In case anyone out there cares, as the topic states, Blizzard has taken action to shut down the one of the largest WoW private servers. The original, lvl-cap-at-60 and grind heavy edition of World of Warcraft has had somewhat of a resurgence of late, as a team based in France has been running the server Nostalrius, a relatively faithful recreation of what some consider "the glory days" of MMO gaming. I know WoW was my first MMO, and clearly it holds a special place for many others too, as the server was serving a population of 10.000-12.000 people every day lately.

Quote from nostalrius.org:

Yesterday, we received a letter of formal notice from US and french lawyers, acting on behalf of Blizzard Entertainment, preparing to stand trial against our hosting company OVH and ourselves in less than a week now. This means the de facto end of Nostalrius under its current form.

As soon as we received this letter, we decided to inform the team and players about the future of Nostalrius, where we have all passionately committed our time and energy as volunteers.

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, if our hosting company keeps the server online for that long. It feels kind of unreal, but we want to continue to serve our players as we did, and the best we can in the remaining time.

Personally, I started playing there in November. I got to see Molten Core, Blackwing Lair and Zul Gurub again, not to mention all the other great dungeons. I found a new respect for the sometimes antiquated game design, managed to get into a fairly okay guild, and relived the pain and joy of having to gather 40 people just to be able to attempt killing some of the harder raid bosses. Yesterday, people were preparing for the release of Ahn'Qiraji. Today they are in the in-game capitals pretty much spamming "Not like this!".

It may be a fool's errand to spend my time building up a character on a private server, but I had fun, and I got what I came for, for the most part. The server was not without it's problems, but mostly delivered a good experience. I will probably never invest as much time in a unofficial project again, but that doesn't negate the fun I've had.

I have no earlier experience with private servers, but to me they live in the same sort of grey area as video game emulation does. Just because Blizzard does not wish to maintain legacy servers does not mean that preserving the game in its original state is devoid of value. In this spirit, Nostalrius claims they will release all source code, including anonymized user data, to the public. Even so, WoW is of course still the intellectual property of Blizzard and running a legacy private server is of questionable legality.

Does this mean Blizzard is going to put even more pressure on other private servers too? Are they, despite what they have stated earlier, considering their own legacy servers? Or is it just lawyers doing their normal lawyery type works?

‎(Disclaimer: I'm considering this news about gaming, not information on how to pirate games. If this for some reason is infringing on rule 3; please delete it. I just needed to vent abit, they are tearing my digital world down.)

Can't say I would willingly go back to vanilla, but sad to see a cool project fade away :< MMO private servers are a strange gray area.

So for some backstory, I used to admin an emulated Ultima Online server, which was running on an open source piece of software called RunUO. It's a somewhat gray area, as it didn't contain any copyrighted material - it was completely orginal code and didn't even work the same as the production servers, and players had to use EA's client to connect. In fact, it ran better than EA servers did, could support more players and required less resources. It was really versatile and I think you could even build your own UO clone with it, if you had the patience for creating art assets and worldbuilding. For reference, we ran a server with a peak connection count of 120 on what was essentially a $1000 range gaming PC using a residential internet connection without issue. The bigger servers had player counts in the thousands. I can only assume EA didn't like private servers, but many of them have existed for years and years without so much as a peep from lawyers, though UO is the tiniest piece of the EA empire at this point. From what I know, it continues to exist because the top brass at Bioware like it - EA was going to kill it and Bioware stepped in and took over its management instead.

Another non-MMO example is OpenTTD, which is an open source port/remake of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, which is an all new engine built to replicate the original game, but comes with its own art and sound assets (you can insert the original game's art into OpenTTD if you have it).

How is it questionable? A third party took Blizzard's property without permission and reverse engineered it to run their own version of a game they don't own. It is 100% illegal, hence the takedown.

This is devastating news for the WoW emulation community. Nostalrius is the best thing to happen to this game in a very long time. It's a real bummer to lose it all, considering that this recent wave of private servers has been on an entirely different level quality-wise. There's a magic to vanilla WoW that simply isn't found in any of the expansions, and the game feels alive in a unique way thanks to the huge, dedicated community. The intense guild rivalries on the PVP server come to mind, which resulted in lovely stuff like this:

Some of my favorite moments were in Vanilla, but god damn did Vanilla WoW suck hard to play back in those days.

