Blizzard Sues To Take Down Another Private World of Warcraft Server, Project Ascension (aftermath.site) 32
"Blizzard Entertainment is continuing its crusade against private World of Warcraft servers," reports the gaming news site Aftermath:
The company filed a new lawsuit on Friday in a California court against the makers of Project Ascension, alleging copyright infringement, Digital Millennium Copyright Act violations, and other claims. Blizzard Entertainment claims that Project Ascension is a "lucrative way to exploit and profit from the popularity of the WoW game experience," according to the complaint, obtained by Aftermath. Blizzard Entertainment's lawyers say in the complaint that Project Ascension purports to have "over a million players." Lawyers write that the developers have "distributed (and are continuing to distribute) millions of pirated copies of Blizzard's copyrighted WoW game software."
They also allege that Project Ascension's servers are hosted on Russian "bulletproof" servers with Aeza Group, a company that was sanctioned in 2025 "for its role in supporting cybercriminal activity targeting victims in the United States and around the world," per a U.S. Department of Treasury press release... Project Ascension lets players combine pieces of World of Warcraft's different classes to build unique characters. It's free-to-play, but players can purchase in-game currency, Donation Points, to buy things in-game, such as cosmetics and experience boosts. Blizzard Entertainment's lawyers assert that Project Ascension has made "millions of dollars from the sale of Donation Points...."
Blizzard Entertainment successfully sued a popular World of Warcraft server called Turtle Wow last year. The project had been running since 2018, taking donations from players for the free-to-play server. Both sides announced in April 2026 that they'd reached a settlement after Blizzard Entertainment was awarded a permanent injunction to shut down Turtle WoW. The details of the settlement were not made public. Turtle WoW was shut down for good shortly after May 15; players gathered online to mourn the end of the server.
They also allege that Project Ascension's servers are hosted on Russian "bulletproof" servers with Aeza Group, a company that was sanctioned in 2025 "for its role in supporting cybercriminal activity targeting victims in the United States and around the world," per a U.S. Department of Treasury press release... Project Ascension lets players combine pieces of World of Warcraft's different classes to build unique characters. It's free-to-play, but players can purchase in-game currency, Donation Points, to buy things in-game, such as cosmetics and experience boosts. Blizzard Entertainment's lawyers assert that Project Ascension has made "millions of dollars from the sale of Donation Points...."
Blizzard Entertainment successfully sued a popular World of Warcraft server called Turtle Wow last year. The project had been running since 2018, taking donations from players for the free-to-play server. Both sides announced in April 2026 that they'd reached a settlement after Blizzard Entertainment was awarded a permanent injunction to shut down Turtle WoW. The details of the settlement were not made public. Turtle WoW was shut down for good shortly after May 15; players gathered online to mourn the end of the server.
Complexity (Score:2)
Re:Complexity (Score:4, Interesting)
I applied for a job at Ascension, as C++ developer.
Unfortunately I am not on the team yet: so I do not know about the backend.
While Blizzard clearly has a case ... their arguments are false. The game is cost free, and 100 times better than everything Blizzard offered after Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King.
What they probably want is an agreement to give them access to the code and art work, because they are to stupid to progress their own game in a way that OLD players want.
They thought they can replace dropping old players with new kids and earn money ... however making a kids game makes old players drop out faster than new kids hop on the game.
I played WoW classic for a year ... until it got clear they go into the Pandora shit hole ... so no idea how current wow looks like, and since I played Ascension (and some other private servers): absolutely not interested at all to play Blizz games again.
Pay for client or service, not both (Score:2)
WoW has always amazed me because Blizzard was able to sell both the service and not just the client (which is common) but also updates. What the hell are you paying for with the service if not the updates? Because running the servers is not the hard part, the amount of data is small and the latency is not as critical as in many financial applications (to say nothing of the security) so it's relatively ho-hum. Highest grossing game of all time, possibly the most profitable as well.
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There are people willing to pay for a regularly updated and expanded MMO like WoW, which is relatively free of predatory stuff like loot boxes and microtransactions, unlike most of its peers which have long ago gone down the freemium route.
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I get paying, and I maybe get paying for the client once and for the service, but I don't get paying for the client and paying for the service and paying again for updates.
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The "updates" are far more than just functional updates and fixes. Those happen regularly as part of the service you are paying for - constant tweaks and fixes that make things work better over time, fix bugs that couldn't be tested at scale, etc.
