Comment by RandomGerm4n
11 hours ago
There is no customer list. The only thing Blizzard could do is ban anyone using the same IP address as someone on Turtle WoW. However since NAT is widespread in many countries and many people don’t have their own IPv4 address this would result in an extremely high number of false positives. Not to mention that multiple people could be sharing the same internet connection. Besides there’s no reason to do that. Someone who also plays on the official server is paying for a subscription. Banning that person now would just mean less revenue for Blizzard.
Presumably Turtle WoW also had payment details. If those match up with the IP of someone playing WoW, Blizzard has a very good case for action.
And yes there's a good reason: playing on a pirate server directly and explicitly violates the EULA. Blizzard bans people for violating the EULA all the time.
Only a very small percentage of players purchase microtransactions. In addition Turtle doesn't have any payment information because the transaction went through a third-party service. So Blizzard would have to take legal action against that service first. Also the server itself is not “piracy.” The server is based on VMaNGOS which is open source and contains no Blizzard code. VMaNGOS can be downloaded legally from GitHub. Turtle WoW created its own content for the server some of which runs on the server side and some on the client side. The only thing that is actually "piracy" is the distribution of the game client (which they unfortunately did) as it belongs to Blizzard.