[the_af]

I read a lot of times about this, and I find it fascinating. Are pirated WoW backends "pirated" in the sense of "someone downloaded leaked code and maybe tweaked it", or are they completely reverse-engineered, in which case it's original code and not piracy?

[bytehowl]

To my knowledge they are fully reverse-engineered, which makes Blizzard occasionally going after servers for piracy even more infuriating.

[tmp_anon_22]

All the assets are usually pirated in private servers. Its very illegal and makes it difficult to host them from most countries.

[hgazx]

Even if the code is completely new, you need a lot of copyrighted material to run a wow server.

[KptMarchewa]

Isn't the copyrighted material in game client itself? Did WOW stream content back then?

[hgazx]

Positions and names of NPCs, quest texts, encounter mechanics, texts said by NPCs, I think item names (not completely sure), etc are all stored in the server and are sent over the wire to the player from the server. That’s quite clearly a copyright violation.

[nanidin]

The piracy comes into play when people mirror the content of the retail servers - placement of MOBs, names of MOBs, scripted encounters, quests, items, things like that. All of that stuff comes from a DB on the server. People write in-game plugins and other tools that siphon out data for use on other servers.

[the_af]

Interesting. At that point it would seem it would pay off to simply create new content for the alternative WoW server... It'd be a massive effort, but whole new games have been created by a community that are completely free and open source.

(Though, of course, why not create an entirely new game completely unrelated to WoW then?)

[mrits]

The most popular server for years was named after the word nostalgia. A lot of people had a really fun time playing WoW as a kid but had no actual way to play the game any longe since it was online only and ever evolving.

After a decade or so Blizzard finally caved and released their own "classic" versions of the game. Apparently a lot of the infrastructure was incompatible with the software which made it a not so trivial undertaking. They originally said it was impossible but nostalgia hit one of the internal devs and he proved otherwise.

[Kaze404]

It depends. In WoWs case they're reverse engineered, but there are lots of examples of games that had their servers leaked. Cabal Online for example had a server leaked in 2009, and pirates have since then been modifying it to add current content. It's fascinating.

[hgazx]

The latter.