Throughout the last decade, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft basked in the spotlight (and derision) of gamers and non-gamers alike. It was a not just a game, but a place where relationships were made; where people got married; where raids reveled in world first dungeon clears; where players launched their eSports careers; where young gamers learned of the bitterness of defeat and of in-game currency scams; and where many, many lowbies got ganked. Moreover, it redefined the MMORPG genre by shedding many of its predecessors’ clunky or punishing mechanics, much to the praise and ire of MMO players at the time.
Today, World of Warcraft is still one of the most active MMORPGs outside of East Asia. But recent expansions haven’t sat well with some long-time fans of the game. In search of the olden days, many of these players turn to private servers that host previous expansions of the game, like Wrath of the Lich King or even the original “Vanilla” WoW experience (the first release of the game from 2004). These private servers must be meticulously reverse-engineered via careful coding to accurately replicate all of the nuances of the original game.
As such, private servers can be works of love for their creators (or, in other cases, become sites for mortifying internal drama). All one has to do to join a private server is to obtain a crack of the desired version of WoW, then do some networking tomfoolery to connect to the server. It’s an attractive option because there are no subscription fees for these servers, though microtransactions for cosmetics and other amenities are often offered in one form or another.
Earlier this month, Nostalrius – a French collective who hosted a custom Vanilla server of the same name – announced earlier this month that they had received a cease and desist notice from Activision Blizzard’s lawyers and would be shutting down on the 10th of April. This sparked a series of outcries and petitions from longtime Blizzard fans. But to their disappointment, Blizzard remained silent on the matter.
Until today. World of Warcraft’s Executive Producer, Allen J. Brack, released a statement earlier this morning that explained Blizzard’s actions regarding the Nostalrius shutdown.
The main reason for shutting down Nostalrius: property infringement.
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.
Brack then stated that official classic (or “legacy”) servers have been, and still continue to be, considered by Blizzard’s WoW team as a possibility. The effort and resources required to maintain a legacy server for each expansion pack, though, would be tremendous.
To capture the “nostalgia of when WoW first launched” while avoiding the aforementioned expansion pack bloat, Blizzard has toyed with the idea of what they call a “pristine realm.” A pristine realm would be stripped of most of the features that many players feel bog down modern WoW expansions; these include “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.”
Blizzard acknowledges that this conception of a pristine realm is not perfect. It’s still, as Brack stated, “an open topic for discussion.”
As for Nostalrius? Brack assures us that his team has “recently been in contact with some of the folks who operated Nostalrius,” and that they look forward to talking with them more soon.
The former Nostalrius team itself has not yet issued a statement on the matter, and Blizzard’s official discussion forms are bustling with talk on the legal gray areas of operating private servers. It’s an issue that likely won’t go to rest any time soon, either. A series of servers running the Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm expansions called Warmane, for example, enjoys immense popularity every day, with its population numbers consistently shooting into the thousands. What fate lies in store for realms like Warmane remains to be seen.
Stay tuned for more updates to this story.