[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.