Dead MMOs, emulator servers and the licence question

NCSoft switched City of Heroes off on 30 November 2012. On 4 January 2024, a server its former players had rebuilt announced that NCSoft had granted it a licence. That ending is rare. Most revived MMOs run without permission for as long as the rights holder puts up with them, and what decides their fate is mainly whether the publisher still has a use for the game.

Two ways to rebuild a server

An MMO ships only half of itself. Players get the client; the server, which holds the world and everyone's characters, stays with the publisher, and when the publisher turns it off there is nothing left to host. Reviving the game means supplying the missing half. That is a harder problem than the one facing modders who take over an abandoned engine, because the part that matters most never left the publisher's machines.

The first way is emulation: writing a new server that speaks the old protocol well enough to satisfy the original client. World of Warcraft's emulators are the best-known lineage, running from MaNGOS through TrinityCore to projects such as AzerothCore, which recreates patch 3.3.5a and is published under the GPL. The code is new, but it still runs on the publisher's material. AzerothCore's setup guide says the dbc files, maps and vmaps, all derived from the game client, are needed for the server to work properly, and it keeps the world and every character in MySQL databases.

The second way is less tidy: code for a working server turns up. That is how City of Heroes came back. In April 2019 it emerged that a private server had been running the game in secret for years. Within days, code for it was circulating widely and public servers appeared, Homecoming among them.

Either way, players are still running the publisher's client and looking at the publisher's art. Neither route gives the people running the server a game they own outright.

Nostalrius and the letter

Nostalrius ran World of Warcraft as it was at patch 1.12 from February 2015, for hundreds of thousands of players. In April 2016 its team received formal notice from lawyers in the US and France acting for Blizzard, threatening to take the team and OVH, the company hosting the servers, to court within a week. The servers went off at 23:00 server time on 10 April 2016.

Blizzard's J. Allen Brack answered the protests a fortnight later, writing that there was no clear legal path to "grant an operating license to a pirate server" (Blizzard Watch covered the statement). On 3 November 2017, at BlizzCon, Blizzard announced it was developing a classic server option of its own, and WoW Classic opened to subscribers in August 2019.

From Blizzard's side the takedown was straightforward. It still sold World of Warcraft, and a free vanilla server was competing with the subscription for the same players. The demand Nostalrius had shown was demand Blizzard went on to meet itself.

Why City of Heroes ended differently

NCSoft had no City of Heroes left to sell. Homecoming ran in the open from 2019 for nearly five years before the licence arrived. The announcement on 4 January 2024 set out what it meant for players: the game would stay completely free and funded entirely by donations, new content would keep being developed, NCSoft would keep ownership and would not get access to players' personal data, and the licence covered Homecoming alone. Other City of Heroes servers were left where they had been.

That last term matters as much as the headline. What the licence settled was the status of one team, the one that had run openly for years and asked players for nothing beyond donations, and nobody else's.

What tends to decide the outcome

Put the two cases side by side and a pattern shows, though no publisher has written it down.

The first question is whether the rights holder still sells the game or plans to. A revival of something the publisher is actively selling is competition. A revival of something it has abandoned is much easier to leave alone, and occasionally to formalise.

The second is money. A server that sells items or experience boosts under the name of donations looks like a business built on someone else's property. Homecoming's licence announcement is explicit that the game stays free and runs on donations.

The third is the host. The Nostalrius notice named the hosting company alongside the team. Pressure can end a server without ever reaching the people who run it, because it only has to reach the company renting them the machine.

Size cuts both ways. A server with hundreds of thousands of accounts is too visible to ignore, but a project that large and that organised is also the only kind with anyone a publisher could sign an agreement with.

What running one is like

Most of the work is content. Getting an emulator core to compile is the easy part; making every quest and boss fight behave as players remember takes years, and the world database, thousands of spawn points and loot tables, is where the effort goes. Players are unforgiving about accuracy, and whole communities argue over how faithful a given server is. The same databases hold everyone's characters, which puts unusual weight on how the server stores its data and on backups that actually restore.

The version never moves. A vanilla server stays on 1.12 and a Wrath of the Lich King server on 3.3.5a, because the client is fixed and nobody can ship a new one. Staff are volunteers, often spread across several countries, and the team can split or fall out over money like any other community. The difference is that the players have no fallback. Years of a character's history sit in a database run by people with no agreement with anyone, and one letter can end it inside a week, as it did in April 2016.

What a licence changes, and what it leaves alone

For Homecoming's players the licence removed the threat that hangs over every rebuilt server: the rights holder has said yes. It did not change who owns City of Heroes, and it did not extend to anybody else.

For other dead MMOs it is a template with a narrow opening. It needs a publisher with no plans for the game, a team willing to run without profit, and years of operating in the open first.

Compare the games that never needed one. The Half-Life mods that never stopped and most older shooters shipped their server software to players, so when the publisher lost interest the servers carried on, and games with LAN and offline play keep working for as long as someone has a copy. The licence question belongs to games whose publishers kept the server for themselves. Anyone looking for servers for a game everyone calls dead runs into that split quickly: some old games are hosted by their players by design, and the rest only by permission, or without it.