April's shutdown of World of Warcraft legacy server Nostalrius did away with one of the problems that'd been bugging Blizzard for some time, while also robbing the WOW community of the last way to enjoy the classic, original version of the game which over the years has been bent into countless shapes and forms by subsequent patching and add-ons. The move elicited a mass uproar (Nostalrius had some 150k active players) and it led to petition which has been thus far been signed by some 250k people, that requested the setting up of vanilla servers by Blizzard.
It now looks like Blizzard may in fact be looking into the issue as news emerged that the company had invited the crew of Nostalrius for talks, at an as yet unspecified time in the future. Whether or not the invitation is a precursor for a vanilla server effort on Blizzard's part, remains to be seen. The company has in fact alluded to the launch of a "pristine" server, which would drop some of the boosts and services of the game while holding on to its current version. Some community members fear however that the setting up and running of legacy servers by Blizzard will funnel resources away from new games and thus it will negatively impact the community.
On their part, Nostalrius' staff are obviously happy they'll get this opportunity and they have already vowed to act as the voice of the community.
Blizzard have repeatedly said that running a legacy WOW server would be immensely difficult for them. According to former WOW developer Mark Kern though, it would indeed be well worth the effort/costs. The game is a major part of gaming history and as such, it more than deserves to have a classic snapshot of it made available.
Philip Thalberg works for Gosugamers, the top destination for eSports VODs.
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