If Horizon Had A $1 Monthly Fee

Should say "If Horizon introduced a $1 monthly fee".

That is a VERY quick way to get shut down. Square Enix would lawyer up so *** fast...

Thats the beauty of it: SE wouldnt have to, those poors wouldnt touch Horizon if they had to pay.

Also true. Private servers have never worked for this game. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional.

Well, someone has to pay the infrastructure.

Im sure its not cheap to maintain all of it.

Unless the owners of those servers are godlike altruists, someone need to be paying for it. And supposely something that nets something over zero by the end of the month

There are already Gil sellers for that server, you can extrapolate from there

Thats why I suggest private servers to name their game as "Penultimate Fantasy XI", "Initial Fantary XI", to avoid those problems with trademarks.

Make Lastok, SanLoria, Sanddurst, Zeuno. Iagudos, Kadav, Orks. Banadiel. etc

Ninja is currently paying for the infrastructure. When he gets bored of it and stops paying them there are going to be a lot of unhappy people.

Make it an "optional donation" instead but Patreon style where the account gets perks like XP bonus's, KI cooldowns, etc.

Still likely to have SE's legal missile launched at them.

Buddy it's more than the name. You are using assets, storylines, nearly everything from an existing game. That IS theft. You can and will get your *** sued into oblivion of you step an inch over whatever arbitrary line SE draws in the sand, because they own ALL of what you are using. This isn't "oh I made a not-metroid game with all original sprites and music". This is literally piracy.

problem with P servers someone will always steal or borrow code and create a new sever and all the retards will jump and level again its like they don't even work and live under wages it got trying after Nasomi ppl jumped to Eden which was a hell 100 times better than nas and Horizon. But than again why would u keep doing new P servers on xi for 75 era lol stick to 1, oh nvm ppl got bored.

I understand this is a joke topic and my response is worthless in reality, but myself and other server admins pay for the costs out of our own pockets. I typically chip in 500 bucks every couple months personally. Because enough of us do it we maintain the costs. Horizon collects no money and we don't even have advertising enabled on any our platforms - this is purely a money draining hobby for the sake of it.

No, the users are using assets they paid for. Servers are not using these assets and therefore are likely in the clear for this specific use case.

If the story\quest dialogue is stored server side, then that is an issue.

The servers are just responding to packets, not using SEs code base, that is not illegal.

So was Ninja lying when he said "I actually took care of the entire server this year, personally"?

I have neither the time nor patience to explain to you that emulating software is still illegal and you have no idea what you're talking about. Just be quiet.

Paying for something does not equate to ownership and rights to use freely.

The actual server code they're running, sure if it's clean room engineered could be fine from a legal point of view, but literally everything is stored server side aside from visuals.

Copyright law is not as simple as you think.

Without getting too technical, google "Clean Room Design".

It is quite possible to produce a working server emulation platform without reusing a single line of leaked copyrighted code.

The FFXI Private Servers (the ones currently based on LandSandBoat, and DarkStar etc. before that) do not use a single line of actual retail FFXI Server Code. Whenever the FFXI client software (the retail copy of FFXI that you bought legally and installed on your PC) connects to one of those private servers, the server responds to the packets sent by that client in a way that "makes sense" to the client and lets you play the game, but the server itself isn't running any copyrighted code.

Admittedly it is rather difficult to do things that way, which is why none of the FFXI private servers can match retail's current feature set; but the hobbists have been at it for decades at this point, so the vast majority of everything up to and including the 75-era works fine and anything beyond that is "mostly playable"; which is sufficient for an awful lot of people to have fun and enjoy themselves.


There would certainly be a case for copyright infringement in the USA (US copyright law is more strict than the rest of the planet, thanks Disney!) if the usage of the distributed FFXI client application was tied to active retail subscriptions. But it isn't. You can own a copy of FFXI without an active subscription; which is something that retail actually capitalises upon whenever they do a "come back to us" promotion and entice people to start playing and paying for subs again. This means that using a private server (for FFXI, not for other games like WoW!) does not breach any copyright agreements. So neither running or connecting to a FFXI private server is illegal.

The most SE could potentially do is enforce the EULA and terminate your retail account if they caught you playing on a a private server... which would still let you use the FFXI client to play on the private server; and just shoot themselves in the foot. So they don't do it.

https://github.com/XiPrivateServers/Servers

https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXIPrivateServers/comments/17osjfp/community_warning_regarding_altanaxi_project/k84fg15/

TL;DR - FFXI private server hosting and usage is not illegal and never has been. Not so for other games like CoH or Wow where the servers are built on leaked code or owning the the client app is tied to a retail subscription.

