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Comment by Volundr | Hacker News Reader

Why does it have to be a refund? Private servers have been a thing for a long time, with people even running them for MMOs like World of Warcraft or City of Heroes.

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Do you just mean it should be legal to reverse engineer and cleanroom impl your own server if the developer's official servers are closed? I can agree with that.

But anything more than that I probably don't agree with.

Nah, if I pay for the game, I should get to keep it. If it's a monthly subscription only (not sure the current state, but WoW didn't us to be) then there's an argument to be made here that I was just buying access to those servers. But if I've plopped down 70 bucks and you don't feel like running your backend anymore, then the least you can do is provide the tools for others to do so.

>not sure the current state, but WoW didn't us to be

WoW has always required a monthly subscription since release

Correct. It also used to require an upfront purchase of the game and every expansion. I'm not sure if it still does. Those who paid bought the game and should be able to continue playing it, even if Blizzard wants to shut down the servers.

It still does require a purchase, though now all expansions except the latest one are included in the base game and you can purchase the expansion with the base game at little markup over the expansion itself so the base game might as well be free.

They should be required to publish either the full spec that is sufficient for such a server to be written, or barring that, the complete source code for the server (and all resource files necessary to run it, if any of them don't come with the base game).

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