Blizzard Finally Responds to Vanilla WoW Demands

On 10th April 2016, Nostalrius, a private WoW Legacy server went dark after Blizzard threatened legal action.

Nostalrius Begins PvP, Nostalrius Begins PvE & Nostalrius TBC and all related servers will be definitively shutdown at 23:00 server time on the 10th of April 2016

Nostalrius was a server running the original version of World of Warcraft from 2004, free of charge, It’s was Vanilla WoW’s most popular private server, running build 1.12, Drums of War. 

Nostalrius had more than 800,000 accounts with 3,242,751 character created and 2,000,000 website views monthly. It was run by a team of 30 volunteers who slaved away to ensure the gamers had the true experience of Vanilla WoW. Check out their infographic

The blow of legal action was felt across the internet and the rallying cry was heard as they announced the imminent closure and wrote an open letter to Blizzard. Currently sitting at 236,490 signatures, the letter has been backed by popular internet figure heads, Blizzard supporters and even ex-developers of WoW who have printed it the entire petition out and delievered it directly to the desk of Mike Morhaime. You can still sign the petition here.

Finally Blizzard have responded on the forums:

We wanted to let you know that we’ve been closely following the Nostalrius discussion and we appreciate your constructive thoughts and suggestions.

Our silence on this subject definitely doesn’t reflect our level of engagement and passion around this topic. We hear you. Many of us across Blizzard and the WoW Dev team have been passionate players ever since classic WoW. In fact, I personally work at Blizzard because of my love for classic WoW. 

We have been discussing classic servers for years - it’s a topic every BlizzCon - and especially over the past few weeks. From active internal team discussions to after-hours meetings with leadership, this subject has been highly debated. Some of our current thoughts:

Why not just let Nostalrius continue the way it was? The honest answer is, failure to protect against intellectual property infringement would damage Blizzard’s rights. This applies to anything that uses WoW’s IP, including unofficial servers. And while we’ve looked into the possibility – there is not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server. 

We explored options for developing classic servers and none could be executed without great difficulty. If we could push a button and all of this would be created, we would. However, there are tremendous operational challenges to integrating classic servers, not to mention the ongoing support of multiple live versions for every aspect of WoW. 

So what can we do to capture that nostalgia of when WoW first launched? Over the years we have talked about a “pristine realm”. In essence that would turn off all leveling acceleration including character transfers, heirloom gear, character boosts, Recruit-A-Friend bonuses, WoW Token, and access to cross realm zones, as well as group finder. We aren’t sure whether this version of a clean slate is something that would appeal to the community and it’s still an open topic of discussion. 

One other note - we’ve recently been in contact with some of the folks who operated Nostalrius. They obviously care deeply about the game, and we look forward to more conversations with them in the coming weeks.

You, the Blizzard community, are the most dedicated, passionate players out there. We thank you for your constructive thoughts and suggestions. We are listening. 

J. Allen Brack

What does this mean?

Will we see World of Warcraft Private Servers? We hope so!