Home / Software & Gaming / Blizzard responds to Nostalrius private vanilla server closure

Blizzard responds to Nostalrius private vanilla server closure

Earlier this month, Blizzard sent a cease and desist letter to the operators of Nostalrius, a private vanilla World of Warcraft sever played on by hundreds of thousands of players. This also sparked a petition to get Blizzard to stop ignoring fans calling for legacy servers. It took a couple of weeks, but Blizzard has now commented on the matter, explaining its side of the story.

Writing on the WoW community forums, community manager ‘Nethaera' explained that Blizzard couldn't just let Nostalrius continue the way it was as once you own a trademark or Intellectual Property, failure to protect it can eventually lead to it being revoked. However, Blizzard is apparently in talks with the people who ran Nostalrius right now and is exploring some options for legacy servers, though it wouldn't be an easy task.

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“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. 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 right now, the idea floating around Blizzard is to implement ‘Pristine Realms', which would strip WoW of all of its levelling acceleration features, heirloom gear, XP boosts, friend recruitment bonuses, tokens and the group finder. This would essentially be a ‘clean slate' edition of WoW that would aim to re-capture the nostalgia of Vanilla WoW. However, at the moment Blizzard isn't sure if that would be the best solution.

Aside from that, the World of Warcraft team is in ongoing talks with the people who ran Nostalrius but nothing more was elaborated on.

KitGuru Says: It is great to see Blizzard actually explaining its side to this and communicating with World of Warcraft players. What do you guys think of Blizzard's response to all of this? 

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11 comments

  1. Honestly this is sad to hear but also good to hear. If Blizzard is infact in talks with the Nostalrius team we could end up with the team getting some kind of pay and an official server being hosted.

  2. It makes sense, IP rights what they are. Still if Blizzard takes it upon themselves to host such servers, you know who players are going to bitch to. Blizzard should figure out how to have licensed private hosting, the way we all used to play online.

  3. that wouldnt’ work either,

  4. Could you elaborate on that?

  5. Blizzard CAN grant operating licenses without affecting their IP rights, they just won’t.

    Many other publishers do exactly that when publishing to certain regions they have little established presence in, and there’s even precedence for this exact situation. NCSoft has license agreements with companies who operate classic versions of their games and they still maintain full IP rights.

    Allowing the private servers without an agreement in place yes would have an effect on their rights but they are flat out lying when they say “there is not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server.”. There is. Other companies do it, other industries do it, they can too if they actually wanted to.

  6. They keep saying it would be soo difficult to do this… yet this small group had this server running for years, and they didn’t make hardly anything *did they?*, so it can’t be all that hard.

    It would be difficult for blizzard only because they would endlessly debate on WHAT FEATURES go in. No doubt they would want a lot of the modern features in, which personally I wouldn’t like. They would especially want their DLC store content in.

    That is the only reason it would be hard for them, cause they don’t understand that vanilla players want vanilla, keep your darn sprinkles away!

  7. If they did the ‘pristine’ version idea, they would need to make sure to also lower the ilvl of all gear acquired outside of raids so that you had to actually progress from one raid to the next, instead of just doing some pvp or Tanaan or its equivalent in previous xpacs to get ready to jump into the highest content.

  8. they didn’t make hardly anything *did they?*

    They refused all forms of donation or payment and punished/banned GMs who accepted donations.

  9. I think he meant that they didn’t produce anything themselves, not that they weren’t making money.

  10. Well actually they scripted every instance themselves by using the old archives of WoWHead and similar sites to find the old boss drop rates and item descriptions / stats and added all of that content into the game themselves, they actually kept to the same patching schedule as Blizzard did with the original WoW. Sure they didn’t make the assets, but they definitely did a tonne of behind the scenes work on the server side of things.

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