WoW Scape Judgement

[Stab]

I wonder how this will effect smaller test servers in the future now. Friday, a California court found in favor of Blizzard and has ordered the owner of WoW Scape to pay 88 million dollars including 85 million dollars in statutory damages. http://www.rfcexpress.com/lawsuit.asp?ID=51340

FINAL JUDGMENT by Judge Stephen V. Wilson,Pursuant to the Courts July 22, 2010 and August 10, 2010 Orders Granting Plaintiffs Motion for Default Judgment, it is hereby ORDERED, ADJUDGED, AND DECREED that Plaintiff Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. shall recover $88,594,539.00, and post-judgment interest thereon at the rate provided by law until paid in full, from Defendant Alyson Reeves, d/b/aScapegaming. 24 . ( MD JS-6. Case Terminated ) (pj) (Entered: 08/11/2010)

The total reward of $88,594,589 comes from $3,053,339 of inappropriate profits, $63,600 of attorney's fees, and $85,478,600 of statutory damages.

[Patman128]

Looks like she should have gotten a better lawyer.

Meanwhile, nothing of value was lost.

[vladex]

well privates servers are ilegal in someway, you steal the work of blizzard's programmers,hope this won't end all servers as in 2008.

[Toinan67]

"$3,053,339 of inappropriate profits"

Did I understand well, the guy made $3,000,000 with his private server? oO

[vladex]

it is possible, just think how many players pay for good game experience.

[goodbadguy]

This girl made quite a lot of money selling just about every possible drop for a price via their website, which is why it was being sued by Blizzard probably for selling their virtual property.

[Toinan67]

I've never understood how this type of people can possibly do things like that and still believe nobody will see the $3,000,000.

I'm totally with Blizzard this time...

[Patman128]

Yeah, but considering Farmville makes $1 million a day, I'm surprised it was so little money. This is the internet.

[vladex]

yea , everyone has a internet connection these days

[Toinan67]

We can't really compare Farmville with a private server, Farmville is on Facebook, 500 millions potiential users and consumers.

Wow has 11 millions users on official servers, I don't know how many of them play on private...but it's clearly not 500 millions.

[vladex]

i don't think its even a million players on private servers more like half probably.

[roby10]

http://www.mmoglider.com/Legal/ReevesComplaint.pdf

maybe this helps read this

btw who were they?i know little about them

can anyone make a fully detailed story:P i'd like to see one

[Ever]

I wont state specific details but I (at one time ;p) had direct ties with Reeves. It is correct that she made roughly 3 million in "donations". It was simple for those of you that already know what she did. For every "donation" a user from the playerbase made, she would just simply give you an epic item ingame, and the higher the donation, the better the item.

I'm sure you can see where this goes. It went on for 4 years. Her husband, a now former Dallas county sherriff actually ran it with her. She bought him a $105,000 trans am at one point, and a backyard swimming pool. She is a mother of 3.

What is most sad is during this time, whether people tell you it was Mangos or not, heavily modded mangos, or Ascent code, I can tell you with 100% accuracy that it was plain old mangos taken from the then SVN.

Her developer at the time was Burlex/Espire who claimed it was is own code. Yet it was nothing but Mangos with a simple motd change and a few other snippets.

I am glad that it turned out this way, for 4+ years I tried everything in my power to get her stop making money off of OUR communities code. Think about it, think about the work the head devlopers and yourselves have put into this, it should make you sick. The mangos project has helped me tremendously in understanding of net code and client <--> server applications, and it annoyed the hell out of me to see it used that way.

Anyways /end rant.

[Toinan67]

Thanks a lot for the details Ever, and thanks roby10 too for the pdf. Quite interesting to read actually, but a bit too long

And what does happen to her family now? Are they going to jail?

Think about it, think about the work the head devlopers and yourselves have put into this, it should make you sick.

She's clearly not the only one...that's what makes an open source project great and "dangerous" sometimes : everybody has access to the code, but they can do whatever they want with it

[vladex]

i think mangos should input a terms of agreedment, not to take credits and so on.Not to be used in a money makeing way.

[Patman128]

Think about it, think about the work the head devlopers and yourselves have put into this, it should make you sick.

Not really. People use open source code to make money. Life goes on.

