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When Blizzard shut down the Nostalrius third-party World of Warcraft server, it triggered a wave of protest from thousands of players who had signed on to play the classic version of WoW, before any expansions had arrived to change the feel. In the wake of the fan outcry, Blizzard promised to encounter with the Nostalrius developers and hash out the state of affairs. According to the lead programmer of Nostalrius, Viper, their meeting with Blizzard nigh the prospect of building archetype servers for the game was productive and treated seriously by Blizzard itself. The listing of people attending the meeting included:

  • Mike Morhaime – CEO
  • J. Allen Brack – Executive Producer for WoW
  • Tom Chilton – Game Director for WoW
  • Ion Hazzikostas – Banana Game Director for WoW
  • Marco Koegler – Technical Managing director for WoW
  • Saralyn Smith – Global Managing director of Customs Development
  • Kester Robison – Managing director of WoW Customs Evolution
  • Vanessa Vanasin – PR Director for WoW
  • Randy Jordan – Blizzard Community Managing director

The discussion itself ran to more than five hours and touched on a diversity of topics, including the history of WoW emulation, whether or not a volunteer team could keep to handle Nostalrius (or a Archetype project of similar scope), and a technical report on the achievements and bugs of the Nostalrius project in particular. Here are the major highlights from that coming together.

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First, Blizzard does accept the original Vanilla WoW source code and tin retrieve the code from any previous date or patch at will. Unfortunately, in that location are still significant barriers to launching a vanilla version of WoW. Viper writes:

[I]north order to generate the server (and the client), a complex build organization is being used. Information technology is non just about generating the "WoW.exe" and "Server.exe" files. The build procedure takes data, models, maps, etc. created by Blizzard and too generates customer and server specific files. The client only has the information it needs and the server only has the data that it needs.

This means that before re-launching vanilla realms, all of the data needed for the build processes has to exist gathered in 1 place with the lawmaking. Not all of this information was under a version control system. In the finish, whichever of these parts were lost at whatsoever betoken, they volition accept to be recreated: This is likely to take a lot of resources through a long development procedure.

In addition to the technical aspects of releasing a legacy server Blizzard besides needs to provide a very polished game that will exist available to their millions of players, something existing unofficial legacy servers cannot provide.

The meeting ended without Blizzard expressing any firm determination as far as the hereafter of archetype servers, but the Nostalrius team reports that Blizzard is actively interested in the idea, and that many of the people they met at the meeting were longtime WoW players, from vanilla to the present day. Information technology's not clear if nosotros'll see whatever time to come classic servers from Blizzard, but the visitor is clearly willing to engage on the idea. I maintain that the best fashion for the company to engage with its unabridged playerbase is to offer some sort of progression advocacy through the original game, especially for those who aren't thrilled that their classes weren't well balanced prior to The Called-for Crusade (Paladins, Shaman, and Druids were basically locked into healing roles in terminate-game content in vanilla WoW). Such a step is probably an gild of magnitude more difficult than getting the company to build even a single archetype server or set of servers, so it probably wouldn't be implemented when / if the start archetype servers deploy, if it's considered at all.

It's worth noting that sure aspects of vanilla WoW might not be enjoyed past anyone. As someone who participated in the original WoW PvP grind, I can testify that while it was, in certain means, a lot of fun, information technology was also stressful and required an insane amount of time, week afterwards week afterward week. It was easy to hit the early ranks, merely if you wanted to push past Rank eleven, the corporeality of time you had to sink into PvP started to ascent exponentially. You had to be a fellow member of the server farm team, and yous had to play most every waking minute — some players shared their account data with other people simply because it was impossible for them to dedicate viii-10 hours to PvP seven days a week for the 3-4 weeks it took to motility from Rank 13 to Rank 14.