Cast your mind back, if you will, to last month. Nostalrius was a hugely popular World of Warcraft vanilla server – and it was shut down by Blizzard.
A great deal of fans reacted badly to Blizzard’s decision. After all, Nostalrius was literally the only server that offered players a chance to experience WoW as it was in the beginning, before expansions came and changed the game in a way a lot of folk didn’t agree with.
Exciting news then, as it was announced over on the Nostralrius forums that the administrators behind the closed private server will meet with Blizzard at their headquarters.
The administrators of the server are currently trying to lock down a date and time to meet with Blizzard at the developer’s Irvine, California office.
There was no mention of who from Blizzard will be in attendance, but I would hope they don’t try and mug off the Nostalrius guys by sending in the janitor or something.
It seems likely that they’ll at least be meeting with community manager J. Allen Brack. He’s the chap who broke Blizzard’s silence on the closure, and did suggest that they were looking to meet up for a chat.
Nostalrius admin Daemon spoke of the team’s excitement:
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.
If the closure of Nostalrius and accompanying reaction proved anything, it’s that the fans want a vanilla server. Here’s hoping Blizzard can work with the team to make something happen.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.