I get that people really wanted that deep shot of nostalgia that those days had, but it was a matter of time before Blizzard would catch wind of these servers.

It questionable because international copyright law isn't always the same as american copyright law. Also I'm not a copyright lawyer. So questionable is the word I'd go with.

Ninjaedit: @erhard, that video will continue to bring a smile to my face for a long time.

I debated the idea of jumping into this server a while back, but eventually decided against it. This is a bummer for the people playing on the server, but they should have been prepared for this kind of eventuality anyway.

Blizzard doing this is... interesting. I don't remember them shutting down any other private servers in the past, but I haven't been paying attention to the private server scene. I would love to see Blizzard launch an official vanilla (or any other expansion) server(s). That would actually get me to resub just to check it out.

I know it's unlikely to happen because of the whole, splitting the user base thing and I'm sure there are some non-trivial server issues that they would need to solve, but there's very clearly a demand for this sort of thing. Having an official server run by Blizzard and not having to download a bootleg client and all matter of shady business would appeal to a lot of people I bet. It's such a cool idea that it will never happen, but we can dream.

This is a real shame. Blizzard doesn't offer any kind of vanilla server, so Nost wasn't competing with retail, and the people who ran Nost made no money off of it. Kind of a weird move for a company that's going through a lot of criticism over the quality of Warlords of Draenor (with a loss of 5 million subs). I understand it's their property, and maybe it will just blow over since it's such an underground thing, but I'm surprised they're willing to take the bad publicity. Nost is very popular for a reason. It's not some fling people got into, despite what Blizzard says about people having little lasting interest in a Vanilla server.

There's other vanilla servers out there that aren't as big as Nost. They're going to see a lot of people coming over, so it's only a matter of time before they get shut down too.

Shame, this was a quality server. I went on a nostalgia trip back in January and leveled a human paladin up to 40 before burning out, and I really enjoyed my time there. The PvP server ended up getting a little too hectic—the original player cap back in vanilla was 2500 and this server eventually got up to 12k online, it was too much for vanilla azeroth—but it was pretty damn stable for the load it was handling. I think they started getting a little too big, the player base right up until now was fucking enormous and getting bigger as Legion takes longer to release. The TBC server I bet was going to attract even more people.

It's really disappointing Blizzard is doing this, they haven't shown any interest in preserving the older versions of WoW in any official format. There is so, so much love for The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King in the WoW community that I'm really surprised they haven't come out and released a few servers of their own that run 2.4.3 and 3.5.5. Game preservation is a topic that keeps coming up, and stuff like this makes it still a problem if the actual company is actively against the people trying to preserve a lost age. Even before this, Blizzard was/is shutting down any twitch streams that were streaming private servers for any WoW expansion that is not the current.

Too bad to see so many people lose something they care for, but I can't say I'm surprised to see something like this happen.

That said, as someone who began playing WoW on release, and still semi-regularly plays the game, personally, I could never go back to vanilla. There are parts of every expansion that are great, and, well, aside from original Nax and ZG/ZA, it's still there to experience. I go back and run those old raids solo, or with a friend, once in a blue moon, and it's fun to blow through and see everything. Hell, not even a week ago, I got the Ashes of Al'ar during a Tempest Keep solo run.

@immunity: Apparently when asked about the possibility of legacy servers some years back someone at Blizzard released a statement saying it was impossible to, because they never kept pre-TBC data around when patch 2.1 dropped and the company would never want to invest the time or money in reverse engineering it back.

@trilogy: They where competing though because they were offering an alternative service using the product that Blizzard made. As the OP stated, there's about 10,000 people playing daily on that pirate server. As long as that server is available, it's keeping potential customers away from Blizzard. There's no way for us to know if when it shuts down any of those people will go and start playing on official WoW servers but some of them might.

Also Blizzard just need to put the foot down on this stuff or they leave themselves open to future problems.

