This Has Happened Before...

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]who they just sued. Mind you, let us fly you out to Blizzard Entertainment. We want to meet you guys and talk to you guys and talk about classic WoW.

[00:00:11]Ladies and mostly gentlemen, today is a really big day in the World of Warcraft community. a day that either has people standing and cheering triumphant or uh the other side of the coin, people being very very angry at Blizzard Entertainment. A very big and monumental piece of news just dropped. And honestly, if you're someone like me and you've been playing the game for a very long time, kind of feels like deja vu right now. I admit a little bit of deja vu. And um I'm going to explain what all that means here in a moment. But, you know, first of all, you know, what happened? You might be wondering. Well, if you haven't yet heard the news, Blizzard Entertainment and Turtle WoW, the private server, their lawsuit has finally reached a conclusion in the courts. So, 8 months ago, seven or eight months ago, Blizzard sued Turtle WoW, a Classic Plus private server that was played by a lot of people. Blizzard sued them and pretty much said, "Hey, you've stolen our IP. you need to shut down.

[00:01:14]Court case has kind of been back and forth, whatever, just ongoing for the past several months. It's finally reached its conclusion. The courts, they have leaned in favor of Blizzard Entertainment, and now Turtle Wow is being commanded to shut down all operations. I I think the best place to begin with this video before like I kind of share my thoughts on this whole situation is just explaining what Turtle Wow is or was rather. and uh just kind of giving people a little bit of an understanding of, you know, why so many people are upset about this particular private server being taken down. And then I'll talk more about that whole uh deja vu bit and then I'll share uh my thoughts at the end of this, like my conclusions. So, what is Turtle Wow?

[00:02:02]Most likely everybody here has heard about the idea of classic plus. There's a lot of people that play World of Warcraft or who formerly played World of Warcraft and they really love the OG vanilla version of the game. They feel that that version of the game is World of Warcraft at its finest and they would love the idea to or they love the idea of playing Vanilla WoW again, but with some new things added to it that stay within the spirit of the game and how it was developed all those years ago back in the early 2000s. And this vision is classic plus. So classic plus is very subjective. you know, it, you know, varies from person to person, but classic plus is, you know, it's more dungeons in the original vanilla WoW world. It's more raids. It's a new profession, maybe it's a new class. Uh maybe it's new zones to explore.

[00:02:57]Certainly more quests, whatever. And uh classic plus has been something that people have discussed for a very long time. Tons of YouTubers, including me, have thrown ideas out there of what Classic Plus could be. But Turtle Wow was a private server that actually attempted Classic Plus. I don't know how many years ago Turtle Wow got started, but it's been a number of years. And they re-released a vanilla WoW private server with some minor changes. And then over the years, Turtle WoW has built what many consider to be the Classic Plus WoW experience.

[00:03:35]If you are somebody that you want to play classic plus and you want like the game to still feel like vanilla woow while you're playing it, Turtle Wow is that game. I mean, I guess to just give one example of uh what they did, but I could make an entire video just sharing like, you know, what these guys did that was so good and why people fell in love with their server. Um, you would kind of expect that if a server made a classic plus realm, like maybe they'd put a little bit of attention on the early game, you know, 1 to 60, but most of the attention, of course, would be on endgame, right? You know, new raids and adding mythic dungeons to classic WoW and maybe some new endgame zones or whatever. Turtle WoW didn't do this. Uh, one of the things that people loved about Turtle WoW is that the developers of this server put more of their attention on the greater world of Azeroth and the leveling journey. You know, the Classic WoW leveling journey is very, very long. You know, not everybody has been able to do it. You know, even people that have been playing Classic WoW for a very long time, not everybody has a level 60. It's a very slow process. And Turtle Wild just wanted to add more to the world. you know, tons of new zones for level 20 players, 30 players, 40s, 50s, whatever.

[00:04:53]New dungeons to explore while you're leveling up to 60, new items to find, a new profession or two to check out while, you know, you're going through Azeroth for a fresh new time. Yes, there was endgame stuff, but, you know, people really loved Turtle because of how much attention they put into the early game.

