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Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

It's important to understand it's not just the Turtle WoW people who violated Blizzard's copyrights, it's also anyone who played on Turtle WoW. They don't have licenses to use the clients, and downloading and running those clients is in violation of Blizzard's copyrights.

I wonder if Blizzard got a customer list from Turtle WoW as a result of the settlement. At the least, they could permanently ban any WoW player who also played on the pirate servers. Beyond that, they might even engage in large scale legal action, of the kind copyright trolls used in the past. "Pay us $5K and this lawsuit, which might cost you $100K plus your legal fees, will go away."

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I don't really get this logic. Why would they want to permanently ban someone paying them money because they also played on TurtleWoW? Isn't the entire argument they're making that TurtleWoW could be hurting their own sales? And given that Blizzard doesn't still distribute their old clients anymore from what I understand, how would you prove that people running the old clients ever even saw the licensing agreement? People can't violate an agreement they never agreed to in the first place. You might be able to make a case for people distributing the client, but in this case that's probably just the same people who ran the server.

Why would they ban people who violate other terms of the EULA? And yet they do.

Ostensibly because the terms are supposed to avoid making the game actively worse for other players like farming resources in a way that warps the in-game economy for regular players, or being blatantly antisocial in a way that discourages other people from playing (although it's kind of a common complaint that they're generally pretty sloppy at this and could do a much better job). Someone playing TurtleWow doesn't inherently make anything worse for the people who play on retail though, so I don't see how you can compare the two.

There is no customer list. The only thing Blizzard could do is ban anyone using the same IP address as someone on Turtle WoW. However since NAT is widespread in many countries and many people don’t have their own IPv4 address this would result in an extremely high number of false positives. Not to mention that multiple people could be sharing the same internet connection. Besides there’s no reason to do that. Someone who also plays on the official server is paying for a subscription. Banning that person now would just mean less revenue for Blizzard.

Presumably Turtle WoW also had payment details. If those match up with the IP of someone playing WoW, Blizzard has a very good case for action.

And yes there's a good reason: playing on a pirate server directly and explicitly violates the EULA. Blizzard bans people for violating the EULA all the time.

Only a very small percentage of players purchase microtransactions. In addition Turtle doesn't have any payment information because the transaction went through a third-party service. So Blizzard would have to take legal action against that service first. Also the server itself is not “piracy.” The server is based on VMaNGOS which is open source and contains no Blizzard code. VMaNGOS can be downloaded legally from GitHub. Turtle WoW created its own content for the server some of which runs on the server side and some on the client side. The only thing that is actually "piracy" is the distribution of the game client (which they unfortunately did) as it belongs to Blizzard.

You don’t kill a competitor and then ban their customers from your product.

If you can scare the hell out of other people from using pirate servers in the future, you could come out ahead. And the money from shakedowns could be quite lucrative, if the volume could be made high enough.

In general, "you are never allowed to use our products again" is a horrible idea in any industry where all the focus is around trying to get _more_ people to try them.

It's part of why a lot of places might ban your account but they won't ban you-the-person if you make a new one, necessarily - even if every ban was accurately assessed, shrinking your potential player base permanently by even 0.5% annually compounds really badly over time.

(The notable exceptions usually include things where they're banning you for exposing them to legal liability in some fashion, because the risk of you doing it again is so large.)

So, kill their company by banning a large portion of their player base for no benefit? Why?

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