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Comment by mrits | Hacker News Reader

I spent years playing WoW on a pirated backend.

I read a lot of times about this, and I find it fascinating. Are pirated WoW backends "pirated" in the sense of "someone downloaded leaked code and maybe tweaked it", or are they completely reverse-engineered, in which case it's original code and not piracy?

The latter.

To my knowledge they are fully reverse-engineered, which makes Blizzard occasionally going after servers for piracy even more infuriating.

Even if the code is completely new, you need a lot of copyrighted material to run a wow server.

Isn't the copyrighted material in game client itself? Did WOW stream content back then?

Positions and names of NPCs, quest texts, encounter mechanics, texts said by NPCs, I think item names (not completely sure), etc are all stored in the server and are sent over the wire to the player from the server. That’s quite clearly a copyright violation.

All the assets are usually pirated in private servers. Its very illegal and makes it difficult to host them from most countries.

The piracy comes into play when people mirror the content of the retail servers - placement of MOBs, names of MOBs, scripted encounters, quests, items, things like that. All of that stuff comes from a DB on the server. People write in-game plugins and other tools that siphon out data for use on other servers.

Interesting. At that point it would seem it would pay off to simply create new content for the alternative WoW server... It'd be a massive effort, but whole new games have been created by a community that are completely free and open source.

(Though, of course, why not create an entirely new game completely unrelated to WoW then?)

The most popular server for years was named after the word nostalgia. A lot of people had a really fun time playing WoW as a kid but had no actual way to play the game any longe since it was online only and ever evolving.

After a decade or so Blizzard finally caved and released their own "classic" versions of the game. Apparently a lot of the infrastructure was incompatible with the software which made it a not so trivial undertaking. They originally said it was impossible but nostalgia hit one of the internal devs and he proved otherwise.

It depends. In WoWs case they're reverse engineered, but there are lots of examples of games that had their servers leaked. Cabal Online for example had a server leaked in 2009, and pirates have since then been modifying it to add current content. It's fascinating.

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