[00:05:11]um how much attention they put into it that encouraged like more cooperation and more community building, which is something that many MMOs lack today. And that's just one example, you know, again, I can do like a whole video talking about what Turtle Wow did very, very well. But, um, Turtle Wow had a really solid community, you know, very, very solid group of people that played on this server that loved it and had been playing on it for a very, very long time. And uh so as you can imagine, this server being shut down has angered a lot of people because many of the people that play on Turtle WoW are people that formerly supported Blizzard Entertainment and then for one reason or another they have stepped away and they want to keep playing WoW, but they feel like giving money to Blizzard makes them feel a bit dirty. Um, Blizzard is of course uh no stranger to controversy and uh lowquality releases and controversial changes to their games and so on and so forth. And Classic WoW has been some or excuse me, Classic Plus has been something that people have been asking for for a very long time. And many feel that Blizzard has never actually delivered on that, you know, that want from the community. And uh some people might say Season of Discovery was classic plus, but I think those of us that have played Classic for a uh like those of us who are really big fans of Classic WoW would never say that Season of Discovery was classic plus. Like Season of Discovery did not have the spirit of Classic WoW behind it. One of the big thing the main thing I want to talk about with this video though is how deja vu this situation is. It's It's so I I feel like I've stepped back into the past.

[00:06:58]Let me let me explain. Some of you guys were there, bro. Like, so a long time ago, well, not too long ago, but years ago, Blizzard released the Warlords of Drraanor expansion for World of Warcraft. And this expansion was garbage.

[00:07:20]It was the worst WoW expansion that we had ever seen up to that point. And uh and there are many reasons why, but the main reason is just the fact that well, you know, let's roll out the laundry list. The launch was terrible.

[00:07:38]Garrisons were underwhelming. Followers were not at all what Blizzard said they were going to be. Blizzard was getting just destroyed with controversies during this time behind the scenes. No content came out during Warlords of Drraanor. If you weren't there, I want you to imagine this. For the entirety of the Warlords of Drraanor expansion, only one patch came out for the entire expansion. One.

[00:08:07]Now, I know some people will say, "No, technically there was two Nixxium."

[00:08:10]Okay, technically you're right, but the first patch in big air quotes was the introduction of a selfie camera to World of Warcraft.

[00:08:21]You know that selfie camera toy? That was it. That was the patch. And then the actual, you know, first and only patch of Warlords of Drraanor was the final raid. So expansion came out, nothing happened. Got a selfie camera, nothing happened. Got the final raid, and we moved on into the next WoW expansion.

[00:08:39]So, Warlords of Drraanor was a complete catastrophe. It was a like it was the expansion though that I don't know about you guys, but Warlords of Drraanor was an expansion that had so much potential behind it. There was so much hype. So many people came into Warlords of Drraanor because of all the marketing Blizzard did for it. So many people were pumped to go to this early version of Outland and see Drraanor as it was like garrisons and stuff. Dude, Warlords of Drraanor had such great potential. And so when it came out, like the disappointment was thick. Like people were frustrated. They were pissed off.

[00:09:21]People were even asking for refunds on this expansion because Blizzard underdelivered so much. Anyway, anyway, what has this got to do with Turtle WoW?

[00:09:30]Well, let me explain. During this low moment, this very controversial moment in World of Warcraft's history, a private server appeared on the horizon. And this server was called Nostriius.

[00:09:45]Now, Nostalius was a classic WoW private server. It wasn't classic plus like Turtle WoW. It was classic WoW. And during the the expansion Warlords of Drraanor, this server absolutely blew up. So many people were running off of retail WoW to go play classic on a private server. Now, keep in mind this is before 2019. So many of you guys, maybe if you just recently started playing WoW, you know you're familiar with all these versions of classic WoW that currently exist. classic and hardcore and miss ofaria classic and season of discovery and whatnot. All this recycled, you know, old World of Warcraft content. Before 2019, this was not a thing. All right. Before 2019, Blizzard was adamant that nobody wanted to play an older version of World of Warcraft. Like, we had been asking Blizzard to make classic WoW Realms for years, and Blizzard was always just, "No, we're not going to do it. You think you do, but you don't. Blah blah blah.

