14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard has been recently awarded with 88 million dollars in damages from Alyson Reeves, the operator of a World of Warcraft pirate server. Blizzard had originally filed the lawsuit in October last year because Reeves implemented a very successful micro-transaction system.
According to a series of court documents obtained by Gamasutra, Blizzard Entertainment won a lawsuit regarding an unauthorized World of Warcraft server entitle Scapegaming, run by one Alyson Reeves.
The defendant had started to ask the 400,000 strong community behind the server for donations in exchange for in-game items or advantages. One could pay up 1 dollar to advance their character two level or even 300 dollars for a pack of epic and legendary weapons and armor.
This proved to be quite profitable for Reeves, at least at first, as Scapegaming managed to gather over 3 million dollars in gross revenues, all through PayPal.
The US District Court judge decided that Reeves must pay the three million dollars, alongside 85.4 million dollars in damages and 64,000 in attorney's fees to Blizzard, totaling in a staggering 88 million dollars.
During the lawsuit, Blizzard also reported that Scapegaming had around 427,000 member and that 40,000 players would be online most of the time. The damages were calculated by multiplying the number of members with 200 dollars, around how much they would owe Blizzard, given they played the game legitimately.
Reeves did not respond to the suit and it is unclear if she would be able to pay this huge sum to the PC gaming giant.
Scapegaming was just one of the many so-called private servers of World of Warcraft currently operating worldwide. Owners of such pirate outfits can modify the game as they wish, but players do not have access to the same level of quality from the original game, with many of the features and fixes of World of Warcraft being disabled.