On Thursday Judge Margaret M. Morrow in the California District Court ruled that Scapegaming, a private server company who ran World of Warcraft private servers, was infringing copyright and ordered the site run by Alyson Reeves to pay Blizzard Entertainment the hefty amount of $88,594,589 USDs. WoW.com reports $3,053,339 of inappropriate profits, $63,600 for attorney fees, and $85,478,600 for statutory damages. Blizzard Entertainment sued Scapegaming on October 20, 2009 for copyright infringement. This is yet another blow to not only WoW private servers but private servers for other MMORPGs. Blizzard’s victory against Bnetd established that creating software used to set up a private server is copyright infringement but now it is possible to extract damages from those running private servers and that despite what may be said, running a private server is illegal.

What impact do you think the Blizzard Entertainment vs. Scapegaming casewill have for MapleStory private servers? Tell us in the comments below!

Sources: 1, 2, 3

According to our source three of DestinyMS’ PayPal accounts were locked by Nexon. Each account allegedly contained $300.00 USDs and were released after 90 days and our anonymous tipster told us the money in those accounts was not used to pay off server fees.

Duncan is now asking for donations to upgrade the server. A total of $3,850.00

Hello all you (loyal) players!

We want to upgrade our current server into a whole lot better, and we can get a good price for a good server.
But we need your help!

Current idea of Specs:
2 x Quad core E5504 2.0Ghz
32GB ram
2x300gb SAS 15k

However, we want even more if possible! have a better connection.
The current idea is that we use this as our main server, and maybe expand it. The more players we get, the ‘cheaper’ the server becomes per player. The more we can expand.

For the current plan we need about 3.000 euro (around 3850USD) to get started. There is no big rush and we can save up with money we have left over from our normal payments.
The amount might seem high, but this is for a whole year.

There are allot more options available if we manage to save up more money. So we might even open up more worlds (at possibly different rates, or not GMS alike… these options are open for discussion later). But this is just an idea.There are allot more things we could try.

But to achieve this, we need YOUR help. Considering we have over a 1000 active players (400-500 online), this would basically be an average of 4USD per player. And is entirely doable in our opinion.

To donate, contact a staff member either on forums, irc or ingame for more information.

Remember, we need your help to improve DMS. This idea is not for anytime to soon, does not have to be instant, but this is what we want to work towards.

The new site will also have improved donating implemented. Eliminating any waiting times

Regards.

DMS Administration.

Source

Allegedly Duncan is pocketing donations made by players believing their money was going to server fees (similar to a recent situation with the private Server AbideStory). It is believed this latest request for donations to upgrade the server is another ploy by Duncan to trick players into donating for the server in order to fill his bank account. We have yet to receive a comment from DestinyMS and will update this post with more information as we receive it. If you have any information regarding this article please contact us at maplenewsnetwork@gmail.com or use the contact form on our website.

Before you comment, please be aware that this post is currently based on one witness’s account and that none of this is proven. Let us know what you think.

AbideStory owner David is said to have pocketed over $400 in donations for his private server that were intended to go to server costs for their hosting on FranTech. A FranTech staff member had this to say on RaGEZONE:

Hey there,

He actually tried to ditch on us. He agreed to pay off what was left on his account (A fair amount to say the least), if we would give him till mid July to get some payments in.

I personally like David so I gave him the benifit of a doubt and worked out a deal with my billing department. They demanded I not let it slide but, well, I did as I did for many other people on these forums.

We noticed that things weren’t on our services anymore when we checked our RAM usage graphs and noticed it was lower by 5 – 6G of usage. We checked the abide one and it was sitting at only around 100MB – the amount Windows needs.

We checked the domain and noticed the nameservers were moved off of the Frantech ones and sure enough the gameserver too.

At this point all we’ve done is repo’d his domain but I wouldn’t doubt they simply go buy a new one and try to continue.

It’s a shame, I’ve tried pretty hard to help out some communities on here but even some of the more well known people on here have pulled the exact same thing. Abide is now the 3rd – 4th server that had a fair balance due and has (tried) to ditch on it.

Thanks,

Francisco

Considering most of the people donating are kids many players and bystanders are in an uproar over what appears to be someone tricking a bunch of kids into giving away large amounts of money and then keeping it for himself. Way to make a living.

FranTech are now attempting to the sell the database and source of AbideStory as retribution. AbideStory has since registered a new domain and is still trying to extract more donations. Player beware.

We have just received an update from someone claiming to be David, the owner of AbideStory.

This is kinda funny because I told Fran by the end of July I would pay him back and according to the calender it’s still July 2nd.

