• driving_crooner
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      4 days ago

      They didn’t had private WoW servers? I remember playing Ragnarok Online in a private/pirate server

      • Ulu-Mulu-no-die@lemmy.zip
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        3 days ago

        It’s not piracy, it’s copyright violation, they’re both crimes but they’re very different things.

        Piracy is when you break a protection system, if you do it or if you take something on which a protection has been broken, you commit the crime.

        If you just take copyrighted material you don’t break any law, rightfully so, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to watch any movie, read any book, listen to any music, etc. because they’re all copyrighted (intellectual work).

        But if you publish said material without the authorization of the original author, you commit the crime.

        I don’t know all MMOs emulators out there but I know WoW very well. Nothing has ever been stolen from Blizzard, private servers are ALL based on emulators written from scratch by the community by reverse engineering the client, they’re all opensource and hosted on GitHub. The code is legal.

        The code alone tho is not enough to run a server, you also need data and some assets the are copyrighted, NOT protected, there’s no protection system involved, not even on the WoW client that has always been free and downloadable by anyone (ownership of the game/expansions is checked server-side).

        If you take those things and run them on your own PC you don’t break any law - you would if you needed to break some protection system but there’s none on WoW.

        But if you publish them you violate the copyright, that’s what private servers do.

    • Ulu-Mulu-no-die@lemmy.zip
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      3 days ago

      Pirate WoW? What do you mean?

      WoW server emulators are all opensource and hosted on GitHub, what’s there to pirate?

        • Ulu-Mulu-no-die@lemmy.zip
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          3 days ago

          What? The client is free and downloadable by anyone, it’s not protected in any way, never has been, ownership is checked server-side on your account.

          • winkerjadams@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            3 days ago

            And if you’ve ever actually played a wow private server you would realize none of the NPCs or anything is in the game except the world. That’s all server sided and needs to be re-coded into the server

            • Ulu-Mulu-no-die@lemmy.zip
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              3 days ago

              I personally don’t think that “just playing” on a pserver is enough to realize what’s in it, you need to compile and setup one to truly understand.

              For those wondering, you can check projects like TrinityCore, AzerothCore or CMangos, those are the most popular ones.