"; legality of viewing is. "Open" to them usually means it can be distributed (to them) and read without breaking the law.
Says who? The Pope? Richard Stallman? Bernie Sanders? Some random self-appointed authority figure who goes by the name "the_af" on Hacker News?
Whose name is on the trademark application?
> Perhaps the open source movements should seek intuitive definitions of terms rather than invent vague nomenclature that only makes them unable to communicate with normal users.
The "open source movements" he/she mentioned have very technical definitions of what open source means (of varying degree, of course, but have you tried reading the GPL? Do you think it's non-technical?). Of all the valid criticisms you could throw at them, "vague nomenclature" is not one. Their definitions of open source may be difficult to communicate precisely because they are very technical, not because they are "vague".
I think "who" was quite clear in this context. Do you disagree?
Its not just Foss people, its common knowledge among technical people.
I've heard the term "published source" used when trying hard not to step in this particular pile.
> Linux is “open source” software meaning, simply, that anyone can get copies of its source code files.
And the state of Kansas:
> Make use of open-source software (OSS). OSS is software for which the source code is freely and publicly available, though the specific licensing agreements vary as to what one is allowed to do with that code.
For me, the reason for the confusion comes from (1) the ambiguous use of the word "open" (visible) vs "closed" (hidden) and (2) the fact that I've personally never seen until now a project that was "source available" but not open to modify under some license, so I haven't had to deal with the distinction.
(And since I'm a little insulted by your incredulity that a technical person could believe that to be true, FWIW, it's common knowledge among English speakers when to use "its" and "it's".)
> However, the obvious meaning for the expression “open source software”—and the one most people seem to think it means—is “You can look at the source code.”
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Open-sour...
Note this is unrelated to the many incompatibilities between the various open source licenses.
Also see: Microsoft's "Shared Source", an example of something that may look like open source but (with some exceptions) isn't. Disclaimer: no idea if this still exists, now that Microsoft seems to be truly embracing open source for some of its software.
However, my guess (and that's all it is) is that in this case, the authors aren't actually interested in enforcing such a restriction, but rather added the "educational use only" line as part of an attempt to avoid any liability for subsequent use of the code.
I bet Blizzard will go after they OSS version too, just like they did with bnetd.
Maybe they could even claim patents on the protocol? Who knows.
WoW currently costs $15/mo. Blizzard is in a much better position to have numbers for this, but let's say that the existence of the free server might have discouraged 50 K people from having subscriptions who otherwise would have. Assuming 50K, then that's a monthly loss of $750,000 in revenue; or if all 150K did not subscribe but would have, it's $2,250,000/mo. Given that servers are relatively cheap, probably a good portion of that would be profit.
The people who say that the servers do not threaten blizzard are naïve or at worst disingenuous. They threaten Blizzard exactly as much as they discourage people from having wow subscriptions whenever they would otherwise. A player who spends a lot of time on a private server is probably not going to see a lot of value in keeping their WoW account active, after all. Given the way network effects work, a popular server could have a runaway success effect (people tend to play where a critical mass of their friends play). Furthermore, it is probably quite difficult to convince a player to reactivate their account once the successfully play for a while on a private server and have friends there; the server is probably very sticky.
Rather than asking Blizzard to bring back old versions of the game, perhaps Blizzard should embrace a model where players can run their own servers and list them in a public directory, such the players still require a subscription in order to play. And perhaps the server gets song cut of the profit from players who predominantly play on their server, like 10%. Perhaps this could align the interest of Blizzard and server hosts too much greater degree. The analog of a gameplay mod in other games is more like a custom server in wow, and think of all the good that's come from mods like DOTA. There are still a number of reasons why Blizard would not want to do this, such as the fact they lose control of customer experience, but maybe it's closer to a workable model.
Who are you kidding? It will never be public domain.
7 millions+ people are not paying Blizzard already (me included) because the game they sell now it's not the one I subscribed years ago. It is not an MMO nowadays, you just hang around in your personal space, click to get in instances, click to get a selfie, click to buy some gold. I miss the community and the sense of exploration, and private servers, especially those on Vanilla or TBC, are the only ones giving me that feeling.
It's years the community ask Blizzard to give us Vanilla/TBC servers, and let us play the game we love. Most of us will pay an higher sub if required, so it's not being cheap.
Closing Nostalrius will not bring more people in retail, but the opposite. Most of the people I know are dropping their subscriptions BECAUSE of the action Blizzard has taken. Instead of solving the cause, they are sticking they head in the sands, telling us we don't know what we want, that they know better. Well, numbers don't lie, and the game is empty.
So yeah, good work Blizzard, you managed to kill the biggest game in history. And they could make a lot of money with a couple of legacy servers. Those have no costs, except for limited maintenance, and the game development has paid itself years ago. So it is virtually pure profit.
Sorry for nitpicking, but ancient versions of the game client don't really work so well on modern hardware. Also, we don't know how much the server infrastructure has changed since then. It's not that easy.
The downward momentum looks crushing. The few big temporary peaks over the last few years vanished immediately and it reverted back to decline as though they'd never happened. So people jump in for a look when there's something big happening, but _none_ of them (statistically speaking) stay afterwards. No wonder they're hammering down hard on anything that might draw away subscribers.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-world-of...
