The Lawbringer: A primer on private servers
by Mathew McCurley 
Jan 28th 2011 at 6:00PM
The history of private MMO servers goes back to the heyday of the massively multiplayer, when the concepts of these virtual worlds were still in their formative stages. World of Warcraft private servers, also called emulated servers, boast numbers in the thousands, usually running off donations and providing a limited amount of the full WoW experience due to the nature of the reverse server engineering and implementation needed to run the game. One thing is for certain, though: Using the game client to connect to an emulated server is against the World of Warcraft EULA and cuts into Blizzard's profits.
What are private servers?
Private servers have been around since the early days of MMOs. I remember back in the day when RunUO, emulated server architecture for Ultima Online, was incredibly popular. Some of these servers provided really cool and compelling rulesets that were never part of the original game. Sure, it was against the EULA then, but it was the wild west and rules were made to be broken. EULA violations, sure, but illegal?
An emulated server is basically a third-party approximation of what the real server software and architecture is supposed to look like. In WoW's case, a crafty programmer can use the WoW client to reverse engineer or make approximations about how things are supposed to work, put those servers online, and then allow people to connect to said servers without the same authentication, activation, or other anti-piracy measures that Blizzard had put in place, like CD keys.
So how do you create server architecture and software for a game that never releases its server architecture and software? Blizzard would never release its WoW server technology -- it would be a terrible move for the integrity of the brand and its game and profits. Ultima Online was easy to emulate because, apparently, all you needed to do was change a few lines of text in the UO files to point to client to a new server location.
The client, the actual installed copy of the game on your hard drive, then becomes the server key, with clever programmers parsing the client for clues and information on the server architecture. Usually this involves some type of reverse engineering of the server software, which is generally illegal, according to the DMCA.
Ah, our good friend the DMCA is back. You'll learn quickly that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has curled its many tendrils around almost every internet legal concern since its inception. There was a case called Bowers v. Baystate Technologies back in 2003 that clarified that a EULA could negate the fair use allowance of reverse engineering, thus removing reverse engineering as a way to figure out the way software works. You can, however, reverse engineer for interoperability concerns, but not to make a competing product. You're also prohibited from releasing any code or information you create from reverse engineering.
bnetd: We've been here before
Do you remember bnetd, the emulation software that allowed players to create their own Battle.net-like servers and play Blizzard games on them? Bnetd was huge during many of Blizzard's betas because many people downloaded the game clients without permission and began to play said betas on emulated servers. The reverse engineering of Battle.net was so good that bnetd provided some of the best emulation ever, giving almost a perfect feature-for-feature facsimile of Battle.net.
Blizzard didn't sit on this one idly. In 2002, Blizzard issued a DMCA takedown to bnetd's internet service provider, and the lawsuits soon followed. Blizzard won in 2004 on claims of copyright infringement, trademark infringement, EULA violations, and DMCA anti-circumvention procedures. You see, the DMCA specifically states that it is illegal to circumvent barriers that software creators put to block unauthorized use of their software. CD keys, Blizzard said, were such barriers.
The EFF hated the rulings, saying that fighting over reverse engineering was going to have a chilling effect on interoperability system design. Blizzard won the appeals in 2005, and bnetd.org was given to Blizzard, with production of the emulation server software moved to other countries where no such anti-circumvention law exists.
Battle.net even has an FAQ about emulation servers and how CD keys help to fight piracy here.
Mike Morhaime's now infamous quote resonates with us today, especially when you consider the sales and subscription figures for World of Warcraft. After the bnetd rulings, Morhaime stated that the rulings were "a major victory for our profit margins." And he's right -- the ability to only play Blizzard games on Blizzard's architecture is a big deal, especially with the number of people who play Blizzard games. Battle.net was free, and people still played on bnetd servers. Granted, they were also usually downloading copies of Blizzard games illegally and against the EULA, because bnetd did not require the same authentication to play as did the actual Battle.net servers.
Which brings us to the World of Warcraft. The problem with emulated servers is not so much the server aspect, running the servers, or making profit off of unauthorized servers. I mean, those things are also a problem. The real issue, however, is that these servers do not require the same authentication to play on them as the actual Blizzard server structures do. Just like Battle.net and bnetd, the real issue is that players steal copies of the boxed game and use these illegal copies in unauthorized ways.
When Morhaime said that bnetd was a huge victory for their profit margins, he wasn't being flippant -- he was being honest. Selling retail versions of the game is a big capital moneymaker, covering a good amount of the cost of development. The monthly fee revenue generated pays for upkeep and the continued development, sure, but the initial investment has to be repaid somehow, and boxed copies are key.