[00:10:52]They were very much against it. So, here comes Nostriius, a vanilla WoW private server. And everybody's quitting Warlords of Drraanor to go and play on Nosttorius. And Nosttorius was different as a private server because, you know, Vanilla WoW private servers had been done before. You know, private servers have always been around, you know, in World of Warcraft's history. So, it it had been done before, but not like this.

[00:11:15]Nostarius was very much committed to recreating the original 1.12 vanilla experience and they were able to do it not only with a server that was incredibly bugfree. I mean not perfect but it was very much bug-free compared to your regular private server but also this server was capable of handling thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people at once. Like for most private servers like you know once you get like over a few hundred people the server starts suffering with lag and stuttering and disconnects and stuff. Not Nosttorious. Nostarius was doing great and it was just growing each and every day.

[00:11:59]So after a while Blizzard took notice of this. They took notice of this server that was giving to the community something that they had been asking for for years and Blizzard looked at them and they saw a threat.

[00:12:18]And so what did Blizzard do? Well, they contacted the Nost people. They sued them and they shut them down.

[00:12:26]I have never seen in in all my time playing WoW, I have never seen a backlash against Blizzard as big as the Nostalious One.

[00:12:40]It was like not even Shadowlands and like the hate that Shadowlands got as an expansion came anywhere close to how pissed off people were about Nostalius being shut down. If if you went on Facebook and you looked at a World of Warcraft post, every single comment was people calling Blizzard a bunch of scumbags. You went and looked at WoW Twitter, everyone's tweeting at Blizzard, calling them a bunch of like greedy, selfish [ __ ] You go on YouTube, you looked at like any YouTube video that was coming out during that time to promote Warlords of Drraanor or to talk about the game or whatever. And it was just getting bombed with all these comments just giving Blizzard the finger for what they had done. And I know I know the forums were full of hate. Like, it was everywhere. And I know there's some of you that maybe you weren't there or whatever and you're probably listening to this and you're like, "Well, it probably wasn't that bad." You know, you're you're probably just exaggerating a little bit to make like a dramatic story.

[00:13:45]The backlash was so bad that petitions were made against Blizzard Entertainment to be like, "Hey, if you're going to shut down Nostalius and deny us this classic experience, you need to give us the experience yourselves. you need to host your own damn classic WoW servers.

[00:14:04]Former WoW developers like Mark Curran, if you're familiar with him, literally took this big stack of signatures that people had made, went out to the Blizzard Entertainment offices, remember former developer, dropped all these signatures on Mike Moheim's desk face to face, told him, "What the hell are you doing?" And Blizzard's PR was so bad during this time that they had no choice. What? Blizzard did is they contacted the guys behind Notoriius, who they just sued, mind, mind you, and they said, "Hey, let let us fly you out to Blizzard Entertainment. We want to meet you guys and talk to you guys and talk about Classic WoW just because Blizzard needed to win a little bit of community PR points." So, Blizzard flew out the NOS team and whatnot. I don't know what happened like behind the scenes. Like I don't think those people paid Blizzard a dime, you know, in terms of like getting sued. Blizzard flew him out, gave him the whole like experience. They got to see the Blizzard offices. They got to talk to them, blah blah blah. And a short time later, Blizzard Entertainment walked out on the stage at BlizzCon and announced that Classic WoW was finally coming to World of Warcraft. And of course, it finally came out again in 2019. And ever since then, Blizzard has been milking classic WoW over and over and over again because for whatever reason, for reasons that modern Blizzard really I I think kind of struggles to understand. Like so many people still play classic even like to this day. Like classic might kind of go up and down, but people always just go back to it.

[00:15:50]They they love it. and getting Classic WoW officially hosted by Blizzard, no private server nonsense, it felt like a huge victory and it was at least for a little while and then things started to go a little bit downhill.

[00:16:05]So when TBC came out, Blizzard introduced level boosting to Classic WoW, which pissed off a lot of people.

