What are the creative ways to punish pirates for pirating World of Warcraft?
Me, I would recommend to humiliate pirates by having pirates wearing an embarrassing gear (like having pirates’ characters as a cross-dresser or something very embarrassing to have) that all NPCs would laugh hysterically at the pirates’ characters’ gear they wore. Plus the pirates will not get the epic, legendary, and artifact gear. And the story stops in the beginning of the Shadowlands storyline which is why the pirates’ characters is now captured and taken into Torghast along with Baine, Thrall, Jaina, Anduin, Bolvar and his Death Knights, and the rest of them who intruded the Maw. To make thing worse, the game is over, and the pirates’ character are deleted automatically per character for the rest of the story, that’s it. Also, for pirating WoW, the pirates will not have access to dungeons, raids, PvPs, scenarios, events, and Mythic+. And pirates are not allowed to create or join a guild at all.
And that’s it, did you guys and gals have an another suggestion for WoW’s anti-piracy method. Please do tell about the suggestion that you made.
That’s when FBI is going to track it and send the authorities to the pirates’ location and take the stolen copy of WoW to the Blizzard and arrest the pirates for illegal downloading.
The software client itself is free and you can install it on as many PCs as you want. Logging in requires a valid key and Bnet account. You can’t play the legitimate WoW without having a real copy of it that verifies your key and account on every single login to the live game server. What you pay for is access to said server - and you can’t access it without paying.
People who decide to run private servers with reverse engineered server side code are actually breaking the intellectual property laws and can be prosecuted if it is done from a country where Blizzard can access the legal system. Some countries don’t care about intellectual property theft.
Literally no one playing on the official servers pirated the game.
If you’re talking about the private server community, that’s not a 1:1 piracy…it’s an emulated program wearing a WoW costume, all assets of which were on disc or client side. And the absolute best way any company can handle such would be to set up their own private server hosting service, ensuring those hosting aren’t profiting off their work.
You are a genius! This statement of what you said about it makes perfectly sense. I can’t disprove of what the software client itself and WoW is all about. And what you said is true, you can’t play the legitimate copy without having a real copy out of it that verifies your key and account on every single login to any live game servers.
And yes, people who decide to run private servers with reverse engineered server side code are breaking the intellectual property laws and can be prosecuted. But why would some countries never care about intellectual property theft. To tell you the truth, I don’t like bootleg knock offs of every media, games, books, and other sources like that, and it’s best for me to have what US is allowed to sell in USA.
Yes, that makes sense. I assure I don’t want to hurt Blizzard’s feelings that there was a new private server of WoW that I joined. But I don’t join private servers, and I really don’t think I would. But it’s a good try for the WoW fan remakes.
They only go after the people running the servers, though. The players just might get a suspension (from regular wow), if they have some way of figuring out who they are. Then again, many are on those servers because they are not subscribed to Wow.
I bet their numbers went down after the “Classics” came out.
I’ve always been in awe of people who put in that much work to replicate the entire server backend, and wonder why they don’t just go one step further and make their own games.
(Although deep down I suspect the answer is some variation of “umpteen GB of art assets” ?)
Because part of the reason they do it is for the intellectual challenge of making it as Blizz-like as possible. It’s easier to write your own quest chains and raids with their own encounters than it is to duplicate something that already exists to the smallest detail. It’s also something they can do at their leisure while still having a day job, without the uncertainties and pressures of a release schedule that investors would put on them for a new game.