EULA
Here's the EULA provision that makes emulated servers unauthorized:
Additional License Limitations
The license granted to you in Section 1 is subject to the limitations set forth in Sections 1 and 2 (collectively, the "License Limitations"). Any use of the Service or the Game Client in violation of the License Limitations will be regarded as an infringement of Blizzard's copyrights in and to the Game. You agree that you will not, under any circumstances:
F. facilitate, create or maintain any unauthorized connection to the Game or the Service, including without limitation (a) any connection to any unauthorized server that emulates, or attempts to emulate, the Service; and (b) any connection using programs or tools not expressly approved by Blizzard;...
Blizzard has stepped up the fight against unauthorized emulated servers in recent years, sending out takedown notices, threatening legal action against against these server providers, and in some cases removing the official accounts of private server users.
One of the biggest emulated servers, Molten-WoW, boasts over 60,000 active players weekly, provides links to full World of Warcraft downloads and patches, and accepts donations while using Blizzard assets, artwork, and everything in between to run their own servers for World of Warcraft. It opened on Dec. 5, 2009, and only features limited content up to Wrath of the Lich King. It's a hotbed for game piracy.
60,000 non-paying customers. 60,000 (potential) retail box copies and subscriptions not bought. And that's just Molten-WoW. There are dozens of popular private servers with an estimated hundreds of thousands of total users. Over the course of World of Warcraft's past, present, and future existence, a very, very large sum of money will be lost to pirates and private server operators.
Blizzard's recent forays into the legal world have been met with mixed successes, with major defeats to the copyright infringement aspects of their EULA claims. The DMCA, however, is still a sharp sword that Blizzard wields with finesse, and it will most likely be the weapon of choice against private servers. The problem is can Blizzard even reach them?
My preachy two sentences: Buy your games. Support the companies who make video games.
This column is for entertainment only; if you need legal advice, contact a lawyer. For comments or general questions about law or for The Lawbringer, contact Mat at mat@wowinsider.com.Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, The Lawbringer
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)
CC Jan 28th 2011 6:13PM
Most those people likely did buy WoW. They got tired of how the game was being run, but you got a contradiction in there.
"and in some cases removing the official accounts of private server users. "
Well if they really wanted their subscription fee, they wouldn't be banning people who were likely doing a little both of both, live and private servers. It wasn't doing any harm to WoW and quite frankly, it's not any of their business no matter how many times you want to say EULA EULA EULA over and over in big letters as if its the bible.
Long story short, f*ckem, there will always be private servers. Blizzard bans people, they go to private servers. Blizzard nerfs stuff, they go there. Deal with it.
Charles Fleming Jan 28th 2011 6:16PM
And let the downvotes begin. Anyone who isn't fanboying all over everything Blizzard-related gets it. It's a badge of honor since everyone wants to know what got said by highlightling it anyways.
Xsinthis Jan 28th 2011 6:24PM
Its the principle of it, Blizz obviously isn't so desperate for cash that they don't ban people, it keeps the integrity of the game up. No real excuse for using private servers
Aidan Jan 28th 2011 6:30PM
You almost got me to upvote CC's comment, Charles, just to prove you wrong. On content alone, I would have upvoted it.
But I went back, and the overly combative and ornery language of the original post annoyed me.
An the lesson is: guess what? People aren't getting downvoted because they disagree with the establishment, it's because they are making no attempt to be a reasonable member of a conversation.
Poltergeist Jan 28th 2011 11:56PM
"A major victory for our profit margins"
I highly doubt that, Mr. Morhaime. As has been mentioned in these comments multiple times, the people on these bootleg servers were either unable or unwilling to pay full retail. Most will either find new servers or a different game to pass their time with.
The small fraction of users that actually migrate over to the legitimate side of things will barely begin to cover your legal fees.
Ragnaorc Jan 30th 2011 10:32AM
Poltergeist wrote, "people on these bootleg servers were either unable or unwilling to pay full retail. Most will either find new servers or a different game to pass their time with."
The key word in your response is "bootleg". PIRACY is illegal. I, for one, an extremely grateful that Blizzard has invested the time, effort, and tremendous expense of developing the best MMO game in the world. They DESERVE every cent they make; if you are too cheap or dishonost to pay for their services, then go play something else. You do NOT have a RIGHT to play this game; you purchase that privilege with your monthly subscription. If, as you suggest, some people are "unable or unwilling" to pay for this legitimate service, then they need to do SOMETHING to earn the money necessary to subscribe.
I'm against piracy of intellectual properties. These pirates are parasites who prey upon the honest, legitimate labor of bright, creative individuals and companies.
Solitha Jan 31st 2011 6:55AM
CC, you're missing a major point of why Blizz does what it does.
Playing on a private server with a live paid account is practically begging for your account to be stolen. And who has to do all the work to pick up the pieces? Blizzard.
More work, without more income. The people who patron private servers cost Blizzard more over the long run than they're worth as customers. It makes good business sense to refuse them service, called "cutting your losses".