It got too big, should probably have capped players at like 5000 or so before it got out of control.

Blizzard are such greedy bastards

@erhard: Oh hey, bomb groups in WoW; pretty neat. That was the Warhammer experience 24/7 in the lakes, though it was actually somewhat balanced before you got up to 400+ people.

To be clear it doesn't matter that the server curators made no money, by existing and being a vastly superior product to modern WoW they're inherently an extremely viable competitor that can drastically reduce the interest in the already poorly received WoD.

I disagree. The people who play Vanilla servers are getting an experience that retail can't and won't offer. Blizzard isn't interested in making and maintaining their own retro servers, and that's fine. But we're not talking about people who just want to play WoW for free. We're talking about people who want to play an experience that is so radically different from what modern day WoW has become. Many of them are willing to pay for it, but can't because it's illegal to charge for it, and if they did charge for it, it would of caused Nostalrius being taken down immediately instead of 1 year after launch. Some might return to retail, but my guess is most will not. Some won't ever buy another Blizzard product again. You're right in that we won't know those numbers, but what we have a much larger understanding of is why these people choose to play on Vanilla servers, and the context that made this all a huge thing.

I'm not naive enough to think Blizzard is outside of their right to shut down these servers. I'm just really disappointed when I factor in the entire context of the situation. Retro servers are such a special thing, and to lose them because the company that made the game in the first place doesn't want to preserve the game themselves, and also doesn't want anyone else to preserve it for them (even without profit), is a shame to me. There's probably some cold hearted copyright protection type of explanation here that explains why Blizzard is obligated to shut these servers down, but I'm not a copyright lawyer. My argument is heartfelt and in the interest of preserving something really special. I'm fully aware that in a courtroom, my side doesn't win.

@trilogy: I agree with you that most people playing on the vanilla server don't want to play the current version of WoW, but by it existing it's giving people an option to play a game that they shouldn't be able to play and giving them an option they otherwise wouldn't have. Your option to play WoW should be play it or don't. Not play it or don't or play this old free version. By there being an old free version, it keeps potential customers away, no matter how small that number might be. And that, on top of protecting their IP (which could entirely be cold hearted legal reasoning), is why it's important enough for Blizzard to shut it down.

Man, that must be such a crazy bummer for the hardcore people on that server. Legal schmegal, sucks to be them right now.

Think @fredchuckdave is right. Had this been capped at a smaller number I wonder if it would have just slid under the radar..

I wonder why they wouldn't save it all and transfer it to someone else in a less copyright friendly location.

@pyrodactyl: They possibly could another server called Scriptcraft which was like proto-Nostalarius shut down but transfered accounts and characters to another private server named Valkyrie. But it's really up to if anyone in those countries would be willing to get a group together and run another server just as well as the current one.

You're not wrong; legally speaking it's black and white.

That said this very much reminds me of how emulation and abandonware were 10+ years ago, and the gray area they were in. Legally speaking with those games you would always be able to put it in black and white, and companies would take steps to protect their IP. Though from time to time developers of classic games would say informally they were happy that at least there was SOME way for people to enjoy their games since until GOG and the like it was very hard to obtain old games and for PC games, run them on modern computers.

I feel like emulation of MMO's on private servers are very much where emulation and abandonware were not so far before. Let's not so quickly forget that the conversation has changed from "they are pirating these games and it's illegal, therefore naturally they're going after you for hosting Pirates! on your site," to a more nuanced conversation. This is also an issue of games preservation and MMO's are in the hardest spot because the game you played before no longer exists. This is most difficult for games that have been just shut down such as City of Heroes and Star Wars Galaxies, but also games like WoW, FFXI and EQ1 are so radically different now than when people loved them that they're practically not the same games.

More studios need to take Daybreak's stance with the Project 1999 emulated servers for EQ1. Going back to my abandonware analogy, what Daybreak did with EQ1 was very similar to what Bethesda years ago, did with Arena and Daggerfall: allowed people to freely download them.

I wonder if there's any more to this than a simple cease and desist. I feel like if I were Blizzard, I'd look at the situation and say, "Sure, you can do that. But you gotta pay us for it." And of course since it's free, it's more than likely the people responsible wouldn't go for that.

