Today, June 8th, the staff behind vanilla World of Warcraft server, “Nostalrius Begins” released a detailed report on their meeting with Blizzard officials last Wednesday.
In the forum post on Nostalrius’ website, the team provided information about the meeting preparation, how it went, who took part in it from both Nostalrius and Blizzard, (Blizzard’s CEO Mike Morhaime included) and general conclusions about what this meeting means. Overall, Nostalrius emphasizes that the meeting went well, and was a productive one.
In the meeting that was supposedly only meant to last two hours, but instead lasted five, the Nostalrius team cited that they had worried the meeting would only serve as a PR move by Blizzard, but actually turned out to be an engaging conversation that focused on Nostalrius’ history, community of players, and both Blizzard and Nostalrius’ team’s personal history with World of Warcraft, and the future of legacy servers.
The forum post quotes:
In a sense, they [Blizzard] are also Vanilla World of Warcraft fans and one of the game developers said at a point that WoW belongs to gaming history and agreed that it should be playable again, at least for the sake of game preservation, and he would definitely enjoy playing again.
After this meeting, we can affirm that these guys WANT to have legacy WoW servers, that is for sure. We did everything we could to make this presentation & discussion as professional as possible, which was something that clearly was a pleasant unexpected surprise for the whole Blizzard team, Mike Morhaime included.
[via forum.nostalrius.org]
The release of a legacy server would require a lot of technical work, outside of just generating files that allowed Nostalrius to run, lost information and data from the game’s history will have to be re-created. However, Blizzard does have the original source code for Vanilla WoW.
Drawing from the details of this meeting, one can speculate that Blizzard may officially announce development of legacy servers at their BlizzCon convention later this year, November 4-5, 2016.
This is a huge step in the recent dialogue regarding legacy WoW servers, as in the past, Blizzard has shut down non-official servers, as they did with Nostalrius, nor did they acknowledge the desire for legacy servers, infamously stating “You think you do, but you don’t.”
Nostalrius had a playerbase of 150,000 active accounts at the time of the server’s shut-down, with having 800,000 accounts made, and 3,252,751 characters created. The server’s global time played reached 64 centuries. Shortly after Nostalrius told their players about the server going offline, they created an online open letter addressed to Blizzard, which over 260,000 of Nostalrius players and WoW fans alike have since signed.
