Blizzard Sues To Take Down Another Private World of Warcraft Server, Project Ascension (aftermath.site)
- Reference: 0183820546
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/26/06/14/0743231/blizzard-sues-to-take-down-another-private-world-of-warcraft-server-project-ascension
- Source link: https://aftermath.site/blizzard-project-ascension-lawsuit/
> 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, [2]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."
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> 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," [3]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...."
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> 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 [4]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; [5]players gathered online to mourn the end of the server .
[1] https://aftermath.site/blizzard-project-ascension-lawsuit/
[2] https://www.scribd.com/document/1050564024/Project-Ascension-lawsuit-via-Aftermath
[3] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0185
[4] https://www.mmorpg.com/news/blizzard-wins-lawsuit-over-turtle-wow-private-server-settlement-reached-2000137786
[5] https://www.gamesradar.com/games/world-of-warcraft/it-has-been-an-honor-world-of-warcraft-fans-gather-in-popular-private-server-turtle-wow-to-say-goodbye-as-it-ends-8-year-run-following-blizzard-lawsuit/
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.
Goes back far... (Score:3)
This goes back really far with Blizzard. I think it was 2000 or 2001 when they sent a cease and desist to an open source project called bnetd. It let you host your own Warcraft I/II and Starcraft games. It could also allow people to use pirated betas of Warcraft 3 in multiplayer mode on a local network. Back in this year, Counterstrike was still a mod and everyone hosted games locally using the free Half-Life server Valve provided (that could run on Linux).
Gamers should have turned away from games that didn't allow local hosting, but not enough did and here we are.
Complexity (Score:2)
I figured the WoW backend would be way too complicated for a small team to make any kind of clone. I guess not.