A Free Ride When You've Already Paid (Or Someone Has, Anyway...)

Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob has a post up about the fallout from Daybreak Games' ongoing legal battle with whoever it is that operates the for-profit EverQuest rogue server, The Hero's Journey. Meanwhile, Shintar over at Priest With A Cause has been keeping us all up to date with her experiences on for-profit World of Warcraft rogue server, Turtle WoW, currently receiving similar legal attention from Blizzard.

 I'm not going to go over all the ins and outs of the events involved or rehash the legal arguments for and against (Except to note that there really are no legal arguments in favor of the continued existence of either server.) The short version is that both servers run unlicensed versions of commercially-available games and take money for doing so and the I.P. owners are taking legal action to stop them. 

You don't have to approve of copyright or I.P. ownership to understand that it exists and the mechanisms to enforce compliance with both also exist. And that the outcome in both cases is a foregone conclusion.

Rather than talk about the legal niceties or even the morality, I'm more interested in the ironies both these cases have made it impossible to ignore. There are a myriad of them but the big three seem to me to be:

• Small, amateur teams out-performing large, professional companies.
• Players believing the New Boss will be different from the Old Boss
• Games coming back to life just as the call to Stop Killing Games gets louder.

Taking those in order, both THJ and TurtleWoW (Which really does not abbreviate well...) offer something not too different from the "Classic +" experience for which so many veterans, particularly of World of Warcraft but also of other MMORPGs, are frequently heard lobbying. 

Both Blizzard and Daybreak have done their best to serve the nostalgic demand for time-slipped servers that aim to return WoW and EQ to something close to their roots. Far from satisfying the urge for a return to the past, however, in both cases what the Classic and TLE servers mostly seem to have done is unleash a desire for a whole new timeline, one in which the games continued to develop, just not the way they did in this one.

Understandably, neither company has, as yet, taken to the idea of running another, divergent MMORPG alongside the one they already have, presumably out of a fear it would split the existing player-base and require a considerable amount of extra expenditure with very little increase in income. Unfortunately for them, this eminently reasonable position is currently being undermined by the highly-visible evidence of much smaller, less well-funded teams seemingly doing exactly that. 

Only without the encumbrance of an actual, much more popular, live game to run at the same time, of course. But no-one playing TurtleWoW or THJ pays much attention to that inconvenient detail, for the very understandable reason that they've already written the Live games off as a betrayal of the True Faith and would almost certainly not shed any tears if they disappeared tomorrow.

It leaves Blizzard and Daybreak looking like the worst combination of bullies, killjoys and incompetents as they try to put the very people who are doing what the players want out of business, while refusing to consider doing anything similar themselves, presumably because it would just be too hard for them. I mean, it's not like they make games for a living or anything...

Which leads me directly on to Irony #2, that being said players imagining that, should the teams behind their rogue servers of choice ever build up a sufficient head of steam to challenge the professional game developer elites, they'd behave any differently. It's quite sweet, really.

There are lots of examples of tiny, dedicated, non-professional teams running retro servers for ancient MMORPGs wholly in the service and with the informed consent of the people who play them. They're wonderful. We all applaud their genuinely selfless efforts. 

And note that they're hobbyists; developers and players alike.

They aren't running commercial businesses so they don't have to make compromises with quality or content to keep their kids in shoes. THJ and TurtleWoW aren't quite the same. They most likely are someone's livelihood already and if they continue to grow they certainly will be before long. 

They may also be labors of love but so, for the most part, are the original, official games they're leeching off. Only, the developers of those games don't have the leeway to make noncommercial decisions just to please the players. The more successful their rogue equivalents become, the less leeway they'll have, too.

Which isn't to say they won't make a better job of balancing the commercial and the aesthetic but they sure as hell won't be able to keep all the players happy all the time, any more than any other live MMORPG ever has. And the longer the Classic + style experiments continue, the further they'll diverge from the One True Path and the more pissed off the players will get.

Finally, and most amusingly, there's the mortality issue. We've been hearing a lot lately about games dying. Or being killed, rather, because apparently they don't just age out and pass away into the Great Gray Nothing all on their own. Someone has to administer the coup de grace.

My question is, if someone's out there killing them, why don't the buggers ever die? 

I mean, they used to, right? Even a hint that an MMORPG I'd played and enjoyed and felt a connection with might be about to close down for good used to make me come out in a cold sweat. Quite literally in the case of a handful that I really liked.

Nowadays, about the best I can summon is a shrug. There's no emotional impact when I hear a game I used to play is about to sail into the ultimate west because I know that, should I ever get the urge to play it again, I can just hop onto an emulator.

The whole post-sunset after-life is so much a part of the process now, Massively OP just ran a post asking readers if the people playing their MMO of choice had a back-up plan in place to spin up an emulator in the event of the real game closing down. It's expected now, apparently, and the wise players are far enough ahead of the curve to guarantee there's barely a bump as players switch tracks when the official servers power down.

It seems like the greatest irony of all, the way the one genre that should be the most vulnerable to executive kill orders, due to being both entirely online and running mostly on someone else's hardware, ends up being the least likely of all to go dark for more than a blink. 

And it doesn't even take a closure for the resurrection to come.

In the case of the two games mentioned at the top of the post, neither of which has yet given the slightest indication that official service is in imminent danger of being withdrawn, there are dozens of unofficial alternatives available already. EQ even has not one but two authorized, non-commercial third-party alternatives in place! You can go play EverQuest on Project 99 or Quarm just as legally as you can play on Daybreak's own servers. 

Blizzard haven't quite countenanced that yet but they've made it pretty plain they aren't interested in closing down every last fan project out there. Just the ones that try to make money. 

I used to like to say that WoW would probably be around longer than I'd be around to play it. At the time I was thinking of the official version, which seemed likely to last for decades and still does. Eventually, though, Blizzard will shut it down. I won't see it happen but you might.

The game itself, though, by which I mean some playable version that's instantly recognizable as World of Warcraft? That's going to be around long after anyone reading this is still here to enjoy it. And so will EverQuest. And many of the others. 

There'll be no final curtain for any of them, although the day may come when they're playing to empty houses. Interest will ebb before opportunity.

Is that a good thing? I'm all for historical preservation and personal choice. If people want to play the same game for fifty years, let them. It's not without repercussions and consequences, though.

Daybreak have made the extent to which The Hero's Journey's success damages their bottom line very plain. Blizzard is going after Turtle WoW for much the same reason, although as part of Microsoft now they have almost infinitely deep pockets, meaning the competition can hardly have the same impact. WoW isn't going to close down because TurtleWoW steals a few thousand of its players. EverQuest just might, though, if the shortfall in expected revenue DBG ascribes to THJ's success is accurate.

But even if they both went under, we'd still be able to play, right? We'd just roll up new characters on the emulators and start over. So why worry?

Possibly because all those people playing games that were made twenty or more years ago are sopping up players who could be playing something new, thereby contributing to the much-discussed difficulty every new MMORPG experiences in both attracting and holding an audience. 

And if that's happening already, imagine how much stronger the effect might be if those games weren't just replicating old experiences but were actively engaged in creating new ones. Every action has consequences, not always intended or foreseen.

And maybe that's the greatest irony of all. If the old games won't die, how are new ones going to live?  

Mostly by not looking or playing anything like the old ones, I'd imagine...