For that matter, where do you think Blizzard gets the money to pay their employees, who pick up after those idiots who buy gold, buy powerleveling, or play on private servers, and end up getting bitten? WE pay them for that.
Without the idiots, we'd either have a better game, or a lower cost. Private servers hurt US.
Pyromelter Jan 28th 2011 6:22PM
As someone who test drove wow on private servers before plunging into the retail game, I know the good and bad of it. Even the best private servers are buggy, low population, and large swaths of the game never work right. You'll never get a raid boss that works as it should, and you'll be lucky if even 10% of all the games quests work right.
That being said, a lot of the private servers cater to people in extremely poor areas of the world. I encountered a lot of people in eastern europe, south america, and poorer areas of asia, such as the philippines. Most also dedicate themselves to PvP, because they focus on getting the class skills and talents working right, as well as the smaller battlegrounds and arena, as these areas don't require the massive scripting that PvE encounters require.
I honestly feel that for the most part, private servers don't hurt blizzard or World of Warcraft. Scape gaming, which was a huge enterprise, may have siphoned off a bit, and blizzard was smart to go after them. But the people who play in private servers usually are doing it because they have absolutely no other choice, usually because of money, but also possibly because of country restrictions, and would not be playing retail anyway. Many people who love wow will go to the retail servers once they scrape together the money, and the private servers give them their fix in the meantime. To this end, I wouldn't be surprised if there was or are a few chinese private servers that aren't publicized in english speaking countries, because of the lag that country imposes on the expansions - for almost all of wrath, if you were in china, and you wanted to play wrath of the lich king, you either had to join a taiwanese server, or go private.
Regarding the legality of private servers, I really see them kind of like driving laws. A very small server with you and a couple of people messing around is like going 56 miles an hour in a 55 zone. Yes, it's illegal, but you really aren't putting anyone in danger or doing anything excessively bad. What scape gaming was doing was more akin to going 200 miles an hour in a 25 hour zone right by a school at 8 am when kids are all walking across the street. The 60,000 people on molten-wow? That's the amount of clicks that server gets their users to click on a top 100 site.
And no, I no longer play on private servers, and I would never go back - but I don't regret having played on them. I will say that it would be very difficult for blizzard to go after the players on these servers, because as I said most of them are not in the US. The servers themselves are fair game, and they know it, but I really think most believe if they don't make too much noise, they won't get hassled. I would tend to believe that because it is quite expensive for blizzard to file legal actions. Think they are ever going to see a dollar from the girl they sued from scape gaming? Not a chance, although it was definitely worth it for blizzard to shut them down.
Pyromelter Jan 28th 2011 6:24PM
Apologize for the wall of text. Here's a tl;dr - private servers are crappy, almost all players are people who wouldn't be playing on retail, and as long as they don't get too big, or popular, won't make a big enough wave to affect blizzard's profits enough have them bring expensive legal actions against them, even if they are technically in their rights to do so.
johnthediver Jan 28th 2011 6:50PM
What a lot of people fail to understand, despite how much money Blizzard makes from legit servers/subscribers private servers are stealing. There are costs associated with putting out a product, if you do not pay for it, there is no incentive to continue development of said product.
No body expects you to go to work every day and then not get a paycheck. You expect to get paid your $8.00 per hour, just like your boss expects $12.00 and his boss expects $100.00. If you stopped getting paid, you would stop going to work. (dollar amounts are just random to prove a point, I don't mean to imply you make $8.00 per hour)
Why do these "information should be free" or it is "just digital bytes" people insist they shouldn't have to pay for somebody's hard work?
Phredreeke Jan 28th 2011 7:16PM
John: If piracy is stealing as you say, then why do we have copyright laws? Wouldn't the existing laws against theft be sufficient? :P
Not defending pirates but legally they are two different things.
Saeadame Jan 28th 2011 8:27PM
We need anti-piracy laws in addition to normal theft laws because people are silly and consider it different because there is no physical loss of product. Let's say I steal a bottle of water from a convenience store. It's easy to say that I stole something, because I now have a bottle of water, but the convenience store doesn't have the money that that water bottle costs. Loss of product, with equal return in the form of money = theft.
If, however, I download someone's album on the internet (or DL WoW for free), there's no "hard copy" that's missing to prove that there should have been an equal return of profit. But that doesn't mean there SHOULDN'T have been an equal return of profit, just because it's not a physical object. That's why anti-piracy laws are in place, to say that "yes, this product, which does not exist in the real world has an actual value and can be stolen, and that despite there being no physical loss of that product to the company, it is still theft."
mazokuranma Jan 28th 2011 9:08PM
@johnthediver
There are ways to use private servers that don't necessarily involve theft. The only time I've been involved with a private server was one I ran myself for some friends. We were all in the military, and were deployed in an area without viable WoW connection. With only one exception of the entire group, none of us even bothered to suspend our WoW accounts during this time period, so were were even paying for a service we weren't utilizing. This allowed us to occasionally mess around in WoW since we couldn't actually use the legal service.
