Blizzard Shuts Down Vanilla WoW Private Server With 150k Active Players KitGuru

Although World of Warcraft has made a significant impact on the MMO industry, there are still people who prefer the 'vanilla experience' back before Blizzard introduced any major expansions or changes to the game. For those people, there have been private servers available to get a nostalgia fix but one of the largest and most active servers is being shut down this week, following a cease and desist from Blizzard.

Nostalrius servers offered the vanilla WoW experience to 800,000 players since it first opened up and over 150,000 players have remained active to this day, according to a petition written by the Nostalrius team in an effort to get them to change their minds. The petition has attracted close to 47,000 supporters as of the writing.

Nostalrius will be shutting down on the 10th of April unless Blizzard changes its mind, which may be unlikely as there is no requirement to own or subscribe to the game in order to play on these servers.

To save the servers, a letter to Blizzard was published along with the petition. It explains why the vanilla server exists, and how popular it is. We passionately reproduced the original progression you created throughout patches and content releases. The Ahn Qiraj raid of the mighty was to be released next Month.

"However. The French provider hosting our server received a formal notice from US and French lawyers requesting that we shut down our services in the event of Copyright Infringement. We decided to schedule the final shut down of our World of Warcraft realms as soon as we received the information.

"This message is sent in the hope of facilitating changes in the link between Blizzard's legacy servers and those run by volunteers. Our community has never been viewed as a threat to Blizzard. It sounds more like a transverse space where players can continue playing old World of Warcraft game until a new expansion becomes available. This is a large and powerful community that is attached to future Blizzard titles as we are in no other gaming company.

Blizzard has yet not responded to the petition.

KitGuru Says: Blizzard has turned a blind eye to private servers in the past but it looks like this one in particular gained a larger following than they were comfortable with. All about private wow servers It will be interesting to see what Blizzard's response to the open letter and petition is. Would you guys like to see Blizzard allow vanilla WoW servers to exist? I'm a fairly new player (I started last years) and would be interested to see how it was back then.