The "paying again" is for new content. Nobody has to buy the expansions - you can continue playing just fine without. But you won't be playing the new content you didn't buy.
This is no different from 15 different "Call of Duty" games coming out one after the oth
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldnt underestimate the complexity of an MMO. They are genuinely some of the most complicated software assemblages ever created, and usually involve teams of hundreds of people working for upwards of a decade just to get a beta out the door.
Creating a cloned server is a hell of an achievement.
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Well, they target specific game clients at specific patch levels. Wotlk content hasn't changed since whenever the last patch hit. That's one of the most populate stopping points and we've pretty much got those servers perfect. Now we're almost done making the bots as perfect too. It's basically to the point where you can do single player wow, including pvp and raids, though I haven't tried doing wotlk raids with all bots but given the mods, I'm sure it's doable. Might need to dual box at worse, but I sort o
Goes back far... (Score:5, Interesting)
Gamers should have turned away from games that didn't allow local hosting, but not enough did and here we are.
Re:Goes back far... (Score:4, Informative)
...but not enough did and here we are.
I stopped buying and playing all Blizzard games at that point.
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I miss BANGG!
For the young folks...Us ancients would pack up our rigs, and drive to some shitty venue and shoot the F out of each other in the conference room. Standing up and pointing at the guy you just head shot, shouting "BOOM" is way more fun socially.
*Bay Area Network Gaming Group !
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So mmos never would have existed?
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https://github.com/ProjectSWGC... [github.com]
So I guess that evil would be unavoidable.
Ridiculous (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, they're not paying Blizzard. But they're also not using any of Blizzard's resources (by not being on Blizzard's servers). So it takes nothing away from Blizzard.
People should be able to play how they want. It's ridiculous that the laws are against this.
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Considering these custom servers was what compelled Blizzard to launch Classic WoW as an actual product and it has stayed popular since then I think there is something to be said about that theory in terms of how it applies to an MMO like WoW, seems like many of those players were willing to pay for the experience and Blizzard in that case was smart enough to give it to them.
If the tweaks this server made to the game are compelling enough maybe Blizzard will launch an official product with them as well.
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Many people aren't going to trust that Blizzard won't just make undesirable changes again. Many people just don't want to pay, period. Many people just want to be on a private server (even though for many other people the mas
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I think for Blizzard the success of Classic WoW (and Classic+ which is expected to be announced and likely part of the timing of this) proves that as you said, some measurable amount of people are willing to pay up if given the right offer.
Exactly, if you don't trust Blizzard with the game then go play FFXIV or ESO or GW2 or any of the various other MMOs. If you want to do this private server thing then you also have to expect that shit will get shut down as Ascension players will find out shortly. Losing
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The projects that make the private servers possible (which are not affiliated) are still doing their thing though. The development has reached the point where you can effectively make wow a single player game, including raids and pvp. It's all very easy to host your own wow server for a enough people to do raids the old fashioned way as well. The bots are good enough that pvp is fun. Bots are on par with any random BG player and you can tinker those settings as desired.
The real fun of the private servers is
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Yes people can go play something else, but it's ridiculous that the law doesn't allow people to just play WoW the
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I mean sure if we want to say pretty much the entire structure of IP law should be upended, sure, I'll get on board with that but this is far and away a very clear cut case of IP law that would be considered fair in almost any paradigm and I think the idea that random private people can charge for, lets be real, stealing someones else's work to make a case for changing IP law is at best, counterproductive to that effort.
The only reason the people on these servers have the desire to "play WoW the way they wa
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Yes, so they can all go through the grind of leveling a new character up, because they legally killed the last one they already went through that for. And now they get to pay a monthly fee to do it all over again!
Yay!
Nobody is going to do that.
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More than that, they already paid Blizzard for the software, and probably paid for years of their hosting service when that software was new.
They are not interested in the latest version of the game, because they have been in "retread" mode for like a decade at this point. Have they even stopped releasing new versions of old content redressed as somehow "new" yet?
The Panda expansion was the last straw for a lot of people, and that was over 10 years ago. None of the people playing pre-Pandas are going to u
You DON'T OWN a game anymore !! (Score:2)
no doubt (Score:2)
There's no doubt some infringement going on, it's probably legally actionable. I played PA and liked it very much, but ended up at Turtle Wow because it was a little less financially aggressive and just did a better job with the parts I enjoyed.
That said, I'm reasonably sure PA doesn't distribute the 1.12 wow client themselves, so that assertion by Blizzard is narrowly mistaken.