Project Ascension: Blizzard’s Full Lawsuit Breakdown

On June 12, 2026, Blizzard Entertainment filed a federal lawsuit against the alleged operators of Project Ascension. On paper, it looks like just another case against a World of Warcraft private server. In reality, the filing goes far beyond a simple cease and desist.

Before the full case file surfaced, the story first circulated as short recaps on social media. A single video clip was enough to show this wasn’t just another lawsuit. Blizzard isn’t only alleging copyright infringement — it’s going straight after organized crime. We had already covered the first available details in our first article on this lawsuit, but the full court filing, once you dig into it, turns out to be far more nuanced.

Two of the charges completely change the nature of the case. They rely on the RICO Act, a federal U.S. law originally built to dismantle the mafia. Enter Project Ascension, the largest classless World of Warcraft private server, with more than a million cumulative players since launch.

Blizzard brings out the heavy artillery against the biggest classless WoW private server

Project Ascension has been running since around 2016. Its core concept breaks one of the original game’s pillars. Players are no longer locked into a fixed class — they build their character by freely picking up skills anywhere in the game, a system known as classless. We’d actually tested this server ourselves before the lawsuit even broke. That figure of a million cumulative players, mentioned earlier, remains enormous for an unofficial community project.

Blizzard has already sued over copyright infringement dozens of times. What’s surprising here are the two civil RICO counts added to the case, a law designed in the 1970s to prosecute the mafia and structured criminal organizations. Using it against a video game private server is no small thing. According to Game Rant, it’s precisely this choice that turns the case into something more than a simple intellectual property dispute.

The difference lies in the target. A typical copyright lawsuit goes after the act of copying. The RICO Act targets something else — the economic structure behind the operation, how it’s funded, organized, and split among several people. In practice, that opens the door to potentially tripled damages if the charges hold up, a far heavier threat than a simple piracy fine.

What the lawsuit really says: copyright, DMCA, and two RICO counts

The case has a specific, verifiable docket number. According to the official docket available on CourtListener, the case Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. v. Derek S. Powell, et al. carries docket number 8:26-cv-01506. It was filed on June 12, 2026, in the federal court for the Central District of California, before Judge John W. Holcomb, with referral magistrate Douglas F. McCormick. The cause of action listed on the docket is « 17 U.S.C. § 101, Copyright Infringement, » and Blizzard is requesting a jury trial. The same case appears on PacerMonitor, which tracks the main filings in the proceedings.

In its 51-page complaint, Blizzard states that the alleged conduct covers nine distinct counts. None of this has been ruled on by a court yet — these are allegations the defendants will be able to contest:

• direct copyright infringement
• contributory infringement and vicarious infringement
• DMCA violation (the U.S. law that bans bypassing the anti-piracy protections built into the game client)
• tortious interference with contract, tied to the EULA violation (the user agreement every player accepts, often without reading it, when installing World of Warcraft)
• false designation of origin, invoked via the Lanham Act, the federal law that protects registered trademarks
• participation in a racketeering enterprise under RICO (18 U.S.C. § 1962(c))
• conspiracy under the same RICO provision (§ 1962(d))

Two of these counts stand out sharply from the usual pattern. The RICO Act, mentioned earlier, makes it possible to target an entire economic structure rather than a single isolated act of piracy. Game Rant sums up what’s at stake with this framing: « the final two counts, RICO participation and RICO conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. §§ 1962(c) and 1962(d), are the ones that transform this from a typical copyright dispute« . In other words, Blizzard isn’t presenting this case as a simple story about copied files, but as the prosecution of an organization allegedly built to generate structured profit. That characterization still has to be proven in court.

Financially, Blizzard is seeking statutory damages that could reach up to $150,000 per infringed work, the legal cap that applies when infringement is found to be willful. The publisher is also asking for a permanent injunction — the legal obligation to permanently stop the activity in question — along with a forced « turnover » of Project Ascension’s game client and source code. On top of that, it’s demanding a full accounting of all revenue generated by the private server, according to information reported by mmos.com. These amounts and obligations remain requests, not rulings that have been issued.

