Comment by pfdietz
7 hours ago
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.