It’s been more than four months since the Nostalrius team dropped into Blizzard to make their case for World of Warcraft legacy servers. Despite trying to communicate with Blizzard, the team has decided to release their source code due to the lack of response from Blizzard.
The update released today by Nostalrius outlined their thoughts on Blizzard’s reluctance to communicate.
“After the meeting with Blizzard, we continued to reach out regarding the issues they raised in order to help them as much as possible and to speed up the process of an official release. Trust us, we were ready to work like hell on that, even more than before in order to help WoW team. But we never received any response to these questions, even after 4 months.
“Then, we tried to show our motivation to solve the issues from a different angle by working on mature proposals (studies, cost analysis, schedules, milestones, etc.), including a complete transfer of technology of our existing work, fixing the few remaining issues we had, official Battle.Net integration on Legacy to enhance community driven strategy and other more complex IT topics, all of this on a volunteer basis.
“Why? Our only goal was to nullify as much as possible the impact of Legacy on the WoW team so that everyone could be pleased with the result. We knew that having even a single person from the current WoW Team working on Legacy might not be seen in a positive light by the Legion community, something we understand. Sadly, we never received any answers to these proposals either.
“Blizzcon got closer by month after month, then week after week, and all the while we had a constant flow of messages from the community solidly supporting the idea of legacy servers. So we decided to take the risk of challenging Blizzard regarding Legacy servers and lighting the flame of hope for one final burst. Why? Because there are many MMORPGs coming in 2017 and 2018, mainly from Asia and also including crowd funded projects. Vanilla WoW fans were already disappointed by the stance Blizzard had adopted for so many years, and many of those people might never come back unless things moved fast on the subject.”
The Nostalrius team also announced their plans foe the futuew which initially involves handing over their source code to another WoW legacy project called Elysium. Some members of the Nostalrius team have already moved over to this project under different names.
This new server, like Nostalrius, will be working as a non-profit service to WoW players wanting the legacy experience. However, the Nostalrius source code will also be released to the public in the future.
“The source code will be first given to an existing Legacy project which we believe to be the most in line with our core values, named Elysium. This server shares the volunteer spirit and passion for the game we had. Furthermore, an important part of Nostalrius volunteers are already working there, some under different names. We wish them all the best, and hope that they will become a new home for the reunited Vanilla community.
“We will continue collaborating closely with them. This collaboration could include additional “things” to share with them if necessary to achieve this goal. In exchange, this server promised to not receive any profit from this activity. They will also have to create the documentation required to install, understand and use the work we did.
“Once this work has been done, source code & documentation will be release to the public. Goal is to have the same user friendly development package as we did for our Burning Crusade project. All of this to help developers who want to work in the gaming industry later understanding how a server works, as Nostalrius server backbone can be considered as one of the rare production server of that scale to become available. The purpose of this will still remain mainly educational in nature.”
Nostalrius were disheartened when Blizzard announced they would not reveal anything to do with WoW legacy servers at BlizzCon 2016. Nostalrius may have jumped the gun with today’s news because J. Allen Brack had said, “we’re still discussing the possibility”, of working on legacy servers.
Members of the Nostalrius community are not pleased with the news, they were hoping that Nostalrius could return with the help of Blizzard. It’s now up to Blizzard to make the next move.
Ex-Blizzard and World of Warcraft dev Mark Kern, who championed an official WoW legacy server project and delivered the petition to Blizzard, posted on Twitter this evening.
https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/795322213373132800
Directly related to this World of Warcraft story
- No Legacy server announcement at BlizzCon
- World of Warcraft Legacy server technical issues solved by Blizzard
- Nostalrius report on Blizzard meeting
- Vanilla server meeting with Blizzard goes well
- Update Interview with Mark Kern
- Nostalrius no longer releasing the source code.
- The petition has surpassed the 200K goal.
- PC Invasion Interview – Ex-World of Warcraft dev Mark Kern explains why Blizzard should open vanilla servers
- Blizzard post official statement on World of Warcraft vanilla servers
- World of Warcraft vanilla server petition open letter released
- Kern responds to Blizzard on World of Warcraft vanilla servers: “Brack’s just … wrong”
- Blizzard to meet with Mark Kern and Nostalrius.
Published: Nov 6, 2016 07:30 pm