The procedural timeline is worth noting. Summonses were issued on June 25, 2026, and four formal waivers of service were executed on July 9, 2026. In practice, the defendants voluntarily agreed to be sued without a physical process server, which speeds up the proceedings and implies a lawyer was already retained on their end. Attorney appearances were also recorded on July 2 and 10, 2026, and the defendants’ responses are due by September 8, 2026 at the latest. This timeline contradicts the scenario of hidden, unreachable administrators: here, the people targeted are actively taking part in their own defense, with legal counsel in place from the very first weeks.

They’re not alone on the docket. Five other individuals are named: Alexander Steven Kozma, Ye Lwin, Brien Allen Middaugh, Andrew James Seward, and Lincoln Marshall Simpson, the latter described by the press as a developer based in Australia. Unidentified « Does » round out the list, a standard procedural placeholder that allows parties to be added once their identity is uncovered during discovery.

Two companies also appear in the complaint: Exalted Management Services, registered in Nevada, and Exalted Management and Consultation Services LLC, based in New Mexico. Blizzard describes them as shell companies. A third name, Online Management Partners, is described as the third-party payment processor the server used to handle player transactions.

The core of the accusation is about money. Ascension allegedly sells « Donation Points, » an in-house currency priced at around $0.50 per unit, with bonuses once a purchase passes $15. This system allegedly gets around the ban, written into Blizzard’s EULA, on monetizing an unofficial server. According to Game Rant, quoting the complaint directly, « both men have received ‘millions of dollars’ from the operation through Project Ascension’s in-game and online shops ». The project reportedly still claims that same figure of a million cumulative players mentioned earlier.

This level of monetization isn’t a minor detail in Blizzard’s strategy: RICO requires proving the existence of a structured, profit-driven « enterprise, » not just a handful of fans tinkering with a free server. Millions of dollars in alleged revenue lend weight to that characterization. It also explains why the shell companies and the payment processor are named in the proceedings: the court can now demand a precise trace of where the money goes.

Russia, Aeza Group, and the myth of the untouchable server

The operators named in the complaint aren’t hiding behind an anonymous server: they live on U.S. soil, or in Australia for one of them. And yet the narrative that has long circulated around Ascension rests on a completely different angle — the server’s hosting in Russia.

One fact first, completely unrelated to the Ascension case. On July 1, 2025, OFAC (the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the U.S. Treasury bureau in charge of economic sanctions) designated Aeza Group, a hosting provider based in Saint Petersburg, as « bulletproof hosting » (a hosting provider that sells its clients tolerance for illegal activity and refuses to cut access even when reported). Aeza was sanctioned along with two subsidiaries and four executives for supporting cybercriminals, including the Meduza and Lumma infostealers (malware that steals data), targeting U.S. and international victims. It’s spelled out in black and white in the official U.S. Treasury press release.

This is where Blizzard’s complaint comes into play. According to the document filed by Activision Blizzard, Project Ascension’s game servers are allegedly hosted on infrastructure tied to that same Aeza Group. Game Rant reports, quoting the complaint directly: « Project Ascension’s servers are hosted on infrastructure tied to the Russia-based Aeza Group. » It’s this exact sentence that kicked off the narrative of a server hidden away in Russia, out of reach of any U.S. court.

Except at this stage, no one else confirms that link. No public hosting registry, no independent technical analysis, no statement from Aeza itself. The only source for this claim remains Blizzard’s complaint. Legally, an allegation in a filed complaint isn’t an established fact — it’s what one party is asserting and will have to prove in court. Mixing the OFAC designation, which is confirmed and documented, with the Ascension-Aeza link, which is alleged and not independently verified, paints a more certain picture than the sources actually support.

And even if that link were confirmed one day, it wouldn’t change much about the substance of the case. The people named in the complaint — Powell, Mannion, and the others — are identified residents of Tennessee, Ohio, and Australia, with companies registered in Nevada and New Mexico. A server can switch hosting providers overnight, a simple change of provider is enough. A person and their U.S. company, much less so.

This confusion between where the bytes run and where the people live feeds the image of a project that’s completely out of reach. The reality of the complaint targets clearly identified individuals on U.S. and Australian soil, not some phantom server somewhere in Saint Petersburg.