The real issue is the art assets, not the code. Private servers are not playable without those assets, and the idea that "well, they don''t say you can't connect to private servers" is, uh, naive.

Like, if people want to play private servers, have at it, but the notion that SE couldn't drop a ninety megaton C+D on you from space the second they felt like it is just completely at odds with actual copyright law

Which art assets?

To my knowledge there are no copyrighted art assets that sit server-side in the codebase for LandSandBoat. Certainly I never came across any during the Darkstar/Topaz era (which was back whenever I did a fair bit of coding) and I'd be surprised if they've started now... perhaps in the early ProjectXI days decades ago, before they got their act together and it was completely recoded into OneTimeXI/DSP?

Sure, there are plenty of reverse-engineered packet handlers (and SQL tables, navmeshes and endless LUA scripts that try to approximate the "look and feel" of retail gameplay) on the server; but AFAIK all of the models and artwork sit in the local client app files. Even invoking things like NPC dialog and Cutscenes is just a text one-liner on the server that generates a packet instructing the client to queue up a specific client-side task sequence. I remember how new retail Client version updates used to trigger merry havoc with the Darkstar devs having to ensure that all the NPC response indexes got realigned correctly; otherwise someone could interact with a shopkeeper in Bastok Markets and get an response belonging to some random uppity Windurst TaruTaru.

Hypothetically SE could certainly send spurious unenforcable C&Ds to anyone they like, but I doubt they're going to start now whenever the private servers have long since gotten their legal act together and the FFXI retail staff levels have been cut back so much. And outside the US there is plenty of precedent for hosting providers telling companies who try that sort of thing to "go and stick their head in a pig" (with apologies to the late great Douglas Adams!)

For one Final Fantasy XI is trade and copyright marked so that alone is enough to get the private server shut down. I would then imagine that all art assets used in Final Fantasy XI will fall under that trade and copyright mark.

SE just isn't that interested in getting the private servers shut down because 1. They don't last that long and 2. They have such a small population and 3. There isn't a subscription model for the private servers.

If any private server started charging a subscription for the service SE will come down on them pretty quickly. Also any C&D is completely enforceable since its trade and copyrighted.

IIRC there was a LotR MMO that was shut down, as well, and I don't think it was based on leaked code rather reverse engineering efforts, similar to this. The C&D is published online.

There is no way to separate the code entirely and consider it clean room for a project like this, because it's entirely derived from reverse engineering efforts and the code has to cooperate with the client. SE never published the source code or protocol for their server, so anything you do will inherently be tied back to their IP and reverse engineered from the client. While reverse engineering is protected to an extent legally, there are limits on what you can do with the data you gather and you can absolutely be legally pursued if you do something of this nature. There's no way to do this without infringing on SEs rights considering the type of data required to replicate the server.

There's no legal ground where you can claim you didn't derive work off their IP.

Ehh, as someone who is involved the retro gaming community, which involves heavy emulating, it's most definitely not illegal. Emulators are 100% legal, stealing assets, code or binaries from another company is absolutely illegal. This is why emulators are written "clean room" with no access to any code or binaries from the original.

In the case of FFXI Private Servers, it's what they do with the client that is likely breaking some EULA. Especially if they are "encouraging" the end user to break the law. The only way you can really get away with this is on a dead game.

I present Earth and Beyond Emulator, a PS that faithfully recreates the Earth and Beyond Space MMO from before EA murdered it.

https://www.net-7.org

SE hasn't gone after private servers for one reason and one reason only: the PR hit isn't worth it. Private servers aren't costing them any appreciable amount of money, and so as long as it's easy enough to ignore them, SE will continue to do so.

This is almost certainly due in part to the fact that FFXI is part of Yoshida's division these days; he in particular has taken a very public "I'm not gonna do anything about third party stuff unless you force my hand, so... don't do that" stance regarding FFXIV, and it makes sense that the philosophy would extend to XI/PS. If someone DID force their hand (subscription model, getting too big, whatever), then they'd probably be forced to do something, but until someone makes a big enough splash in the pool that they can't reasonably ignore it, they seem content to just treat it like other fan-related projects.

