Blizzard has a lot to say about the possibility of opening classic servers for its MMORPG, World of Warcraft. The publisher recently shut down the private “Nostalrius” servers, which served hundreds of thousands of players a vanilla, pre-expansion experience of the game.
The server’s closure lead many gamers to start a petition that has since garnered the support of Mark Kern, the original team lead for World of Warcraft, and numerous Twitch streamers. It has received over 235,000 signatures thus asking for Blizzard and its CEO Mike Morhaime to consider their request and start a fresh vanilla server for the game.
Until now, Blizzard has remained completely silent on the petition and has more or less ignored the community. Speaking on the game’s official forum, WOW executive producer J. Allen Brack wrote, “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.”
“We explored options for developing classic servers and none could be executed without great difficulty,” he said. “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.”
Unfortunately, due to the technical hurdles, Blizzard has suggested a kind of compromise by way of “pristine realms.”
“Over the years we have talked about a ‘pristine realm’,” he said. “In essence that would turn off all levelling 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.”
Brack says that closing Nostalrius was something they had to do for legal reasons. He explained that the publisher had to protect its intellectual property, and that failure to do so would have damaged their rights. He added that the company had looked into the possibility of sanctioning unofficial servers, but it isn’t something they could easily do.
“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,” he said.
Brack says he will be speaking to the admins of the Nostalrius servers. “They obviously care deeply about the game, and we look forward to more conversations with them in the coming weeks,” he said.
