Scapegaming, the company that had set up and was running a private World of Warcraft server until Blizzard’s lawyers went after ‘em, now has to cough up some $88M in damages. There’s no question that Scapegaming had it coming to them, but $88M? Man alive!

Scapegaming, run by one Alyson Reeves, was ordered to pay $3M to cover the loss of revenue associated with the private server’s users, and $85M in statuary damages.

I’m going to guess that Scapegaming doesn’t have $85M lying around, so this will be fairly prickly moving forward.

If you want, you can read a nice summary of the lawsuit summary here.

What am I talking about? Let me explain!

There exist private World of Warcraft servers out there that people can connect to in order to play the game in non-Blizzard ways. So, a person can connect to one of these servers and start out with super advanced weapons and armor right from the word go. There’s typically enough people on these servers to make it feel like you’re still playing an MMO.

Obviously Blizzard doesn’t take too kindly to this kind of thing, hence the lawsuit.

Let this be a lesson to all the other private servers out there: lay low!