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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.

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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.

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