Blizzard finally responds to private server Nostalrius closure

Many people have been wondering as to why the private server Nostalrius, was shut down by Blizzard Entertainment. An official statement by J. Allen Brack, World of Warcraft’s executive producer and vice president, finally explains why they handed down the decision to shut down the private vanilla WoW server.

What happened in Azeroth again?

Earlier this month the internet got wind that one of the largest private servers, for the original version of World of Warcraft, was about to get shut down by Blizzard Entertainment. This classic WoW server was home to an estimated 800K registered fans of the original game. You can find an in depth review of when the story first broke right here on GameSkinny.com.

On April 6th 2016 the Nostalrius server was shut down as per Blizzard Entertainments request, with no clear reason as to why. The confusion has now been alleviated, as of yesterday April 26th 2016. The Blizzard forums, and the Nostalrius community, got the response they thought they were looking for. J. Allen Brack has this to say about the situation:

“Why not just let Nostalrius continue the way it was? The honest answer is, failure to protect against intellectual property infringement would damage Blizzard’s rights. This applies to anything that uses WoW’s IP, including unofficial servers. And while we’ve looked into the possibility – there is not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server.

We explored options for developing classic servers and none could be executed without great difficulty. If we could push a button and all of this would be created, we would. However, there are tremendous operational challenges to integrating classic servers, not to mention the ongoing support of multiple live versions for every aspect of WoW“

Brack went on to say that Blizzard has considered making a “Pristine Realm” which would have all the classic World of Warcraft features but, isn’t sure that it would appeal to current day users.

The biggest question that many have after reading this statement is: how difficult could it actually be to run a vanilla server considering that 1. the French group behind Nostalrius has made all their software information public so anyone can look at it and use it and 2. Blizzard is one of the largest game companies in the world. One technical support person for Blizzard cited that, one of the main issues would be that the hardware from back then and now is completely different. Also stating that the source code for vanilla World of Warcraft may be hard to find, or just non existent at this point.

The full statement about the Nostalrius server closure can be found on Blizzard’s forums.

What do you think? Could, and should, Blizzard host a vanilla WoW server? Or do you feel that expansions to the game have made it better? Feel free to comment below!