[00:16:16]They started making some small quality of life changes to Classic WoW here and there which upset a lot of people. They introduced the WoW token to Wrath of the Lich King Classic sometime later which made a lot of people quit including me and my friends. We all quit when they put the WoW token in. It's like no, I'm not going to play it. Blizzard uh like the classic realms were polluted with bots and Blizzard was like, "Oh, you know, we're we're handling the bot problem." And yet there were just bots all over all the servers just ruining the local economies. It was man after some time there were people scratching their beards and scratching their heads thinking man like I feel like the notorious guys would have given us a better classic WoW experience than Blizzard did after Blizzard got their hands on it and decided to do it themselves. So here we are again. You know, this is why it's kind of deja vu, ladies and gentlemen. Like, because here we have this private server, Turtle Wow, which is giving to players a classic plus experience, which many players have been asking for for a long time. And not only is it classic plus, it's a very good version of classic plus. Like, people really, really enjoy it, those of us that have played it. And Blizzard has now gone after these guys, is going to shut down their server, is going to piss off a ton of people in the community, and then Blizzard's been hinting at it for a minute now. Like, Blizzard's going to do Classic Plus. It's very, very likely that at this BlizzCon, we're going to get Classic Plus announced, that we're going to have Classic Plus announced. But what's going to happen, people are saying, is like, "Oh, Blizzard's going to give us Classic Plus, and it's going to look great on day one." And then Blizzard is going to fill it with a bunch of BS microtransactions and the WoW token's going to get in there and there's going to be all these problems. There's going to be all this drama and people are going to sit there all melancholy and pissed off thinking, "Damn, I wish I could just play Turtle Wow instead because at least on the damn Turtle Wow server, I didn't have to pay $15 a month. And if I did want to give these bastards some money, it was just for some cosmetic [ __ ] and maybe to get some bags or whatever or like a a portable bank guy and like that was pretty much it, you know? not a level boosting and not being able to buy a ton of gold and not the pay to- win crap that uh you know Blizzard might make Classic Plus down the road. But I suppose we will see. We will see. Here are my thoughts though on the whole situation.

[00:18:46]Turtle WoW obviously they're stealing Blizzard's IP. Duh. you know, it was a matter of time or it was only a matter of time before Blizzard came after them and, you know, tried to get them to uh, you know, shut down through a lawsuit or just like whatever. Now, I will say one thing there I've seen some people saying that Turtle WoW is not actually going to shut down because yeah, like a bunch of US courts have told like Turtle Wow and friends like turn off your servers, but like I don't think anybody even knows where the Turtle Wow servers are located except for like the head admins. Like I've heard Russia, China, I've heard Germany, I've heard right here in the United States. I have no idea. Like no one's 100% sure. Like do you know exactly? So are they actually going to shut down? We will see. Some people are just saying like, "Oh, they're going to keep going. The only thing they won't do is they just won't accept uh donations from US players." Either way though, I mean, it's a stolen IP. Of course, Blizzard was going to go after them, you know, and if they do get shut down, like, okay, it's it's not really that surprising. And it does suck because Turtle WoW was a damn good server and the community was a fantastic group of people. Like, they are people that are very passionate about World of Warcraft and, you know, they have issues with Blizzard Entertainment today and they feel that like their their voice is not being heard by WoW. Now, what those issues are, I don't know. Some people don't want to give Blizzard $15 a month because of all the controversies over the years at Blizzard Entertainment.

[00:20:18]Some people don't want to give them money because they think the game is too damn woke. Some people don't want to give them money because they think Dragon Flight is boring like or Dragon Flight Midnight a few expansions behind.

[00:20:28]Anyway, um the point is like, you know, these are people that they want to play WoW. They're passionate about the game.

[00:20:34]They love the game. They love the world, but they don't love Blizzard Entertainment. But I genuinely hope that Blizzard gets as many turtle devs as possible if they're willing to disclose, you know, their real names and locations or whatever. And I truly genuinely hope that Blizzard gives them the notorial treatment. I hope that Blizzard flies these guys out and sits them down at a table and asks them a genuine question of what worked for you guys and what did not work for you guys. What were the lessons that you learned that you can teach us to make our version of Classic Plus as good as possible because like I want Blizzard's version of Classic Plus to blow Turtle WoW out of the water. I want Blizzard to make Turtle their [ __ ] dude. Like that's what I want. I want Blizzard to win, bro. Like I don't want people like in five years mourning Turtle WoW and wishing that they could go back to that server. I want people to be delighted to be playing Blizzard like classic plus. Is that going to happen?