Edit: It just occurred to me that even given this, perhaps Blizzard is doing the commercially adept thing. Suppose decline for a game like this is inevitable. In which case switching to a model that extracts maximum revenue from players at the cost of long term viability might be the best way to capture value. Cynical? Me?
In the years since WoW came out Blizzard came out with a centralized authentication, billing, and support system known as Battle.Net. It took them quite a few patches over 2-3 expansions to integrate that system fully into WoW and a not insignificant effort would be required to port that over to the old game client, especially if they wanted to give it the same level of polish in integration that they're known for applying to their games.
Second, patch 2.0.1 (the Burning Crusade pre-patch) brought in a massive amount of changes designed solely to combat a growing player trend at the time - the use of addons to automate playing the game (no not bots, actual addons like Healbot) - through the concept of protected functions. And this was just a small portion of their overall effort in combating automation/bots. The player base would cry foul if they brought out legacy servers and didn't keep the anti-bot measures, Warden included, up-to-date. They tried for years to fight those problems head-on only and are only barely keeping up in the fight against Glider and its brethren. Log onto retail WoW nowadays and run non-100 dungeons and you'll easily run into quite a few sophisticated bots that'll run the dungeon with you, fully programmed to handle all the dungeon mechanics [1]. There's also plenty of people running bots with level 90 (from the character boost) druids farming dungeons like Stonecore, Gundrak, and the like. It's kind of hilariously sad seeing a chain of them all following the same pre-programmed path in the world, especially when they take advantage of how client movement works in the game to fly straight through obstructing terrain as if it weren't there.
Third, running a game, especially an MMO, also requires providing dedicated support staff. A very large effort would have to be made to recover/remember the issues and workarounds the GM staff would use back when the server was live and then train the new staff with this knowledge. There would probably be a rather significant engineering effort involved in this as well as the old GM ticketing system used to be done entirely in-client while nowadays it's some web-based thing (the former made it rather easy for players to impersonate GMs). Improvements like those and other GM tools like better insight/control over a player character and logged events that were made over the years would have to be back-ported in order to maintain the high expectation of quality Blizzard support has fought hard to maintain.
I actually was thinking about that today because a video regarding this server issue popped up in my YT feed.
The idea I came up with goes like that: Blizzard could offer free server software to interested 3rd parties who could then run their own favorite incarnations of WoW.
And to make sure customers would still pay the subscription fees this 3rd party server software would use the official Battle.net authentication service WoW uses.
Blizzard would still get their subscription fees and customers would have access to "vanilla" servers without Blizzard having to lift one finger.
(But knowing Blizzard this would probably never happen. They are very protective when it comes to their IP and creative control; Even after all those years they still don't allow players to dye their ingame armor because Orcs running around in pink armor would go against their design language).
While I was gaming a lot, before the turn of the century, it usually seemed like when you bought a game you owned it. WoW was to me one of the earliest salient examples of a game you didn't really own, but only were permitted to rent. Even though the community has apparently overcome the challenges of getting a working, large scale server running and maintain a community, that spirit of "not really yours" seems to shine through here.
Poor form, Blizzard! Adding to a design that was better off without additions to sell it all over again is one thing, but smashing the original for those who loved it that way and don't want the extra cruft is just mean.
That was never true.
Nothing new.
At this point in time the only appeal of the game to me is nostalgia. I don't think I'd care to log in and immediately upgrade my formerly maxed out character with 40 levels of free exp just so I can go to the latest newbie zone and not get slaughtered. That would sort of trivialize the entirely excessive amount of time I put into that character.
I played WoW's beta but then went entirely off of MMO's for good (such a waste of time!). I'm sure there are lots of people who would love to revist the release version of the game. Clearly, the demand is there. Instead of shutting Nostalrius down, the Blizzard team should be buying the server config and data off of the team that was running it and then keep it online. They have to protect their IP, but the cost of keeping long-time loyal fans happy (even if they aren't currently paying ones) happy is pretty minimal.
A Jagex employee's view on how they managed to reopen a legacy server and keep it alive (and growing).
I doubt I would know how to program at all if it was not for that server.
It should be clear that Blizzard are ridiculously overcharging people with 10$/month when fans can run something like this and offer it for free or based on donations.
Blizzard have to - legally have to - pay the people who do customer support, development, art, writing server ops, etc.
That adds up to a lot more than just server costs.
On top of that, you can buy character boosts, too. No, this isn't covering development and support costs, it's shameless profit optimization.
But Blizzard can get away with all that thanks to people like you buying their marketing crap.
And this is why its best not to get too involved in games where you have no control or have no possibility of control over the infrastructure that underpins the game.
What would actually happen if I logged in now with my account that I haven't used since vanilla? Would I be told I'm SOL?
>> its best not to get too involved in games where you have no control or have no possibility of control over the infrastructure
Unless you are a professional competitive player, why would anyone become so deeply connected to a _game_ such that future updates, and/or the publisher shutting down the game entirely, would result in such a vehement reaction? If you're the type to cry "lawsuit" over a game getting updates, you may want to avoid playing such games.
tldr; For some people, "its best not to get too involved in games where you have no control" probably starts and ends with not installing an MMO to begin with.