But, no matter the game of pretend its PR reps try to play, it certainly doesn’t have to do this. To be clear, again, Blizzard can do this.

The takedowns happen and Blizzard ignores the market demands. It would be one thing if these takedowns were going on while coupled with statements from the company about its own competing service. If nothing else, this again should represent free market research and the uncovering of an entirely new and potentially lucrative market for Blizzard. And it’s quite popular, too, with thousands of players playing this vanilla experience. The very idea is to allow players to experience the roots of the massively popular online game. That, of course, is the entire point of the vanilla server. Blizzard’s notice targets several SQL databases stating that the layout and structure is nearly identical to the early WoW databases. The company has asked the developer platform GitHub to remove the code repository published by Light’s Hope. At the time of writing, the most popular realm has more than 6,000 people playing from all over the world. In recent years the project has captured the hearts of tens of thousands of die-hard WoW fans. Another fan-operated vanilla server, this one called Light’s Hope, is under attack from Blizzard for all the same reasons.

Instead, the fan-server shut itself down under the threat of a trademark lawsuit and Blizzard went on its merry way ignoring these customer desires.įast forward to today, some two years later, and it’s all happening again. The whole situation became all the more odd when you consider that Blizzard itself does not offer a competing experience with the fan-server, essentially ignoring what is clearly a desire within the fanbase for that kind of experience that Blizzard could monetize if it wanted. The simple fact is that there were other avenues down which the company could travel other than threatening the fan-server into oblivion, such as working out a cheap licensing arrangement to make it official. As is so often the case in these kinds of disputes, we can at once stipulate that Blizzard was within its right to do this while still calling out whether it was the best decision it could make on the matter. You will hopefully recall a post we did several years ago dealing with Blizzard’s decision to shut down a fan-run “vanilla” World of Warcraft server that stripped the game’s expansions out and let players play the game as it was originally released in 2004. Thu, Feb 8th 2018 03:58pm - Timothy Geigner

Wow classic private server