Blizzard wins injunction against vanilla World of Warcraft private server

You can get about as granular with what sort of World of Warcraft you'd like to play as you might with a deli sandwich or an ice cream cone: Would you like that classic or modern? Permadeath-only? That one expansion with all the alcohol-dependent pandas? But private servers like the popular Turtle WoW are still the only place players can find the WoW equivalent to Old School RuneScape: the classic game, but with new stuff.

That said, while some private servers for other games have gotten the go-ahead from the right people, Blizzard hasn't been gentle with these sorts of projects in the past. Before World of Warcraft's official classic realms serving up the vanilla version of the game, there was the private server Nostalrius, which got into legal trouble before long. Now there is Turtle WoW, which got hit with a lawsuit last September—and on Friday, a US district court judge ruled in Blizzard's favor.

You can find the court docs online, and they detail an order to cease and desist. Basically, the devs have been ordered to stop "developing, programming, coding, operating, updating, supporting, maintaining," et cetera, the server. Notably, it also prohibits the developers from passing along their code to facilitate a "'successor.'" That might seem cheeky, but these servers rarely just lay down and die.

Another document states that Blizzard and the defendants have reached a settlement which "is expected to result in a resolution of the action in its entirety," though the specifics are not shared. "The terms of the parties’ settlement agreements are confidential," the document reads. "However, the settlement is conditioned upon certain actions that are required to be taken by certain parties and non-parties over the next several weeks."

Shortly after the lawsuit was filed in 2025, the Turtle WoW team asked Blizzard for a fan server licensing framework. While the server didn't charge a fee for entry or technically have a cash shop, it did allow players to donate in exchange for in-game rewards.

Fans of the server are not pleased. "I get that intellectual property should be respected, but Turtle WoW is giving us what Blizzard won't," said Reddit user kurtkeoki on a thread sharing the news. "I would gladly pay a subscription for something similar to Turtle, but it simply doesn't exist."