The MDY Industries v. Blizzard lawsuit, opened in 2006 over the Glider cheat bot, illustrates the longest scenario of the four. Seven counts, a district court ruling setting damages at $6 million in 2008, then a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling on December 14, 2010 that partially reversed the decision: the contributory infringement claim fell, because WoW buyers aren’t considered owners of the software in the strict copyright sense for that specific doctrine. The DMCA violation and the tortious interference claims, however, held up. Four years of legal battle for a mixed result — Blizzard won the bulk of it, but not all of it. The EFF breaks down this mixed verdict in its analysis from that period.

Ten years later, with the Bossland case, Blizzard runs into a similar kind of opponent: a studio openly selling Honorbuddy for WoW and Hearthbuddy for Hearthstone, one that chose to fight in court instead of shutting down. The ruling established 42,818 counts of copyright infringement in Blizzard’s favor, valued at around $8.6 million in April 2017. What followed happened fast: on November 16, 2017, Bossland announced it was stopping sales of its tools targeting Blizzard games, with full end of support by December 31. Barely a few months passed between the damages ruling and the surrender. MassivelyOP covered this surrender in detail.

Nostalrius, in April 2016, plays out in a completely different register. This vanilla private server, hugely popular and perfectly identifiable, never even got a trial. A cease and desist letter sent by American and French lawyers, targeting both the server’s team and its France-based host OVH, was enough to shut everything down. « Yesterday, we received a letter of formal notice from US and french lawyers, acting on behalf of Blizzard Entertainment », the team wrote, quoted by PC Gamer in April 2016. The server shut down voluntarily within weeks, without any judge ever having to rule. Nostalrius’s Wikipedia page retraces the full timeline of the episode.

• MDY Industries (Glider bot, 2006-2010): a 4-year battle, a $6 million judgment followed by an appeals ruling partially favorable to MDY.
• Bossland (Honorbuddy / Hearthbuddy, 2016-2017): an $8.6 million judgment, full stop of sales targeting Blizzard games a few months later.
• Nostalrius (vanilla server, April 2016): a single cease and desist letter, voluntary shutdown within weeks, no trial.
• Turtle WoW (2025): copyright and RICO charges, a direct model cited in the complaint against Ascension.

Turtle WoW, in 2025, closes the loop and clearly serves as a direct template for the complaint against Ascension. According to GameSpot, the charges brought in the June 2026 case reuse much of what was already used against Turtle WoW, with copyright and RICO leading the way. « In a court document submitted on June 12 in California, Blizzard cited many of the same offenses [as against Turtle WoW] », notes GameSpot in its June 15, 2026 article.

The setup described in the Ascension complaint — shell companies, a named payment processor, a structure built around the RICO law — resembles Turtle WoW far more than Nostalrius, in substance. Blizzard isn’t targeting a small fan project funded by donations here, but an operation presented as commercial and organized. If the studio’s litigation history repeats itself, two outcomes remain possible for Ascension: a quick capitulation à la Nostalrius, or a multi-year battle à la MDY and Bossland, with a heavy financial outcome regardless of who wins on the legal merits.

Can you really take down a server hosted abroad?

Does a private server running from abroad automatically escape U.S. justice? Case law says no, under one specific condition. In the UMG Recordings v. Kurbanov case, a Russian website operator had his motion to dismiss granted at the trial court level, for lack of any territorial connection to the United States. The federal court of appeals reversed that decision. The principle applied is called « minimum contacts »: deliberately targeting a U.S. audience is enough to establish jurisdiction, even without an office, an employee, or a physical server on U.S. soil. The ruling is direct on this point: « The appeals court reversed dismissal, finding sufficient minimum contacts. »

The PornXP case shows what this kind of jurisdiction actually allows once it’s established. A federal court in Tacoma, Washington, issued a default judgment against an operator described as a resident of Kyrgyzstan, after personal service failed. Suing someone unreachable on the other side of the globe doesn’t accomplish much on its own. But that judgment was then used to order U.S. registrars like Porkbun to hand over the disputed domain names to the plaintiff, as detailed by this TorrentFreak investigation. The real catch wasn’t the offshore operator. It was the U.S. infrastructure he was using without even thinking about it: domains, hosting, payment methods.

