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Stories filed under: "fan servers"

‘City Of Heroes’ Fan Server Will Continue With An Official License From The Developer

from the the-heroes-we-need dept

Nearly four years ago, we discussed the online superhero game City of Heroes, which had been shut down officially by NCSoft, but which had survived in the shadows due to some fan-run servers. That story from 2019 was fairly interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it stood in contrast to some similar instances where fans have run online servers for MMOs that had either also been shutdown, or for original versions of those games that were no longer officially available, only to have to shut down those servers after legal threats or action from developers and publishers. Second, while there had been some concern about such threats from NCSoft among some that ran fan-servers, those were eventually put somewhat to rest by the first group to setup a fan-server stating that they had talked to NCSoft, might have more announcements in the future, but that play could continue without worry of legal threats from the company.

In that post, we mentioned that NCSoft, which has had a history of going legal on things like this in the past, had an opportunity to change the narrative and be awesome by working even more closely with this fan-run community. And, while it took nearly four years to get there, it seems NCSoft will be pursuing that route, having agreed to officially license at least one of the largest of those fan-run server sites.

In a post published today on the Homecoming forums, the folks behind the private server thanked fans for waiting patiently over the last few years after teasing in 2019 that it was in talks with NCSoft about the project.

“Homecoming has been granted a license to operate a City of Heroes server and further develop the game – subject to conditions and limitations under the contract – but, as between us and NCSoft, NCSoft still owns the City of Heroes intellectual property and its derivatives,” the devs behind the project explained.

If you read through the announcement on the forum, there’s a lot of good and only a few areas of concern. The current state of the game, the players and their characters, all remain. Nothing needs to get deleted or changed. In addition, the fan developers can still continue to develop new content for the game. Streaming and social media are also all fine to continue, so long as nobody puts that content behind a paywall.

The only thing that kind of sucks is that it looks like NCSoft is only willing to do this once.

As part of this new deal, it seems other private servers might not stick around. The team hopes players will come to Homecoming and they can centralize the community more. The Homecoming team confirmed that part of the deal requires a single “in-house installation and patching solution” and this was why the team spent time developing its own launcher.

Still, compared with the general blanket refusal to allow any fan-game scenarios to exist exhibited by most other developers and publishers, this is a very large step in the right direction.

So cheers, NCSoft. It’s nice to see a gaming company actually work with fans instead of against them.

Filed Under: city of heroes, fan servers, video games
Companies: ncsoft

Activision Shutters ‘CoD’ Fan Servers, Which Were Better, More Secure Than The Official Servers

from the officially-crap dept

Here we go again. We’ve talked several times in the past about game publishers and studios going out of their way to shut down fan-run servers for online play. The excuses for doing so mostly amount to either claims that intellectual property laws require this sort of policing action (it doesn’t), that the publisher needs to shut down servers for older versions of games to get people to buy newer versions (objection: asserting facts not in evidence), and some just seem to want to play strongman for whatever reason.

But the worst of these is when a publisher shuts down fan servers while either not bothering to put out a competing product themselves for legacy games, or when those fan servers are demonstrably better than the official servers. Activision serves as the most recent example of this, having shut down two fan-run server clients for legacy Call of Duty games, all while its own servers for online play are worse and less secure.

The first of these was SM2, which was a client for online play and included a bunch of mods to make the game different and, to some, better.

The first victim of Activision’s recent efforts was SM2, a major Modern Warfare 2 modding project whose development started over two years ago. Since then, the modding group has been working on updating that seminal 2009 release with new weapons, in-game perks, a redesigned UI, new streak and progression systems, and even a recent move to a more modern game engine.

Those efforts stopped last week, though, before the mod could even release its first version. The SM2 Twitter account reported that “a team member received a Cease & Desist letter on behalf of Activision Publishing in relation to the SM2 project. We are complying with this order and shutting down all operations permanently.”