Then again, 10k people... the money from that wouldn't even pay to clean Activision's toilets.

Makes me wonder when/if blizzard is going to take down private servers that have the more recent expansions on them. I played on the Molten-wow servers a lot when they had WotLK, and dabbled a little when they had Cataclysm and MoP. They had 5 or 6 servers up last I checked each with around 4000-5000 people on them regularly. Not to mention that people could buy gear with real money on those servers, not sure if that's something you could do on this Vanilla server.

If their players had a legally purchased copy of the game... they owned it. They didn't torrent some cracked version of WOW and disperse it to people. Their version of the game existed at some time for owners of the game, these players wanted to keep that version. I think the private server owners are within their rights, they just didn't have to resources to fight for it. Blizzard is just playing bully because it can.

If I had an original release version of Call of Duty 4 to this day, having never updated it online, is that wrong? No.

I don't see how it would be wrong to start up my own server using that version of the game either.

Especially since by all accounts, no profits were made off this server, it's absurd to think a consumers rights don't exist unless the developer allows it. Maybe this hasn't been tested in court but it should be.

Except the World of Warcraft requires a monthly fee paid to Blizzard to play it. It's still piracy.

Not legally. When you purchase a movie, TV show, album, or game it's usually considered a license, not ownership. That license usually prohibits certain uses of the product, for instance if you look at a DVD/Blu-Ray it will say you're not allowed to sell tickets to view your copy of that film or even allow over a certain amount of people watch it.

Not to mention when you purchase something you usually agree to a terms of service that will preclude the purchaser from using the game outside of what the developer intends.

JonTron even made a video about this, and he's not someone who normally does that sort of thing. You can watch the whole thing if you like, but I'd say the most relevant part is right here.

That about says it all, right there. People who say to their customers "you think you want that, but you don't" shouldn't be allowed to interact with customers.

And judging from the popularity of the server Blizzard shut down, I think it's fair to say this guy was OBJECTIVELY wrong.

I don't think it sucked. Vanilla was great because it was fresh and no 'Food Stamp' epic items, open world PVP has never been better than it was pre-TBC. The glory days of raid groups intersecting in Blackrock Mountain... I used to enjoy having to make those risky group runs to Scarlet Monastery as Alliance, as you had to walk through a lot of Horde territory and/or brave the Zeppelin. So fun with the right people, but also had the capacity for being frustrating.

It was definitely more of a grind and slower to level; I don't think the grind was bad for levelling as there was plenty of quests but grinding materials for raids and reputation was very time consuming, it still is now from what I know but definitely not as bad, there is no 'I need frost resistance!' concerns anymore.

What does suck is I haven't been able to play the game for years because it's too laggy for me in Asia. My only options are Chinese servers or Australian and the former has weird content cuts and the latter is still laggy.

I love wow and will always love it even in the future. I have played since the release month and have every expansion. (all but original are collectors) I still play from time to time but I cant find myself investing in it much due to the changes and how easy it is to get gear and such. It makes the game seem, less fun as you can get almost anything without having to try hard. If Blizzard made legacy servers to host the vanilla and even BC then I would most likely play those Alot more and give them my money more often. It is sad to see a server that hosted such goodness go away as vanilla, even with the terrible grinding and hours upon hours of raiding and finding 40 peeps to raid with sucked, I still think it was the time when I had the most fun. I met people and interacted with them much more then I do now as it was needed back then. I dont support pirating of games *music tho >.>* but this is something that I wouldnt be mad about people playing as its something blizzard took away and seem to want to keep away instead of letting their fans enjoy. Heres to hoping they do bring their own legacy servers!!!

I'm surprised Blizzard allowed this private server to last this long. People seem to forget that Blizzard is a business and a company. It always has been. Blizzard may be more well liked than most gaming companies though their handle of the community through forums and videos, but it doesn't make them any less of a business. Whether the server was making money or not, Blizzard is going to rigorously enforce their trademarks like any other company. Even then I think there would not be enough subscriptions for a vanilla server to make a profit that would make Blizzard consider setting up one.