The reason I wasn’t able to pay off the hosting costs was that Raymond Owner of AkaiMS Hacked my paypal and took all the cash out of it, now this was few weeks ago but after that It was pretty hard to get donations + Frantech VPS is very good and fran tried to do everything he can to help but our server kept on crashing when passing 500 players online so I decided to move on to another dedicated server first before paying him off. Reason for that was because if I didn’t move to a dedicated server the server will deserted and that means no Donations. If I bought the dedicated server first More ppl + more Donations to pay frantech.

Who do you think is telling the truth?
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Let us know your opinion in the comments below!

OdinMS – The Beginning

OdinMS started it all and in a way successfully sealed the fate of private servers. On June 16, 2008 NEXON filed a lawsuit against OdinMS for 350,000 euros (over $500,000). Over 2 years later a once thriving private server community has been decimated by relentless attacks by NEXON Korea and NEXON America closing dozens of servers, development forums, and ranking websites. Without a constantly updated source coders and sites took up the cause but never to the extent of OdinMS. It was the beginning of the end for private servers.

FlowsionMS, TitanMS, FinalStory

These servers held up the crux of OdinMS by offering reasonable rates, good development teams, and regular updates. They too did not last long but understood and respected the creation of the game and selectively respected the copyrights.

A Mass of Servers and DestinyMS’ Last Stand

With a growing private server community and development websites like RaGEZONE and KryptoDEV 2009 proved promising for private server loyalists. Even if you weren’t a coder or very experienced with a little money and a few friends you could make your own server…running it off your own computer using a CMS and pre-made scripts. Online communities like RaGEZONE and KryptoDEV fueled the fire giving large resources to people interested in creating their own server.

This didn’t last long as NEXON America’s Lloyd Korn along with NEXON Korea’s law firms began sending Cease and Desists and DMCA notices by the masses shutting server after server down and finally playing hardball, threatening lawsuits if owners did not shut down their server. DestinyMS, a server based in the Netherlands, was the first to stand up to NEXON. Refusing to shut down arguing they had lawyers swearing their server was legal and that NEXON could not touch them for months DestinyMS fought NEXON. It became harder and harder as fewer people were willing to take the risk and with the combination of increased updates in MapleGlobal and MapleSEA the need for private servers decreased. DestinyMS remained online sporadically but quickly faded away.

The End

With NEXON America and NEXON Korea coordinating their efforts more closely private servers began to take a beating. Ranking websites cringed at the hands of NEXON and slowly server after server faded away. Increased updates in MapleGlobal and MapleSEA made it difficult for private servers to continue updating and interest quickly faded. The “top 10″ servers either closed down or became only a shadow of what they once were. Development sites like KryptoDEV, who despite their efforts to resist NEXON, closed. Although there are still servers online, most are shoddily designed and fail to reach above 100 users online consecutively and are nothing compared to the original top servers. Private server users will argue it is not over while Nexon will argue that it is. What can be plainly seen is that the official versions of MapleStory are doing better than ever while private servers have become flies obsessed with the light only to get zapped the closer they go. Private servers are known to come back when everything thinks they’re out but can they do it again? NEXON has won the battle, but have they won the war?

What do YOU think? Tell us in the comments!

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On February 13th KryptoDEV posted a Twitter update in which they admitted the lawsuit was in fact real,

@AkaiMS We have to be careful what’s floating around KryptODEV due to the filed lawsuit, on top of which the features…

KryptoDEV’s database was also wiped after one of their administrators (xcheater) was hacked which debunked rumors that Nexon had already shut them down.

So, over the past few months, it’s been nothing but hell for us. One of our administrators (xcheater) got hacked which turned out by the time I got home from work the entire forum was pretty well wiped, this was not the work of Irwin (x0r) but rather another individual unknown.

Despite the lawsuit KryptoDEV is still up and running. We have not received a comment from either KryptoDEV or Nexon America regarding the lawsuit against KryptoDEV. Please check back for updates as they come.

On January 25th the OdinMS creators made the first update in almost a year on their website. Read it below.

Update (01/25/10): After a period of silence something is happening again. We received a bill of indictment from the public prosecutor. Therein we are accused of having illegally copied, distributed or broadcasted a work without the agreement of the holder of rights. The contained report of the facts of the case is in our opinion quite dubious to say the least.
A Korean attestor is named to have prepared an incriminating expertise for which he seemingly was granted access to all of our confiscated data.
Our lawyers will now again request access to the records so we can review the actual evidence (including the expertise of the Korean guy) and decide if we want to name any other attestors or request hearing of evidences.
The lawsuit takes place at the juvenile court (since one of us is still younger than 21) of the Amtsgericht Neunkirchen which is the lowest level court possible in Germany.
(Please note: Contrary to all rumors this marks the beginning of the first lawsuit against us. Everything that happened before was just part of preliminary proceedings. There has been no kind of judgment so far.)

