A community of old school gamers dedicated to the “vanilla,” or legacy version of World of Warcraft have started a petition for Blizzard to host an international legacy server for World of Warcraft.
For a little over a year, the gamers were running their own vanilla server that reproduced the original progression from World of Warcraft prior to the additions of any of its many expansion packs. Unfortunately, the hosting provider received legal notice from Blizzard over copyright infringement and were forced to shut down the unofficial realm.
The server hosted over 800,000 registrations and served 150,000 active users and was set to launch the Ahn’Qiraj raid before it shut down. Impressively, the server managed to earn these numbers entirely through word of mouth and zero publisher support. It operated very much like a real World of Warcraft realm and even had volunteers to fulfill GM roles. It goes without saying that there’s very much a sizable community of gamers interested in playing World of Warcraft in its original form.
To that end, they’ve started a petition addressed to Mike Morhaime, the CEO of Blizzard Entertainment, to launch a vanilla server. It has since gained over 115,000 signatures and earned the support of popular streamers like Sodapoppin, Lirik, Reckful, and Kaceytron. A full list of streamers can be found on Sodapoppin’s Tweet.
Sodapoppin has since released a video urging gamers to support the petition, which you can see below.
Video game designer Mark Kern, who served as the team lead for the original World of Warcraft has also pledged his support to the petition and has announced that he will personally hand-deliver the petition to Mike Morhaime if it reaches 200,000 signatures. Kern states that he’d like to show a lot of numbers to show that it has a lot of momentum behind it.
https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/721113714997403650
If you’re interested, you can sign the petition here.