It does indeed sucketh for the people who loved vanilla especially for the people who worked hard to get it running and maintaining it, but I think they all knew it was not going to last forever.

Blizzard's business strategy has been or at least turn into catering to mostly the "casual" gamer. And it works. Despite declines in profits, they still make a great deal of money off of WoW after how many years of changing literally almost everything.

I consider vanilla WoW player somewhat hardcore considering how brutal it can be. I looking back at my experiences with vanilla I just cringe thinking about Onyxia, Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, 40 man raids, and... DKP loot system. It is of my assumption that Blizzard believe that vanilla is not great or at least obsolete and that they are making a better gaming experience for the current WoW community with future changes. They want veterans to play their version of WoW and think they'll enjoy it as much or more than vanilla even it means taking down private servers. Mind you this is all my just assumptions.

All this makes curious how well Overwatch will be since it a new ip for Blizzard. Can it become as big of a franchise like Warcraft in today's ocean of games? Or will be while a good if not great game yet something to play then forget after an year or so?

@spaceinsomniac: I saw that video. It was the first I heard about any of this. I don't play WoW anymore. Blizzard is completely within their rights to take this server down if that's what they want to do, of course, but it all just seems shitty. I just don't get why they don't do something for the people that want to play old WoW.

Do they really think all these people that want to play vanilla WoW will just rush to whatever the current expansion is because they have no alternative? A few might, but I highly doubt anywhere close to the majority would. Or do they just not give a shit about them? I'm kinda leaning towards the latter.

And man...that clip shown in the JonTron video is insane to me. Telling someone they don't want what they say they want is crazy. Yeah...I'm sure none of the thousands of people on that server actually wanted to be there.

I mean, it CAN be true in some cases--asking developers for a drop rate increase that would get you every cool item in a week, for example--but that's not what we're talking about here. Gamers aren't game designers, and they don't always know what is best for their games, and that's a fact that needs to be accepted sometimes. But again, that has nothing to do with this situation.

This is the equivalent of no one being able to legally play Final Fantasy VI anymore, someone standing up and saying that they want a legal option to play FF VI, and then someone at Square telling them "You don't think what you want to think what you want that you don't want that you think you do but you don't want that what you think. Now, go play our newest game, FF XXIX: Lightning Returns Again for Some Reason."

It would have been so great if the guy asking the question in that Blizzard video would have literally said "yeah, and I don't ever want to play Super Mario 3 or Tetris again either, because those games are old and outdated, right? Fuck you!"

I can see why Blizzard did and I see why people are mad. Im not in the MMO scene anymore, but my question is does that unoffical server charge for people to use it?

No, they weren't. They were hoping that Blizzard would consider vanilla WoW to be abandonware and just ignore them as long as they didn't profit off it.

Problem for them is that Blizzard still uses the IP, so it was only a matter of time.

People have no right to be mad. They were playing the game for free...even if it was a super old build.

It's crazy how they manage to separate their image from Activisions, if articles said Activision closed down the servers then people would flip their shit lol.

I think the fact that the server got up to 10k users is what prompted the shutdown, personally i would have reached out before slapping a lawsuit onto it but maybe they did that who knows. I honestly don't think it's taking away much from the main game as if they wanted the new WOW they would be playing it, it's the problem withe online gaming experience the game you buy changes over time into something you don't like anymore. 10k players want a legacy server but i guess that isn't big enough business for Activision to do it themselves, i would have tried to get some kinda royalty deal with the people running the servers and get some money off it without it costing me anything AND keeping older wow players happy, but who knows if that makes business sense on that scale.

Never played much of WoW, but MMOs are a huge problem for game preservation in general. The fact that City of Heroes, a game I have intense nostalgia for and played at an impressionable age, is something I can never play again is rough. I still think about that sometimes, and still get sad. I'll never really get into an MMO again, because it just sucks too much when they go away. It's a phenomenon that doesn't exist anywhere else. Any traditional game, any TV show, any movie, any book I ever loved is still 100% available to me in some form if I wish to stoke the flames of nostalgia. To see any company take such unnecessary, active steps against ultimately harmless preservation efforts by fans makes me angry. It shows that they don't give a shit about what they made or what it means to people and believe that because they have a legal right to do something it means that they should.

