u/Tenyar_97

Every Server Dies.

TurtleWoW shuts down tomorrow. Years of custom quests, original content, and characters players spent years building just..gone. Private servers are illegal. Everyone knows this. The players, the operators, Blizzard. It is an unauthorized use of proprietary software, and no one pretends otherwise. and there has always been an unspoken understanding baked into every private server: everything can disappear at any moment, for any reason, without warning. We, as players, accepted this the moment we logged in for the first time. It is the price of admission. It already happened to Nostalrius. It is happening again. The Norgannon Registry exists because that understanding should never have been mandatory.

When you play on a server the server does not really own your character. It just writes data about your character while you are playing. There is no reason why this data cannot be stored somewhere that the server operator cannot control. This way no single legal action can delete your character.

Your character should belong to you not to the server you are playing on.

The Norgannon Registry is an open-source project, currently under active development. It is still very (very) early, and many parts of the system are experimental, evolving, and subject to change as the design is tested and refined in real-world conditions.

I made five components and one protocol.

1. The Registry Agent runs on the game server with TrinityCore or AzerothCore. When something important happens, like you log out or level up or get loot it reads your character data from the server database. It then signs this data with the servers key and sends it to the network. If the server shuts down tonight every player who logged out normally will still have their character saved.
2. The Registry Node is where all the character data is stored. Anyone can run a node, like a server operator, a player, or anyone with a computer. These nodes talk to each other automatically. No single node is in charge. No single node is a target. Long as one node is still running your character data will be safe.
3. The Registry Companion is a program that runs on your computer. It. Stores your cryptographic keypair, which is your permanent identity on the network. This identity is not connected to any server account.
4. The Character Export Standard is the shared language used across the system, much like a passport defines who you are in a standardized, globally readable format. It records essential attributes such as level, class, equipment, and achievements in a consistent structure. The registry doesn’t store game assets or world data, only stores these “identity records,” similar to how a passport contains verified personal details without holding anything from the countries you travel through.
5. The Import Layer is how a new server can use the registry to recreate your character. The registry just stores the data. The server decides what to do with it. Any server can use this data.(Prehaps, even, entirely different games. It *is* just data, after all.)

This is (legally) uninteresting..On purpose.

The Norgannon Registry does not store any of Blizzards assets. It does not store any textures, models, code or copyrighted material. It only stores the kind of data that you would write in a notebook about your character, or a D&D Adventurer's Journal. What a server does with that data, however, is up to the server. Because it is a peer-to-peer network with no operator, it reduces centralized points of legal and operational control. The data is everywhere and nowhere at the time. It is hard to touch because of how it's designed.

Every private server has a point of failure. The database is on one computer, controlled by one team and subject to one set of laws. If *one* chokepoint is found, Blizzard can use it to snuff EVERYTHING out. The Norgannon Registry changes this. Your character data becomes as strong, as the community. The more nodes that are running the harder it is to delete your character.