These fan servers wouldn’t even be a thing if Activision would provide the same modding and functionality in its own official servers. There is obviously a market for this. And it must be a sizable enough market that Activision went to all the trouble to have its legal beagles craft and fire off the C&D notice. So why not just figure out how to make the same functionality work within the official servers themselves?

It gest worse with the second shut down, X Labs, which made a series of custom servers to play legacy CoD games in a more secure manner than on the official servers. See, online play for these legacy games is so chock full of hackers utilizing known exploits that, well, it makes much of the ranking systems and, sometimes, even playing the game flatly impossible.

Hackers on those official servers can kick other players from the game and reset their in-game rank and unlocked content, as Modern Warzone said he found out personally during a recent “throwback day” event in the player community. Playing these older games on PC also risks exposing your IP address and letting hackers insert malicious files onto your machine, he said.

“Basically, it’s just not safe,” Modern Warzone said. “If Activision Blizzard wants to continue to send out these cease and desists, they at least need to handle their security problems because it is egregious. You can’t just take away the ability for your fan base to play old games when it’s not harming you.”

Telling your fans, “Sorry, but we’re not let you going to play our games in a safe way and instead need you to use the official, wildly unsecure online servers we’re responsible for instead!” is not exactly treating your own fans well.

And Modern Warzone’s last point is the right one: if this isn’t really causing the company any harm, then what’s the point of this?

Filed Under: call of duty, copyright, fan servers, legacy video games, mods, video games
Companies: activision blizzard

Riot Shuts Down LoL Fan Server After Getting All Wiseguy With Its Developers

from the nice-project-you-have-there... dept

Way back in 2016, we discussed how Blizzard was very busy shutting down fan-made and hosted World of Warcraft servers, pretending like intellectual property forced it to do so. At the time, these fan servers were hosting _WoW_‘s vanilla experience, mimicking what the game looked like upon first release, rather than then current iteration of the ever-evolving MMORPG. While Blizzard has since come out with a vanilla experience product of its own, at the time, these fan servers were filling a market desire for a product that didn’t exist. Rather than figuring out a way to work with these fans, Blizzard just shut them down.

And now it’s all happening again with Riot, makers of League of Legends, an online game that similarly is ever-evolving. Fans of the game once more created a fan server that hosted the older, vanilla version of the game for those who wanted to play it that way. What makes this situation different, however, is that Riot only sent its C&D notice to the developers after the developers posted online an exchange they had with a Riot representative which took on a very 1920’s wise guy tone.

Speaking with PC Gamer, Riot said that it has sent a cease-and-desist request to the developers of Chronoshift after one of them posted an exchange with a Riot employee to Reddit earlier this week. The post showed a back and forth over Discord, during which a member of Riot’s security department named Zed wrote to a Chronoshift developer that Riot’s legal team “isn’t super thrilled about your project unfortunately and is looking for a way to come to a mutually acceptable end to it.”

A few lines later, Zed took the conversation in a decidedly bizarre direction, claiming that their team had archives of chat channels the Chronoshift team tried to delete. Zed followed that by saying, “you’ve obviously put a lot of work into Chrono shift, but I assure you that the chrono break is coming.” When the Chronoshift developer asked Zed to dispense with the “scare tactics,” Zed demanded that the developers hand over Chronoshift’s website and source code to Riot, as well as “all identifiable information” they shared with a specific developer. Zed then made the stakes of the situation clear: “Give me what I’m looking for and we won’t sue,” they said. “Refuse and we will.”

Riot told PC Gamer that, while it didn’t love the tone of its rep’s interactions with the Chronoshift development team, still the request for code and information about the project was a “standard” request. That sort of thing happens so that the rightsholder can figure out exactly to what extent the project was infringing. But it’s notable in this case again that Riot doesn’t currently have a competing project of its own for this sort of vanilla LoL experience. Despite that, and despite the fact that the Chronoshift team never took a single dime in any way for this project, through donations or otherwise, Riot still shut the whole thing down and pretended intellectual property forced its hand.

