Earlier this year, the private World of Warcraft server Turtle WoW announced it would shut down after Blizzard served it a cease and desist and filed a copyright infringement suit. Second verse, same as the first: Project Ascension, a different private server project with several realms, is the subject of a new suit filed last Friday (thanks, Aftermath).
“The defendants … have built an entire business on large scale, egregious, and ongoing infringement of Blizzard’s intellectual property,” the complaint reads, noting that Ascension is “among the largest private WoW servers available today … with ‘over a million players.'”
If you’re unfamiliar with the fan server, it’s a modded, classless, free-to-play version of the game where you stitch together existing and custom spells to fashion unique playstyles. “Build the character of your dreams,” the website beckons. It also looks like there’s a different project in development which adds new ideas to World of Warcraft’s classic incarnation, not unlike Turtle WoW or that secret thing Blizzard seems to be working on.
Also similar to Turtle WoW, the server allowed players to buy in-game items with Donation Points—the complaint alleges this has made the Project Ascension team “millions of dollars.” The complaint also says the game’s pirate servers are “hosted on ‘bulletproof’ servers associated with the Russia-based Aeza Group,” which the U.S. Department of the Treasury has targeted for “enabling cybercriminals and technology theft”—an association which allegedly “signals willful intent to engage in unlawful activity.”
While the team behind Turtle WoW initially urged Blizzard to consider an official licensing framework for fan servers, no public word has come from Project Ascension just yet. Fans of the server are not hopeful: “Welp, we’re fucked,” reads one thread from Reddit user AnaTheSturdy.
User micro_Ampere replied, “Thanks for the memories. I had a better time here than I had on any other [private server] currently out there. Shame to see all that creativity gone to nothing. Good luck devs, but surely you knew this was coming.”