wow Blizzard Response to Nostalrius Closure!

[Valks 2,375]

Blizzard have finally broken their silence on the Nostalrius with a blue post from Nethaera, one of the US Community Managers. Check out what they had to say!

 

The full blue post can be read below. It is important to note that the message actually comes from J. Allen Brack, the Executive Producer for WoW. 

 

J. Allen Brack on Nostalrius

 

We wanted to let you know that we’ve been closely following the Nostalrius discussion and we appreciate your constructive thoughts and suggestions.

 

Our silence on this subject definitely doesn’t reflect our level of engagement and passion around this topic. We hear you. Many of us across Blizzard and the WoW Dev team have been passionate players ever since classic WoW. In fact, I personally work at Blizzard because of my love for classic WoW. 

 

We have been discussing classic servers for years - it’s a topic every BlizzCon - and especially over the past few weeks. From active internal team discussions to after-hours meetings with leadership, this subject has been highly debated. Some of our current thoughts:

 

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. 

 

We explored options for developing classic servers and none could be executed without great difficulty. If we could push a button and all of this would be created, we would. However, there are tremendous operational challenges to integrating classic servers, not to mention the ongoing support of multiple live versions for every aspect of WoW. 

 

So what can we do to capture that nostalgia of when WoW first launched? Over the years we have talked about a “pristine realm”. In essence that would turn off 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. We aren’t sure whether this version of a clean slate is something that would appeal to the community and it’s still an open topic of discussion. 

 

One other note - we’ve recently been in contact with some of the folks who operated Nostalrius. They obviously care deeply about the game, and we look forward to more conversations with them in the coming weeks.

 

You, the Blizzard community, are the most dedicated, passionate players out there. We thank you for your constructive thoughts and suggestions. We are listening. 

 

J. Allen Brack

 

(source)

 

Whether or not this was the response people hoped for it, it is a response in some form.

 

One of the most notable things to look at here is the difficulty that he speaks of when discussing creating their own legacy servers. Among these difficulties, I would imagine they would struggle to:

• Establish a proper infrastructure that supports battle.net and all its facets on the legacy servers, something private servers didn't have to deal with. 
• Do they still have the code necessary? Given that everything was released by the Nostalrius team, I would assume a working template is there.
• Does the game now run on different hardware? We saw updates to WC3 and D2, so does this mean they know how to make the changes?
• Most likely the biggest difficulty is the fact that the servers would be hosted by Blizzard, not a small group of friends. Players complain when there are tiny issues in the game currently, whether it be bugs or glitches preventing certain things from happening. On private servers, it was just accepted due to the small size of the team. Would players expect a perfectly running server, given that this is now a Blizzard product?
• The pristine server sounds like a very interesting idea. I would definitely support the introduction of that.

So what are your thoughts? Is this a satisfactory response? Do you agree with what they have said?

[gurupak 21]

What about other hundreds of private server running at the moment? Are they legal and are they not infringing the T&C like this nostalrius server? Action should be taken on all as well. 

 

My opinion is going forward and play new expansions and enjoy new contents, rather focusing on old contents, which is already the part of the game lore, but have only got easier to do on higher ilvls now.