I see that they’re shutting down private servers, and I’m curious why they’ve never shut down Warmane, which has been around for many years? Is there a particular reason?
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Because Warmane is hosted in a country that doesn’t recognize IP or copyright laws, and doesnt extradite the US. So they can just throw the cease and desist orders in the garbage, and as long as the devs dont go to the US, there’s basically nothing Blizzard can do about it
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FWIW, after the recent TWoW takedown a day or two ago (as well as another one I forget the name of in the same time period that people have been talking about significantly less), [PServer in OP] took down their population numbers and download links.
I doubt they’ve been got, but they’re clearly playing it safe, which means they’re concerned.
That said, yeah, they’ve been massive for straight up 2 decades now (under a couple names, but still). Crazy stuff.
I don’t know that we should be calling out names of private servers here though tbh.
TWoW is a bit different because there’s very public legal stuff happening so it became common knowledge, and it’s now shut down anyway. This one is… not that. They’re still running. They’ve been around for 20 years. They don’t seem to currently be in legal fights with Blizzard in any meaningful way. And now OP is effectively advertising them to a bunch of Retail players who likely didn’t know the name before now.
This is also their ONLY post, which is kind of sus. But I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt given that they don’t appear to have been converted to the account wide system yet.
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They probably kept their mouths shut.
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Nah. Blizzard has to be aware of this one. It’s true that recent PServers have gone crazy with publicly advertising, but this one has always been one of the biggest Blizzlike PServers, even back in like the WotlK Era. No way Blizz hasn’t caught wind of it.
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Nothing you’ve said there disproves my statement though.
The one that “DNMITTW” (did not make it to the water) was talking nonsense and actively challenging/advertising while the one listed in the OP seems so non factor and keeping to themselves they haven’t had the ire of blizzard’s legal team at their throats.
It’s the exact same with RomHacks for Nintendo games, don’t advertise / charge for it and you won’t receive anything sent your way regarding legal action.
It’s using your brain 101. Keep quiet and do not draw attention to yourself.
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The Server in the OP is P2W like many others. You can buy legendaries for like $150 among other things. You’re right that they don’t openly advertise, but they are making money on Blizzard’s IP.
I can see why Blizz went after TWoW. They were brazen about it. They were literally tagging Blizzard in social media posts on top of their actual advertising.
Just saying I don’t think [server] being quiet is the reason they’re still around.
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Can they go after them? yes, they can. It costs a lot of money to file lawsuits in other countries as well as time. There is a lot more red tape, and legal stuff to get through to do so.
In general, copyright laws are world wide. But in various countries they may be a bit different. It takes a lot of work, and money, to get through those differences. To the point that in some cases. It may just not be worth the trouble.
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Normally, Blizzard tends not to care about private servers.
Unless they get in the way of projects like Classic and Classic+, as happened with Vanilla private servers in the past and now with these that simulate Classic+.
Warmane and similar servers are just generic private servers (despite being populous). So Blizzard doesn’t pay much attention to them, It’s not financially worth it, you know?
They’re even somewhat positive for Blizzard itself, since they act as a gateway for many people to eventually move to Blizzard’s Retail/Classic. They’re still wrong for running a pirate server, but still, business things.
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