Please Open If Horizon Had A $1 Monthly Fee Again

Covfefe

Can't tell if this is a really good joke or if we just found the ultimate loophole to avoid these problems.

Someone should've told all those other MMO private servers that got shut down, all they needed to do was not incorporate a business and then nobody can sue you for any of these problems.

Someone inform Buzzfeed of this one trick MMO developers HATE!

Seriously though, someone should answer my questions. If there's no business behind this, who's holding all that sweet, sweet cheddar, and who's holding them to any of their promises to spend it on Horizon? What's stopping them from turning off the server, website, etc.

He thinks a streamer gave more than a pittance worth of money towards this.

I actually know how much money Ninja donated.
Hint: It was less than $5k

STOLLEN

Can't sue what does not exist (or is incorporated in the Cayman's).

Pretty sure you can use an unincorporated association. And that offers the target of the suit none of those fancy "don't take my house" conditions (the kind of protection something like a llc might give you)

You know of a lot of those? Nostalrius is the only one I know of personally and they folded under the notion that they were getting hired to work on actual Classic WoW for Blizzard, they just blamed litigation at the time to scapegoat their reputations. There are full-blown businesses that operate in the private server space, right out in the open. Check out Project Ascension if you want to see what I mean.

Aerec and Ninja have been friends since high school, so while nobody is "holding him to it," I think it's pretty safe to assume he's not trying to bone his friend. And even if he is it isn't like Tyler can't afford to just lose that money. Hell, he tried to donate 10k to Wings' Patreon after having only played there for like 2 months, so why wouldn't he spend even more on a project run by a dude whose wedding he was a part of?

Either way it's not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. If a millionaire wants to bankroll his buddy's crazy personal project then hey good for him, at least it isn't just sitting in a bank account doing nothing.

Do we have to post the video where he said on stream he paid for the hosting costs for the year again?

If their operating costs were similar to ours, less than 5k for the year is actually probably correct. It cost Wings about 250/month to operate and our hardware was pretty modern. They probably use the same host or a similar Amazon-based hosting plan. Either way it would probably be hard to spend much more than that.

I mean, if they're on AWS, it's pretty damn easy to spend a lot more than that even without trying. AWS is a terrible fit for mid-range projects of any kind, really, from a price/performance perspective.

AWS's two value-adds are reliability and not having to think about operations; performance on something like EC2 (which I would be pretty sure this would be running on) is gonna be kinda meh. I suppose XI doesn't need great performance except at large user counts, but you're still paying for things you don't really need for what's essentially an overgrown hobby project.

Like, AWS is great for tiny one-off *** that's going to cost you ten bucks a year, and for giant enterprise tomfoolery that you have to pay with an invoice and not a credit card. Virtually everything else is going to be cheaper/faster on some bare metal sitting in a colo somewhere.

(Obviously, if you actually take proper advantage of things like Lambda, AWS provides other benefits that make it worth it. That's not gonna be the case for LSB.)

We used OVH because we had a lot of issues with DDOS and they were pretty well known in the space for having pretty solid DDOS mitigation. We also wanted to make sure we had our own dedicated server because the host we had before that threarened to terminate our service multiple times because we were just a shared VPS and the DDOS attacks were "putting other customers at risk."

OVH was pretty affordable all things considered. Like you said, it's the incidental things that add up. For us it was a combination of email automation services for account management, a few extra VPS' to host our test server and offshoot server, windows licenses for all of them, backup hosting, domain etc. Death by a thousand cuts.

All that being said, the hardware that we had would be massive overkill for LandSandBoat, but Wings was still using Topaz which was a LOT less efficient so our resource use was still surprisingly high. (And we later found out that it was also full of memory leaks and a few SQL deadlocks, nice!) I haven't used LSB a ton but I know that the Lua core conversion that they did a few years ago was a pretty huge deal as far as efficiency goes. We definitely could have used that.

i guess like a dozen horizon streamers got DMCA'd by SE themselves

truly a FAFO moment for pservers

POIDH

Fake for attention, square doesn't give a ***. I see the email "saying" Square is the claimant. Crock of ***.

some 48h bans, some 24h bans, a bunch of strikes and even a couple live takedowns

Fake until proven overwise. Twitch did ban the strimmers, sure, they have to respond to a claim, but on dispute it'll be shown ***.

big shrug emoji

That isn't true, their legal departments are separate between countries and there are separate email addresses for the US legal team, including for DMCA.

https://www.square-enix-games.com/en_US/documents/tnc



edit: He edited the post but originally he said that SE doesn't have a us.square-enix legal address.

They use DMCA@ not legal@

yeah, it's totally possible someone submitted fake claims pretending to be squenix. but they got the info right. 'us' is used by their el segundo branch

https://who.is/whois/square-enix.com


okay but it's proven that the 'us.square-enix.com' is in fact used in official square communications, so again, big shrug emoji

That's just to file DMCA complaints... legal@ is separate

Anyway i have compelling reasons to believe that it is really SE going out against private servers right now.

And they just hired a dozen new GMs and are totally enforcing the TOS and the STF totally bans a thousand accounts a month.

Totes.

seems that going out of your way to advertise your bootleg server + brag about having "as many players as retail" is a good way to fly too close to the sun. who'd have thought?

That Cayman island business might come in clutch.

DMCA@ is how you report other people to them; legal is for when someone has reported YOU and you have to reply, as the wheels have already started turning at that point.

[Edit]
To be clear, I have no idea if it's really legit, but it wouldn't shock me. SE is pretty laissez-faire by MEGA CORPORATION standards but US trademark law dictates that you have to defend trademarks, so if someone gets too noisy, they are compelled to act, it's not really a matter of them wanting to or giving a ***. They have a duty to respond if they ever want to defend the trademark again.

Kinda wish this dmca stream slap topic had gotten it's own thread

Be the change you want to see in the world. Bonus points if you make it, it'll be purple and you can use the VIP mod powers so I can be lazier than usual

If this whole "HorizonXI streamers are getting banned" thing is real, it's going to even further divide the community. I can see it already...

The HorizonXI-thumpers saying stuff like "Our server was so epic that even Square-Enix felt threatened and had to shut us down because they knew they couldn't compete"

The anti-HorizonXI crowd saying stuff like "They did this to themselves. It's because they were going around being so incessantly vocal about their server. Of course Square-Enix are going to notice it when some of the places they're using to divert players from Retail into their cult-server are official media channels."