People have every right to be mad, they just don't have the right to pretend that Blizzard isn't within their legal rights to do this. But just because something is legal doesn't make it right, it doesn't make it acceptable, and it sure doesn't mean you can't complain about it.

If Blizzard doesn't like the fact that they weren't making money from this, they should create the fucking legacy servers that their fans have been asking for, instead of this bullshit "no, you don't want that" nonsense.

It might sound like I'm fairly passionate about this game, but to be honest, I've never played World of Warcraft a day in my life.

I didn't really think about it when I posted, which is why I didn't clarify, but yeah, that's definitely true sometimes. I just meant in this instance, it's crazy to me.

Something always important to remember about MMO's - especially really long running ones a la WoW, is that by and large they are not the same game anymore! They're not that game you remember playing back in the past. They're not the game where you camped for hours waiting for a rare spawn, shouting for hours for a party, running across the world for hours, etc. Note I'm mentioning all these uses of time. It sounds reasonable that as games evolve they cut out these time things, but really for some people wanting to get immersed in an MMORPG, having to spend time travelling or not get everything handed to you immediately is largely why you play the game. Even if Blizzard says "yo just play retail WoW" that's not nearly the same thing as the WoW these people want to play; actually there are several other games out there that are far closer to old WoW.

As for people not hating Blizzard... I've had more the impression people have hated it since D3 came out, and some SC2 dumb stuff.

I say this not as an old WoW player or anything - I played a couple weeks back in TBC then a couple months in MoP - but there's a similar situation with my old game as well, FFXI. I like modern FFXI just fine but it was a totally different thing than the thing I had played before. So for several months last year I went way deep on a private server, and loved it. I eventually had to move on, and I always did have the thought that the moment the server got big enough to feel like old retail again SE would sue and the whole thing would shut down. But the experience on that private server was arguably better than on retail and in the case of WoW I think it was totally better.

"Modern," post-2010, Blizzard is - in my view - a really unambitious company. I still regularly play Diablo 3 and dabble in StarCraft 2, but it's fairly obvious very different design priorities and sensibilities drove these games vs their ancestors.

Diablo 1 defined the loot based action-rpg genre. Diablo 2 utterly revolutionized that genre, pushed it forward light years.

StarCraft did the same for real time strategy, and while Warcraft III was arguably kinda flawed in comparison it gave us the seeds for the juggernaut now known as DoTA and LoL.

I truly feel for players who want to travel back to late 2004 when Blizzard did the same kind of thing for MMOs. Diablo 2 is still supported and still runs on Battle.net servers, it even received an update earlier this year. It just boggles me that they can't see the same appeal & dedication applied to their biggest franchise, albiet a more primitive version of said franchise.

I suppose a couple thousand players really doesn't add up to much or indeed say a lot compared to the million(s) still happily subscribed. But to me, I see it as a single symptom of a much bigger issue with the company vs its fanbase that has developed over time. RIP Nostalrius

It would be cool if Blizzard did release new servers once every two years and/or release 'classic' servers.

I remember sitting in Skype calls with friends while they were gleefully playing on brand new servers, fresh playerbase, fresh economy, everyone's at the same point.

Just a guess here, but could this be related to Nost asking users to directly pay for the server costs? I can't imagine this move sitting well with Blizzard.

What is the rules about petitions here because: (removed) has exploded in popularity, I didn't think it would get anywhere near 150k.

There are top Twitch streamers who are getting together stating they will stream legacy servers significantly if Blizzard change their stance, which would be a lot of exposure for Blizzard who could sure use it with an all time low subscriber base. The team leader of World of Warcraft back in 2004-2006 (or something) (removed) he will deliver a copy of the petition to Blizzard (link is his supporter comment, the delivery thing was on Twitter).

Does anyone think there is any chance of Blizzard altering their stance? Asking for an Oceania server + legacy is probably far too much...

I don't like this streamer but I do appreciate the signal boosts these people have given this 'movement'.