The Nostalrius team posted an announcement today outlining their plans now that a meeting with Blizzard regarding vanilla World of Warcraft is set to take place.
With the Nostalrius servers now closed, the team behind the vanilla servers had stated shortly after its closure that the source code would be released.
“Today is also the day where Nostalrius will start being community-driven in the truest sense of the word, as we will be releasing the source code, and anonymized players data (encrypting personal account data), so the community as a whole will decide the form of the future of Nostalrius. We will still be there in the background if you want us to, but will no longer take the lead.”
Their plans have now changed and the code will now not be released to the community. A statement today reads:
“We acknowledge the help that the emulation community provided to us by creating MaNGOS and our initial objective was to release part of these sources to help improve the current emulators – without our special anti-cheat and some other critical features.
“Our custom anti-cheat had unique functionalities that allowed us to detect and track any kind of hack / bot in a generic way. We believe the anti cheat that we made was able to detect and was able to block all of the known threats, and releasing our code would allow the development of more powerful cheating tools that would be more difficult, if not impossible, to detect. We have spent countless hours to fight people making money from exploits, cheats and traffics: the last thing we want to see now is people getting more money from wow hacks because of us.
“Some voices in the emulation scene wanted to legally force us to release the complete source code if we chose to only publish a part of it. As explained above, the anti-cheat is not something we would reveal in any case.
“A second important point is that keeping the sources private could be useful at some point during the discussion with Blizzard. They proposed to discuss together and we want to have all the chances on our side, for the community we represent now.
“Furthermore, if official legacy servers were to be released at some point in the future, the emulation would become, in essence, obsolete.”
Some members of the vanilla scene may see this as Nostalrius selling out, but one of the conditions of a meeting with Blizzard might have been that the code would not be released. Having dealt with Blizzard before on matters like this, that would not surprise us at all. If the vanilla scene want to be taken seriously then Nostalrius need to play by Blizzard’s rules.
Instead, Nostalrius has released the source code for their “replay feature” for World of Warcraft which allows sequences of from the game to be replayed. Not the source code most were expecting, but it’s an offering to the vanilla community.
What the future holds for a legitimate World of Warcraft vanilla scene remains to be seen.
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Published: May 1, 2016 06:16 pm