[00:21:39]Probably not. But but we'll see, you know. And the thing is is Blizzard like I I have said this many times. Many people have said this like this is the like a a common catchphrase when it comes to Blizzard Entertainment.

[00:21:54]Blizzard Entertainment is at their best when they are using other people's ideas. Blizzard is a horrible company at coming up with original ideas. Like sometimes they strike gold every now and then, but Blizzard don't know how to come up with a fun and original idea. They need the community to come in and tell them what to do. Blizzard didn't think classic WoW was a good idea. The community came in through Nostalius and through all the passion behind it and told them, "You're a bunch of idiots. Give us classic WoW."

[00:22:27]The community was the one who gave Blizzard the idea for doing hardcore WoW. The community was the people that gave Blizzard the idea of just doing classic plus in the first place. Dragon flying. Everyone loves dragon flying.

[00:22:39]Man, Blizzard was a genius for coming up with dragon flying, right? Oh, wait. No, they stole that from Guild Wars 2. You know what I mean? Like Blizzard never does anything like anything good that Blizzard does is never their idea. You know, someone else did it and then Blizzard comes in and like yoink and they grab it and they try to do a better job at it. And sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. And that's not just with World of Warcraft. That's with their other games as well. And that's what I hope happens in this situation.

[00:23:06]Like Blizzard Entertainment themselves, they're playing Turtle WoW. They played Nostalius back in the day. So yeah, they they love this stuff, man. Of course they do. They're getting ideas from it and I hope they continue to do it. And I really hope that they sit down with the Turtle Wow developers and they ask them questions about how they can make the best version of Turtle Wow possible.

[00:23:25]That's my hope anyway. But for now, it is a very deja vu situation, man. Like even like the animosity like that people are like throwing towards the server.

[00:23:34]Like man, I remember when like Nostalia got shut down, people were like, "Yeah, like screw that server." or it was just a stupid pay to- win private server and like the devs were all just greedy and blah blah blah and it's like it's like copy paste same thing with Turtle Wow now like oh you could just buy level 60 in the store and Turtle Wow and blah blah blah and it was just pay to win you know and the admin was a pedophile behind the scenes and blah blah blah blah like but even like on the positive side like I'm seeing like the same comments like in defense of the server you know it's Like it's like this server is showing Blizzard Entertainment like you know the the path forward. This server was necessary for Blizzard to progress as a company and become a better game company. And it's just like like how many years ago didn't race get shut down? Like like seven or eight. I don't even know how many years it's been. It's like it's like whoa. I'm I'm like seven years younger. Like what the hell's going on? So anyway, I definitely feel though for those of you that played Turtle WoW and you're losing your level 60 characters and stuff, you know, I can only imagine how much time you invested into those characters. But I mean, I guess we'll see what happens with uh with Blizzard Classic Plus. But then again, you [ __ ] ain't going to play like Blizzard Classic Plus. You're just going to wait for the next Turtle Wow to come along. You're going to wait for Tortoise Wow. You're going to wait for [ __ ] Monkey Wow or whatever to come out and you're just going to play that.

[00:25:03]So anyway, I don't think Blizzard won you guys back, you know, as customers by taking down your server, but I don't know. You can let me know down in the comments section below if Blizzard shutting down Turtle inspired you to come back and play the main game. But anyway, guys, I guess that's it. I suppose we will see what happens. We'll see if Turtle WoW actually shuts its doors. But, uh, for now, at least to my understanding, they're still going.

[00:25:28]Thanks for watching, though, everybody.

[00:25:29]And I made a video about what I would like to see from Classic Plus. It was one of the first videos that I made here on this channel. So, if you want to check out that video next, it's on your screen right now. And uh yeah guys, thanks for hanging out and I'll see you with my next