Part of helping mangos means realizing that people are going to use your code on their servers and accepting it. What can you do.

I think the bigger travesty is that most of these big servers do tons of development which in most cases end up going right down the drain once they tank, because they are too stubborn to go open source. Think about all the good work that has been done for these servers, in some cases over and over and over again. If I go develop for some private server, I can make a buck, but where does my work go? If I submit a patch to mangos and it gets accepted, my work may very well outlive me.

[Toinan67]

I agree, Patman

Recent example : I saw that a server implemented the dungeon finder system. Didn't test it, but the overall thing works.

They're on Trinity or Mangos, I don't know. I don't think they want to share it to the community : it took them a long time to do it, and bring it to the community means that they worked for their "competitors".

That's how it is...

"If I go develop for some private server, I can make a buck, but where does my work go? If I submit a patch to mangos and it gets accepted, my work may very well outlive me." -> they want to make a great private server that differs from others, like "MY server has it and not YOURS". Competition...

[Schmoozerd]

and the fun fact about this "competition" is, that there is no big difference between the servers, even the laziest admin has not much less working than others

I rather see as problems, that if admins encourage their developers to work only for their own server, that we tend to get more half-finished stuff, because usally this is good enought for a pserver using custom content..

And then we end up with a couple of different versions of the same thing and all are only working to 80% or so (all ofc some different 80%)

and ofc extremely important: I am quite sure this way of doing things forces the (pserver's) devs to burn out rather fast, because there is nothing more annoying than to do the same thing again and again ..

[roby10]

to patman:

farmville or whatever is that:)) : 1 million a day....

blizzard world of wacraft subscription (3 million players /lowest number) 3,000,000 x 14 euros/dollars (i don't know the montly amount but it's around here) / 30(days) = 1,400,000 dollars/euros

and that's with 3 millions... when cataclysm will be out... 13 millions will be back:))

about donation system:-it should never be implemented to make money

-it should be implemented ,but no rewards of any kind,vip user status,ingame items,gold etc,

-it the player would like to donate he can do ... supporting the server without asking for any reward

-if i donate there are some terms and etc.. that say : "..bla bla bla... by donating you will not expect anything in return...",i can donate for a t10 and get nothing...

sry for my english:P

[Patman128]

Donations, ideally, should only pay for any running costs of a server and any extra should go be given to non-profit organizations and charities, like this one right here (I'm not saying, I'm just saying. )

I don't really have a problem with server administrators making money, I just think if they are going to they should not call it a donation.

[roby10]

all server with high population that are using mangos should donate a % of their montly earning to keep this project alive... 10 $ ..... but the problem.. it that a lot of servers(high populated) are using trinity or other kind of hacky code:D

[TheLuda]

You don't want to know how many public mangos realms exist... and among the existing ones there is probably only a 1/3 actually giving credit. The remainders just claim mangos sucks, and their core is their own work. mangos could sue them all for copyright infringement

Shall we ?

[Seizer]

You don't want to know how many public mangos realms exist... and among the existing ones there is probably only a 1/3 actually giving credit. The remainders just claim mangos sucks, and their core is their own work. mangos could sue them all for copyright infringement

Shall we ?

Better to warmup your email sender. Oh and take a few months vacation from work, so you have time to send all those emails.

[Patman128]

You don't want to know how many public mangos realms exist... and among the existing ones there is probably only a 1/3 actually giving credit. The remainders just claim mangos sucks, and their core is their own work. mangos could sue them all for copyright infringement

Shall we ?

That's because if their paying user-base knew that they were hacks who couldn't code C++ if their lives depended on it, they would leave and go play on the server run by the other hacks who can't code C++ if their lives depended on it!

[Ever]

You don't want to know how many public mangos realms exist... and among the existing ones there is probably only a 1/3 actually giving credit. The remainders just claim mangos sucks, and their core is their own work. mangos could sue them all for copyright infringement

Shall we ?

Haha this ^^

I had remote access to WoWscape deds at one point and just like TheLuda said, they used MaNGOS yet denied it. Claimed it sucked, and claimed they wrote it themselves.

Now maybe I just go overboard with how much I hate it when people don't want to give credit to this project, or maybe I just can't stand their script kiddie ways of going about things.

Either way with proper packet analysis you can tell what is mangos and what is not