Then there’s the question of money, and here too the raw numbers are misleading. In Aylo v. Pornhits, the plaintiff sought $84 million in statutory damages, based on $15,000 per work for 5,600 works. The court only awarded $4.2 million, the legal minimum of $750 per work. The $150,000 per work Blizzard is seeking against Ascension, mentioned earlier in this article, represents a legal cap for infringement found to be willful, not a guaranteed amount. Courts adjust sharply downward as soon as solid proof of intent is missing, work by work.

Taken together, these three precedents sketch out a fairly clear hierarchy of genuinely vulnerable targets. Identified individuals with assets or accounts in the United States remain the most exposed, as shown in the section on Powell and Mannion above. Domain names, accounts with U.S. registrars, and payment processors come right after: even an offshore operator almost always uses them, and they’re the ones that end up seized. Pure server infrastructure abroad remains the least reachable target. A server can migrate from one host to another within hours. A judgment, even a valid one, never catches up with a byte in transit.

How long can Project Ascension hold out?

This hierarchy of genuinely reachable targets, from individuals to offshore servers, helps assess what could actually happen to Project Ascension. Nobody can give a shutdown date for this project, and anyone claiming to know one for sure is bluffing. What we can do, though, is cross-reference the already-known procedural timeline (summonses in June 2026, responses expected in September) with the timelines observed in comparable cases to sketch out reasonable scenarios. Four possibilities stand out, ranked from most to least likely in the short term.

• A long legal battle ending in a negotiated settlement. This is the scenario closest to what happened with MDY and Bossland. The defendants are identified, represented by counsel, and already engaged in the proceedings rather than in flight. It’s reasonable to estimate an 18 to 36 month legal battle, ending with the operation shutting down, source code being handed over, and a negotiated payment, likely well below the $150,000 per work cap listed in the complaint. The server would probably keep running through most of that period, barring a preliminary injunction, which remains rare at this stage in a straightforward infringement case.
• An early voluntary shutdown, à la Nostalrius. The RICO charges change the calculus: they add a personal risk (asset freezes, exposure through financial tracing) that Powell and Mannion may not want to carry through to the end of the trial. If the cost of the defense ends up outweighing the project’s perceived value, a quick negotiated shutdown within three to six months becomes plausible again.
• A technical migration without any real service interruption. This scenario doesn’t depend on the legal outcome. Even with an injunction in place, nothing technically prevents a relocation under a new domain name, with a new front structure and a new front team. It’s the « endless cat-and-mouse » pattern already seen on other private servers after a first shutdown. The problem for the operators is that staying identifiable behind this new entity would expose them to contempt of court — a sanction for defying a court decision that’s already been handed down.
• A quick shutdown via the domain or the payment processor. Following the PornXP model, Blizzard could target Online Management Partners directly, the payment processor named in the complaint, to cut off revenue before any ruling on the merits. Nothing in the current case file suggests this route has been activated so far, which makes this scenario unlikely in the short term.

What puts the first scenario in the lead isn’t just the comparison with MDY or Bossland. It’s the behavior observed so far in this specific case. An operator planning to disappear doesn’t hire a lawyer and doesn’t file a formal response on time. Powell and Mannion are doing exactly the opposite, which looks a lot more like a structured defense than a retreat operation.

There’s one point left that weighs more than all the precedents cited above. A real « phantom server, » hosted abroad and run by unknowns, would have forced Blizzard to sue anonymous John Does and fight for months to obtain their real identities. That’s not what happened here.

Blizzard directly named residents of Nashville and Akron, who retained lawyers almost immediately. Two readings are possible, and they aren’t mutually exclusive: either Blizzard already had solid identification evidence before even filing the complaint, or the operators themselves never tried to hide. Either way, the odds of a simple status quo protected by offshore hosting drop sharply, while the odds of a real legal standoff, stretched over several years rather than settled by a server’s supposed unseizability, take over.