Last week Blizzard decided to take legal action against the hugely popular World of Warcraft private server Nostalrius and it’s now closed down.
In true MMO fashion, players flooded the server to say a final farewell to what was a large World of Warcraft community who wanted to play the vanilla version of the game. As a former WoW player I completely understand the desire to play in the old world, because let’s face it, the game is now a shadow of its former self.
Blizzard has always staunchly protected their IPs, and rightly so, but fans have requested vanilla version servers for a long time. Although it’s a question that’s been raised at BlizzCon on many occasions Blizzard has always said they wouldn’t be creating vanilla servers. When they were asked about launching vanilla servers at the 2013 WoW BlizzCon panel (see video at 30 minutes 07 seconds), they simply said:
“No, and by the way you don’t want to do that either. You think you do, but you don’t”
It appears that fans beg to differ, and despite the flaws of the early versions of WoW, it was quite special. Perhaps Blizzard should listen to their fanbase, something they are not particularly good at.
Nostalrius is now gone but there was a good turnout by players for the server’s closure as you can see in the video below.