Also, the idea that they would terminate retail accounts for PS players is silly. That's whack-a-mole ***, a TON of work, and FAR messier from a PR perspective. MUCH easier to just target the PS admins themselves.

How is the client getting the binaries to play the game? Have each of those clients obtained a license from SE to use their FFXI client in the first place? Is Horizon instructing or encouraging it's community to downloading and modifying a piece of software they do not own a valid license to?

put up or shut up. way too many people on this forum just post ***without citing any sort of evidence. either confront this guy with the reality of what ninja said or shut the *** up.

lol @ the rest of this conversation. SE could absolutely shut down horizon.

whether what horizon is doing is illegal is a separate conversation, very few things that video game companies ban for or send C&Ds for are illegal. but SE could definitely shut down horizon.

disagree with all of the reasons posted here on why they haven't though(other than kinda rooks's). SE hasn't shut down horizon because they don't view it as worth their time to get their lawyers involved. it's as simple as that. they do not give a *** about ffxi on that level.

SE likely wouldn't care if they charged either. people thinking SE is going to bring the swift hammer of justice down on private servers are delusional and i have no idea what they are basing that off.

Emulation and private servers are two different things.

In the case of emulation, you are emulating hardware, APIs, process architectures, etc to make the game cross platform or run on something else. This is a little different, because you are working with the underlying hardware rather than the game itself. You could emulate the environment for the game to run without ever touching the game itself (although ripping ROM out could arguably be a problem). Granted, the hardware manufacturer might be a problem, but the game assets themselves can be separated in this case.

Private servers are entirely developed using reverse engineered protocols and behavior from the client. You can't separate these things unless you rewrite the protocol handling on the client, which would require doing a lot of other things that would likely similarly cause problems (both technical and illegal). You'd have to walk into development with these protocols and behaviors documented/understood, which has happened from the client. You can't separate these things the way you can in other instances. That's why the clean room theory doesn't work here, there's no way to not use extensive amounts of data from their IP to make the client work. Even then you are still using their art/music/story/etc assets.

AFAIK none of this has ever really ended up in court, most people who get C&D don't have the resources to fight it and so they cave in. I don't think there's any real way to know how this would end up if someone had the resources to fight it and there are still long running legal debates about legality of certain software licenses and how they are applied, so how C&Ds for this can be enforced is probably yet to be defined.

This has been discussed before and unfortunately, in many countries reverse engineering is illegal.

By illegal I mean there are laws prohibiting reverse engineering of software with some exceptions for interoperability with other software. These laws were added specifically to assist content providers from people reverse engineering their lockouts but as most laws, they have greater applications.

In order to make private servers the client to retail calls had to be reverse engineered. Clean room design does not apply here, that is for copyrighted code not reverse engineering.

It does depend on the country and SE would have to sue in a particular country where the private servers are hosted or the engineers are based at.

Remember when SE sent a C&D to the FFXI-APP dude?

Horizon admin's really think they're invincible lol, "its clean room code". Go head, charge a paltry $1 monthly sub and test that invincibility out. Yeah, SE probably doesnt care about all the free bots out there, but you start charging people to run your version of FFXI, I doubt they're gonna be very "laissez-faire" about it.

nope. they never sent a C&D to maury. that was an exit scam on his part because he no longer wanted to support his products after the game and his subscription based started to wane.

Oh no they aren't...

The private server is emulating an FFXI server.

I just posted a link to a project specifically emulating the server of a dead MMO from EA as an example.



It has ended up in court, the court found in favor of Cyrix's for its reverse engineering and implementation of the x86 ISA. Intel was suing them for using their x86 language and Cyrix responded they were merely emulating the x86 CPU. Via later bought Cyrix and ended up with the ability to make x86 compatible CPU's, which they did as part of their Epia line.

Writing code that mimics another piece of code is not illegal. There is an entire massive community that does exactly this every day. What *is* illegal is using another companies IP assets like firmware, models, textures, binaries or encouraging others to do the same. That last one is what gets people, server emulation is useless without clients, instead of writing their own client and producing their own assets, they instruct users to use SE's client and assets without a valid license. The FFXI client is not licensed under the GPL, OGL, CDL or any other open license and SE plainly states it's their property.

This is why emulation groups are very careful to never allow discussion of how to download non-licensed client software, aka ROMs. The group creating Ryujinx (a Nintendo Switch emulator) most make absolute sure they don't provide instruction or encourage users to illegally download the Switch OS firmware or Tears of the Kingdom software images.