Depressing news

[WarpathEQ]

Pretty massive leap from running a community based, nostalgia based emulator that has been discussed and run in accordance with the demands of the IP holder and creating a rogue project with no blessing that completely changes how people interact with the IP and monetizes it in the process. With none of those proceeds benefiting the proper party (the IP owner).

Its always been extremely clear that monetization of any project using Everquest IP was a hard no for the IP owner. Its why the P99 staff has always been 0 tolerance, no questions asked, you're gone forever if you're found to do anything involving RMT. Anything short of that and the IP owner has been quite reasonable with supporting and sanctioning a community around classic and nostalgia based projects.

Take that a step further into litigation. Its extremely easy to litigate damage against your IP when a competitor is found to be using, altering, and profiting off your IP. Case and point the judge shut down THJ with a preliminary injunction prior to the trial even playing out in court. Its easy to pull up bank records and show user counts and monetary gains and compare them against the IP holder's internal monetary performance being negatively impacted during the same timeframe. 100% of profits derived from Everquest IP are due in full to the IP owner, that is the whole point of IP existing.

It would, however, be much harder for the IP holder to make a claim of damages against a completely free, non monetized, historical representation of their IP that has 0 basis for impacting the economics (profitability) of their IP. Even if there wasn't an express written agreement between daybreak and the party (i.e. P99 or more recently Quarm). Knowing this the IP holder did the smart thing and decided to foster the community with the knowledge that it would likely only benefit the value of their IP by maintaining awareness. At the same time they ensured they had a hand at the table to work with these projects to avoid deal breakers like monetization and avoid the need for going after a project in court.

[shovelquest]

Nostalrius had a strict no monetization policy and they were shut down same way.

Hope this helps.

[Reiwa]

Originally Posted by WarpathEQ [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Pretty massive leap from running a community based, nostalgia based emulator that has been discussed and run in accordance with the demands of the IP holder and creating a rogue project with no blessing that completely changes how people interact with the IP and monetizes it in the process. With none of those proceeds benefiting the proper party (the IP owner).

Its always been extremely clear that monetization of any project using Everquest IP was a hard no for the IP owner. Its why the P99 staff has always been 0 tolerance, no questions asked, you're gone forever if you're found to do anything involving RMT. Anything short of that and the IP owner has been quite reasonable with supporting and sanctioning a community around classic and nostalgia based projects.

Take that a step further into litigation. Its extremely easy to litigate damage against your IP when a competitor is found to be using, altering, and profiting off your IP. Case and point the judge shut down THJ with a preliminary injunction prior to the trial even playing out in court. Its easy to pull up bank records and show user counts and monetary gains and compare them against the IP holder's internal monetary performance being negatively impacted during the same timeframe. 100% of profits derived from Everquest IP are due in full to the IP owner, that is the whole point of IP existing.

It would, however, be much harder for the IP holder to make a claim of damages against a completely free, non monetized, historical representation of their IP that has 0 basis for impacting the economics (profitability) of their IP. Even if there wasn't an express written agreement between daybreak and the party (i.e. P99 or more recently Quarm). Knowing this the IP holder did the smart thing and decided to foster the community with the knowledge that it would likely only benefit the value of their IP by maintaining awareness. At the same time they ensured they had a hand at the table to work with these projects to avoid deal breakers like monetization and avoid the need for going after a project in court.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

[sammoHung]

Originally Posted by WarpathEQ [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

It would, however, be much harder for the IP holder to make a claim of damages against a completely free, non monetized, historical representation of their IP that has 0 basis for impacting the economics (profitability) of their IP.

This type of sentiment will get you called a Daybreak Shill on any forum or discord related to THJ. It's bad out there. None of those asswads give a shit about the decades long history of EQEmu, they just wanted P2W EQ with QoL changes.

[loramin]

Originally Posted by shovelquest [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Nostalrius had a strict no monetization policy and they were shut down same way.

Hope this helps.

I feel like you're not telling the whole story. They were shutdown (via a "cease and desist") in 2016, but ...

Originally Posted by Wikipedia (with added line breaks)

After a month or so of large scale protests, Blizzard invited the Nostalrius team to the Blizzard HQ to present the case for Vanilla. An eighty-page "post-mortem" document describing the development of Nostalrius, the problems that happened and some marketing strategies was presented to Blizzard, and after some time, released on the Nostalrius forums.

In the following six months, Blizzard did not respond at all to any communication from the Nostalrius team.[5] Allen Brack and the World of Warcraft development team announced they would not be making any statements about Vanilla at the 2016 BlizzCon convention.[6] Consequently, the Nostalrius team released their source code to Valkyrie-WoW, another long-standing private Vanilla WoW server, hosted in Russia, and the Nostalrius servers returned on December 17, 2016, under the name of Elysium Project, with the player database as it had been just before the shutdown in April.[7][8]

In October 2017, the Elysium servers were taken offline when it had been revealed that some staff had been involved in gold selling and character manipulation, which went against the 'Blizzlike' philosophy the team purportedly stood for.[9] The servers returned one month later, with the project rebranded as Elysium Project "Nighthaven".[10]

So, in a completely different scenario with a different company (a company that would later directly compete with "classic" servers ... unlike Daybreak, which has expressed no interest in running a P99-like classic EQ server), a fan server did get shut down. But Blizzard took so much flack that they invited the people behind it in, and that same year the project was back up again.

It then got taken down again, this time for RMT ... but was back up a month later ... and it's still live today (under it's new name).

[Duik]

Originally Posted by shovelquest [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Unwritten rules are unwritten because they’re not rules.

You're a fucking Idiot and part of the problem.

[shovelquest]

Elysium only drives my point even further.

Blizzard targeted Nostalrius for its massive visibility (~800,000 accounts) even though it had strict non-RMT policy and no donation system.

However:

Elysium’s smaller, community drew less attention even though it inherited Nost's assets and added a FOR PROFFIT donation system.

Blizzard never shut Elysium down.

Elysium self imploded in 2017

After it was revealed that admins Shenna and Crogge embezzled ~€2,000/month from donations and collaborated with gold sellers for personal gain, tainting its non-profit stance. This led to its collapse, not Blizzard action.

[Bisonzabi]

I think the biggest impact in all of this is that because it spooked the shit out of so many other server owners, you're going to see less incentive for custom made content. Quarm mused around the idea of making a fork of a new miniature expansion and an undead froglok race ect, but due to the contract agreement that the owner made with DBG, that won't ever happen.
(https://storage.courtlistener.com/re...19107.53.5.pdf

[loramin]

Originally Posted by shovelquest [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Elysium self imploded in 2017

I'm confused: that link I found looks pretty live, and their Discord has 19,128 members (1,590) live, with people actively talking about the game even today. It doesn't look very "imploded" to me, and again Wikipedia reported that they were back up about a month after the event you mentioned (just rebranded as "Elysium Project 'Nighthaven'").

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Bisonzabi [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I think the biggest impact in all of this is that because it spooked the shit out of so many other server owners, you're going to see less incentive for custom made content. Quarm mused around the idea of making a fork of a new miniature expansion and an undead froglok race ect, but due to the contract agreement that the owner made with DBG, that won't ever happen.
(https://storage.courtlistener.com/re...19107.53.5.pdf

Agreed: the staff here talked about adding custom content many years ago, and I always hoped it would happen after Green 2.0. With everything that's happened, I have a hard time seeing DBG let them even add a new tradeskill recipe, let alone a new (or rather, revamped) zone.