Mind you, a private server is very buggy and gets boring fairly quickly. At most you can do some 5 man content with a small group. Of course, messing with the rule sets does let you have some fun you could never have on live servers. How many people get to go one shot Nefarian with a single Pyroblast? Sure, it's only fun the first couple times, but still it can be entertaining. I also set default run speed to epic ground mount speed: instant Plainstriding on a Tauren! =D You'll never get that on a live server.
In the end, it never really compared to live, it was just a way to get to play some WoW when we couldn't do so the normal way, but for that reason alone I support the existence of the private server software. Such things can be used for valid purposes, without hurting Blizzard's bottom line.
Rimar Jan 29th 2011 7:14AM
When wow came out I avoided playing it because I knew how obbessive I can get in those types of games (having played Tele Arena and MajorMud). However I entually met a woman in the Ukraine and moved there and married her.
Not speaking Russian, I quickly found a had a lot of time and nothing to do with it. At teh time, our internet was metered (up and down) by the byte. The city we live in had an intranet that was free to use (no ability to get Internet from it unless you paid).
On this Intranet, they were running a private Warcraft server. So the freetime + boredom got me to download the client and start playing Wow on their private server. Soon I was hooked on wow. The problem with the private server was the bugs and how it was ran. Any time ther was a patch they'd delete the entire user base and you'd have to roll your toons over again. Quests didn't work right, abilities didn't work right (or at all) the laws of physics were meaningless (mobs on teh ground "flew" right up and killed you or there was the issue of walls, etc not holding mobs (once I went into the Scarlet Monestary and for some reason every mob in the instance aggo'd on me all at once and they zerged me.))
When I came back to America, the first thing I did after finding work and a place to live was start up a legit wow acccount (actually ran 2 as one was for my wife). I won't play on a private server again due to the broken code that "sometimes" worked.. But my point is had It not been for the private server I would NEVER have bought 2 accounts and continued to pay for them. In my case, the private server GAVE Wow profits (and still does and always will as long as I live and can play).
Aidan Jan 28th 2011 6:24PM
I agree with your basic message: Blizzard does an enormous amount of work to provide us with continually updating content, and if you want to access it, they deserve your money.
But.
60,000 non-paying customers. 60,000 retail box copies not bought.
This is a fallacy. Quite a lot of piracy of any media (I'd say "most" but i'm not prepared to prove it, so I'll stick with "quite a lot") is not by people who would be buying the product, were it not for the option of pirating. It's by people who would otherwise pass on the product, because they've decided that buying it is not for them, for one reason or another.
Mathew Jan 28th 2011 6:28PM
I've never been comfortable with the "these are people who wouldn't have bought it anyway" thing. It just never sat right with me. A pirate is a pirate, whether he would have bought the game or not -- he still downloaded the game instead of purchasing it.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but that it's something that never sat well with me.
Xsinthis Jan 28th 2011 6:28PM
Though in this case their getting a crappy shadow of the game
Aidan Jan 28th 2011 6:42PM
Matthew: I can't control what sits well with you, and that's fine :) But I can tell you I have spent a lot of time thinking and talking and working on related issues to this, and that I have a lot of reasons to make the claim I made.
Xsinthis: indeed, they are getting a crappy shadow of the game (at least, from everything I've heard, I have no direct evidence on that). Which makes it sound to me like it's people who either don't care enough about the game for it to be worth their $15 a month, but it is worth a couple hours here and there; or because they don't like some aspect of the official servers enough that they're willing to put up with a crappy version, in order to have some ability to play in a different set up.
In either case, I'd argue that a lot of them already made their decision to not pay for the game, private server or no. And I'd also argue that for some of them, the private server keeps them engaged in the game, and might eventually bring them back to a non-crappy version; whereas if the simply stopped playing, they would move on and not come back.
But again, I am in agreement on the point of Blizzard put a lot of time and energy and money into developing this game, and they deserve your money if you're going to play it.
Mathew Jan 28th 2011 6:42PM
No doubt. That's why we're all just expressing opinions here :D
Xantenise Jan 29th 2011 12:19AM
I knew several people as well who only played private servers on Tuesdays, when they couldn't go online - especially Oceanic players, for whom the servers would go down as early as 8PM depending on the time of year, and even earlier if you're in Western Australia.
So I agree - chances are most of those people on the private servers do own a retail version. Having played on one myself years ago (I was one of the Oceanic folks who got sick of early maintenance), it doesn't hold a candle to retail. Nobody who can help it would play on a private server, and only a private server.