We will keep you posted if any new information arises.

Due to unable to pay for our bills for the past few months, or barely.
We already had a problem earlier with out domains, what, luckely, got settled before any damage ocures.

As of now, our DMS server has lost its connection untill further notice, we had about 1000-1500 euro standing open on bills, where we paid about 350 euro from yesterday.
I’m letting them charge 500euro from my bank account, after this is done, hopefully we will get our service back.

How long this will last, is unknown, might be a day, or 3-5 days. Maybe even till the end of the month.

As i’ve got more bills to pay, and i rather wouldnt give up that 500euro just yet (as i really need the money), but as i have no other choice…. i will have to, otherwise it will be byebye DMS, and i dont want that to happen.

Anyways, everyone’s updated. Enjoy the downtime.

Do not complain unless you donate(d). Thanks.

Regards,

DMS Administration.

Shadow has stated he will be paying €500 in an attempt to put the server online, but as one onlooker commented, “Flushing their money down the toilet is a better investment!” it doesn’t look like it will do them any good.

Source

We’ve talked about private servers on the site here before, but in case you haven’t heard the term: they’re unofficial servers, very much against WoW‘s Terms of Use, that are run by companies other than Blizzard. They’re shady as get out — some make you pay (and these are not people you’d ever want to give any credit card information to), some will delete or change characters on a regular basis, and many times they’re created just so whoever’s running them can mess around with GM powers, and cheat with any items they want.

So you can see why Blizzard would want them shut down, and that’s exactly what they’re trying to do with this lawsuit filed in the California Central District Court against a company called “Scapegaming” that runs at least one private WoW server (and they’ve apparently been running microtransactions in-game — selling in-game items for “donations” of money). The law firm working for Blizzard, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, also worked on the “Bnetd” case, which was another piece of unofficial server software that allowed players to play off of Blizzard’s Battle.net setup.

The complaint lists copyright infringement as the cause, which means they’re probably using the same argument targeted at other private servers in the past. We’ll keep an eye on this, but it’s very likely Blizzard will win this one unopposed, and Scapegaming (or at least just their WoW server) will get shut down for good.

Thanks, Phenom!

MorphineStory, the latest private server to attract Nexon’s attention, closed yesterday after an ongoing battle with a Vermont law firm hired by Nexon Korea. MorphineStory was the first private server to run on a version 0.75 source. I spoke with Darion (RaptorJesus) and he confirmed MorphineStory has closed down permanently.

Darion: Yes

Go report that the biggest and best private servers is now closed

and that no server will fill our amazing footsteps

Another administrator of MorphineStory, Vodka, announced yesterday that they were forced to shut down their website and forum.

Due to Lloyd Korn, we had to shut down our website. That unfortunately includes the forum. So the MorphineStory forum is no longer available.

Thanks, sorry.

Despite this it is rumored that the game itself will remain open until October 8th. It also seems quite strange that Vodka talks about Lloyd Korn when Nexon Korea was the branch that contacted MorphineStory.

When asked what happened to the site and forums Vodka reassured players that they’re on to, “Bigger and better things.”

Vodka:

Blame Nexon. We’re moving on to better things now.

MorphineStory was the largest MapleStory private server to run on version 0.75. This is a major win for Nexon and a major upset for private servers.

Hi,

It has come to my attention that Nexon (MapleStory license holders) are currently releasing a lot of statements regarding the “private server” scene and to which I feel obligated to say my part.

First and foremost , these servers are created by fans of the game, a lot of them still play the official servers and on the side create a server for others to play, their intention may or may not be profit but for Nexon to release the statements that they have is absurd.

99.99% of servers you will find here do not contain keyloggers, infact, we have a strict policy regarding this and have done since the day RaGEZONE was created, anybody found releasing virus’s, trojans or any malicious software that coincides with maplestory (or any other server) are instantly banned from our forums so for Nexon to say that by playing a server you will be infected with a trojan/virus is uncalled for.

Secondly, if a server does have a donation/cyber shop, 99.99% of them use PAYPAL, a free service which stores no information to the actual server owner other than your email address and home address, so how can they justify stating that “These illegal servers do not have legal or any other binding obligations to keep your information secure. This means your information has a high risk of being shared, leaked or stolen from unofficial, unsecure servers” its paypals liability for any information obtained not the server owners, paypal transactions do not release ANY credit card details.

Nexon should rethink its words and actions as each time I read something regarding this company they seem to lower their reputation.

MentaL