In Riot’s letter to the developers, which leaked despite the developers’ apparent wishes, the company also noted that Zed’s grab at the game’s source code was “a standard demand made to all developers engaged in unauthorized activity in order to assist Riot’s security team to understand the precise nature of the project, the manner by which it infringes Riot’s intellectual property, and other rights, and the extent to which the code has been shared or disseminated online.” In other words, it does not appear that the company is planning to use the work of fan developers to form the backbone of its own legacy servers, despite fan speculation to the contrary.

In the letter, Riot further explained that it is compelled to defend its “valuable” intellectual property from conduct that “enables and encourages acts of copyright infringement,” which in turn “harm Riot, its business, and ultimately, its employees.” This is similar to what Blizzard said when it infamously shut down popular fan-run WoW server Nostalrius back in 2016. However, Blizzard has seemingly eased off fan-run servers like Elysium in the wake of WoW Classic’s release.

Similar and equally chock full of bullshit. There are plenty of ways Riot could have worked with these dedicated fans on their project to allow it both to come to fruition while also protecting its own rights. But Riot would have to want to have that kind of outlook and interaction.

Instead, it sure seems like Riot instead wants to apologize for its own rep’s “Nice project you have there, be a shame if anything happened to it” tact. Certainly the rest of the League of Legends fandom should be sitting up and taking notice.

Filed Under: chroneshift, fan servers, league of legends, takedowns, threats
Companies: riot games

Blizzard Still Trying To Take Down WoW Vanilla Fan Servers While Refusing To Offer A Competing Product

from the no-fun-for-you dept

You will hopefully recall a post we did several years ago dealing with Blizzard’s decision to shut down a fan-run “vanilla” World of Warcraft server that stripped the game’s expansions out and let players play the game as it was originally released in 2004. As is so often the case in these kinds of disputes, we can at once stipulate that Blizzard was within its right to do this while still calling out whether it was the best decision it could make on the matter. The simple fact is that there were other avenues down which the company could travel other than threatening the fan-server into oblivion, such as working out a cheap licensing arrangement to make it official. The whole situation became all the more odd when you consider that Blizzard itself does not offer a competing experience with the fan-server, essentially ignoring what is clearly a desire within the fanbase for that kind of experience that Blizzard could monetize if it wanted. Instead, the fan-server shut itself down under the threat of a trademark lawsuit and Blizzard went on its merry way ignoring these customer desires.

Fast forward to today, some two years later, and it’s all happening again. Another fan-operated vanilla server, this one called Light’s Hope, is under attack from Blizzard for all the same reasons.

In recent years the project has captured the hearts of tens of thousands of die-hard WoW fans. At the time of writing, the most popular realm has more than 6,000 people playing from all over the world. Blizzard, however, is less excited.

The company has asked the developer platform GitHub to remove the code repository published by Light’s Hope. Blizzard’s notice targets several SQL databases stating that the layout and structure is nearly identical to the early WoW databases.

That, of course, is the entire point of the vanilla server. The very idea is to allow players to experience the roots of the massively popular online game. And it’s quite popular, too, with thousands of players playing this vanilla experience. If nothing else, this again should represent free market research and the uncovering of an entirely new and potentially lucrative market for Blizzard. It would be one thing if these takedowns were going on while coupled with statements from the company about its own competing service. But that’s not what’s happening. The takedowns happen and Blizzard ignores the market demands.

To be clear, again, Blizzard can do this. But, no matter the game of pretend its PR reps try to play, it certainly doesn’t have to do this. It could quite easily work something out with Light’s Hope to make it official and either monetize it directly or at least recognize that these types of fan projects do nothing but drive more interest and dollars towards the original product.

In the end, Blizzard comes off as anti-consumer and against its own passionate fan base. That’s not a good look.

Filed Under: copyright, fan servers, fans, world of warcraft
Companies: blizzard