Blizzard Awarded $88 Million Win Against WoW Private Server Host

A couple of weeks ago, I linked to an interview with Cory Doctorow, which took a look at gold farming in MMO’s from a slightly different perspective. Well, in the “world” of MMO’s, gold farming is a major issue that can affect mostly players, and not so much the game developer. But there’s another factor that does affect the latter, and in a big way. Private servers.

For those who don’t want to part with $15 per month for an MMO, or genuinely can’t afford it, private servers are big business. In one MMO I personally play, Lineage II, private servers have been an issue for almost as long as the game has been around, and even today, I’d be willing to bet that there are as many people on private servers as there are on real ones.

It’s no wonder that developers aren’t too pleased with private servers, and they have actively been seeking them out in order to shut them down, to varying degrees of success. In the case of Lineage II, NCsoft has successfully shut down some private servers in the past, but like most things related to piracy, as soon as you rid one pest, another surfaces.

In a recent case filed by Blizzard, though, a major warning is sent out to anyone who thinks that they can get away with hosting a private server. This company, “Scapegaming”, was ordered to pay Blizzard a staggering $88 million for statutory damages and attorney’s fees for hosting World of Warcraft private servers. To make things worse, Scapegaming had a micro-payment system, and over the years accrued a speculated $3 million. As it turns out, that was a very bad move.

It probably doesn’t help to run such a service in your real name either, or to leave a paper trail. That’s just begging for disaster.

A private server company, Scapegaming (aka Alyson Reeves), was ordered to pay Blizzard Entertainment over $88 million in damages after losing a lawsuit that was concluded last week. Scapegaming was operating unauthorized World of Warcraft servers and using a micropayment system to collect money from the servers’ user base, which according to the lawsuit amounted to just over $3 million. $85 million of that settlement was for statutory damages, and surprisingly only $63,000 in attorney’s fees.