Last year the team behind the unofficial World of Warcraft legacy server,  Nostalrius, became frustrated with Blizzard’s lack of response to an announcement on legacy servers at BlizzCon. Enough was enough. They released their source code to the Elysium project (another unofficial server team) and offered character transfers from Nostalrius to the new Elysium legacy servers which launched in December.

This move was strange because Nostalrius had made it their main goal to have Blizzard onboard and work with them helping Blizzard create an official WoW legacy service. In deciding to pass on the source code to Elysium, and eventually make it public, it can be viewed as more of a tantrum in response to Blizzard’s lack of interest on the matter.

The comments above are very strange, surely they realised that allowing Elysium to continue running unofficial World of Warcraft servers was not going to help their cause? The horse has now bolted, character transfers were made and the project was effectively handed over to Elysium. Nostalrius continue to explain why they think the transfer was a bad move.

However, when looking back to what happened, we have the feeling that the main objective was missed.

The following values that have always been at the heart of any of our actions:

  • Achieving official Blizzard Legacy servers
  • Helping as much as we can to unify the WoW community together

Today, only 10% of the former Nostalrius players have generated a token to join Elysium, and we believe that we failed to satisfy this community entirely, as at the same time legacy fans acquired a reputation of “pirates” on the official WoW community.

Contrary to our expectations, our decision to release our source code and character database to Elysium actually made our 2 goals harder to achieve, implying a thought decision to make.

Nostalrius are now making a bizarre request to Elysium and to players who transferred accounts.

After meeting Blizzard last year, there was hope that Blizzard would eventually come around to working with Nostalrius and launch an official World of Warcraft legacy service for fans. That was their goal. Now they’ve realised their actions have done nothing to help their cause.

In response, Elysium is complying with their request and will remoVe all Elysium code over the next two weeks and “all Nostalrius specific data will be wiped” and “all future Nostalrius related data will be denied”. Elysium has been working on their Anathema code which they say will be “equal to or superior to the Nostalrius core”.

The impatience and terrible decision making of Nostalrius have probably scuppered any plans of working with Blizzard.  Blizzard will have viewed the transfer of code and accounts to a new non-official service as unprofessional. After all, it was last May that Nostalrius announced they would not release the source code only to hand it over when it looked like they were at an impasse with Blizzard.

It would not be surprising if Blizzard ignored future requests from Nostalrius to help make legacy servers a reality, at least when it comes to working with them specifically. All the good work achieved prior to and after meeting Blizzard will likely have been undone.

If this whole episode tells us anything, Nostalrius has no idea how to handle the whole situation and the organisation is lacking professionalism.

Directly related to this World of Warcraft story

  • No Legacy server announcement at BlizzCon
  • World of Warcraft Legacy server technical issues solved by Blizzard
  • Nostalrius report on Blizzard meeting
  • Vanilla server meeting with Blizzard goes well
  • Update Interview with Mark Kern
  • Nostalrius no longer releasing the source code.
  • The petition has surpassed the 200K goal.
  • PC Invasion Interview – Ex-World of Warcraft dev Mark Kern explains why Blizzard should open vanilla servers
  • Blizzard post official statement on World of Warcraft vanilla servers
  • World of Warcraft vanilla server petition open letter released
  • Kern responds to Blizzard on World of Warcraft vanilla servers: “Brack’s just … wrong”
  • Blizzard to meet with Mark Kern and Nostalrius.