I’ve loved Warcraft for a long time, and that’s exactly why I’m writing this.
This isn’t a post asking you to stop protecting your intellectual property. I understand why you have to do that. This is a plea to think differently about the people behind some of these community projects.
Projects like Project Ascension, Turtle WoW, and other ambitious fan creations exist because there is still an incredible amount of passion for Warcraft. These developers have spent years building classes, systems, quests, balancing gameplay, and creating experiences that thousands of players genuinely enjoy. Whether you agree with every design decision or not, they’ve demonstrated something important: they deeply understand why people fell in love with Warcraft.
Instead of seeing talented fan developers only as people to shut down, why not see them as potential teammates?
Many of us have spent years asking for a Warcraft experience that preserves the soul of the game while being willing to innovate where it makes sense. We don’t mind Blizzard making money. We want Blizzard to care for the game first. Keep bots under control. Protect the integrity of the world. Respect player feedback. Build something with the same passion that made Warcraft legendary.
If people outside your company are consistently creating experiences that players can’t stop talking about, maybe that’s an opportunity rather than just a legal problem.
Imagine what those developers could accomplish with Blizzard’s resources, artists, engineers, and lore experts behind them.
Warcraft deserves passionate caretakers. If you find people who have already proven they can inspire that passion in the community, don’t just look at them as opponents.
Look at them as talent.
I genuinely want Blizzard to succeed. I want to be excited about Warcraft again. I hope you’ll consider that some of the people building these projects may be exactly the kind of developers who can help make that happen.
I don’t think this means the same thing to really any given two people. I have long felt now that the best hope for WoW is Retail, and that’s saying exactly what it’s saying.
But corporate wants lowest common denominator. Or increased shop sales. Or more e-sport events for exposure. Whatever. So one is told where to focus their efforts and that’s generally not passion projects. One gets to be as passionate about the game as they are allowed and that is reflected in company-approved ways. Stepping outside the lines can get you on report at best but fired (a parting that could be projected as “mutual” but isn’t) at worst.
That’s already happened here.
If these passionate developers of pirated Blizzard content could be as passionate about something entirely new and even more creative and, more relevant in this instance, not hijacking other creators work then we might have a renaissance in the PC gaming space truly earning for them the title of developer rather than coattail rider.
They tried to sue KESPA despite them not earning any money for televised video games matches.
They tried to sue Icefrog who went to Valve to make DOTA 2, Blizzard Lost. But was still an insult to the community.
They sued Nostralius and other people who opened various Vanilla Private Servers.
Blizzard dont care about you, all they care about is money. They never cared once about the players or our community. They even blurred out the BroodWar Software so that you’d buy the Remastered version.
If Microsoft were real savvy they would issue license for wow that allowed for private hosted servers allowing you to download trusted client and use the battlenet app and update mechanisms to attach to the private servers.
They could even offer some kind of profit sharing mechanism that way the private servers could make money to further development while also sending a share to MS.
Micro-blizzard will never hire good devs like the ones who worked on turtle or ascension Micro-blizzard is happy with the state of F2P maintenance mode E-sport retail is and just releasing the same old versions of WoW because its easy and cheap.
I mean, this isn’t remotely true…. I saw something like 50+ former guildies for the early access Ashes of Creation thing…. and Ashes of Creation was a terrible, 15% completed mess of a scam/cash grab.
There’s a big appetite for a new MMO… Getting to experience a new world that hasn’t already been meta-optimized to hell and back and experience a new world. There’s pretty sizable appeal to that.
There’s just also the reality that no other MMO has actually made one that truly competes. FFXIV and SWTOR both had great narrative/story, but neither where objectively on wow’s level. It’s also why last year there was a big jump to OSRS, and with the GW3 announcement, there’s been a huge surge in the GW2 population.
This part, on the other hand, is straight truth. Blizzard has been almost comically bad at running their games, and it feels INCREDIBLY “phoned in”. It’s not even classic either…. D4 is the same, as is retail.
No real competition does that to a company. They become complacent, super lazy… perfect example all the pservers and all the new QoL features they have. Not to mention new stuff… blizzard has had the chance to save face and guess what… Classic+ is it. I really, really hope Classic+ is good, never mind great.
Didn’t SOD have ideas that were stolen from pservers? What in SOD was an original blizzard idea? The blue print is out there and its sad that its from pservers and not blizzard.
yea its hard to feel bad for thieves. they stole an ip, that shows they are dishonest. do you think that the private server devs weren’t in it for the money? i mean one of twows creators is a known p server scammer. like this whole pserver devs are holy acolytes of wow is just laughable. they dont care about wow any more than blizz. they just want to make money off an established ip because its easier than starting their own.
correction - you love private servers. it’s still strange to me that people are shocked that blizz is trying to protect their game lmao. i’m personally more surprised they hadn’t done it sooner.
I mean… who is not in it to make money? But, the pserver devs throughout the years have done a far better job then anything blizzard has since the original devs left. What we have retail disney wow? No, thanks!
They are lucky that original wow, tbc, wraith is still so highly regarded as great versions of the game. Its the reason they keep recycling it… isn’t another classic anny coming out in like 2028/29? LOL people will still play it.
sorry