Blizzard vs Nostlarius

Much controversy has been around Blizzard’s World of Warcraft as of late due to a fan-made private server based on the original version of WoW. Blizzard decided to issue a cease and desist order against the team that helped to develop and maintain the private server known as Nostalrius. Due to this order, the Nostalrius team was forced to take down their servers in order to avoid a lawsuit with Blizzard.

Nostalrius is a private server that allows players to play the original version of WoW as it was released, known as “Vanilla WoW.” Created by dedicated fans who loved the original version of WoW, they maintained and worked on this private server for over a year with an active community playing the game. The private server had over 800,000 registered players with accounts.

The server was a reproduction of the old build that was used for the vanilla version of WoW. “We trained several entire teams: development, software validation, customers service (also named Game Masters), communication, ... as we wanted to be as professional as possible even as a completely volunteer team.” said the Nostalrius team in their petition letter to Mike Morhaime, the CEO of Blizzard. The developers of this private server stated that they chose to work on this team for the love of the game.

Since news has broken about Nostalrius having to shut down their servers, there has been quite a buzz going around with well known Youtubers such as JonTron and boogie2988 becoming involved with the topic and having opinions on the matter. Even players who never played on the server have joined the topic on forums and online speaking about why they think Blizzard is in the wrong or in the right.

Blizzard has defended its position in stating that they are within their legal right to protect their property. It is true when talking in a technical standpoint that private servers are illegal because they are using the name of World of Warcraft which is violating a copyright law. People also still argue that the private server is not making any money so it is there purely for the enjoyment of players and not affect the company in any way.

Blizzard decided to finally meet with the Nostalrius team after having them shut down their servers on May 2 to discuss the current status of the game and the possibility of having “legacy servers” so players can enjoy the original vanilla WoW as they did on Nostalrius."We are very excited to be able to help Blizzard understand the part of their community asking for legacy servers and many other related topics, in the hope that they will eventually make it possible to legally play previous game expansions," wrote the team members.The fact that Blizzard is meeting with the Nostalrius team could be a sign that Blizzard wants to add legitimate legacy servers to be operated externally.

After the meeting the Nostalrius team stated that it won’t release the source code or the database for its servers which is how things were when it originally shut down its servers. The Nostalrius team wants to give back to the emulation community for helping to get the servers up and running in the first place but it seems they may be holding on to that information for future use. For now not much else has been said about the issue and all the community of Nostalrius can do is wait.