Blizzard responds to Nostalrius closure

Recently we reported on the closure of the World of Warcraft private server ‘Nostalrius’, which ran a version of vanilla World of Warcraft for fans seeking something a little more old-school.

The closure of the server caused the community to ask many questions about private and legacy servers, mostly about why Blizzard supposedly won’t support them. Now Blizzard has finally broken its silence on the matter.

“We have been discussing classic servers for years,” WoW executive producer J. Allen Brack said on the game forums. “It’s a topic every BlizzCon and especially over the past few weeks. From internal team discussions to after-hours meetings with leadership, this subject has been highly debated.”

“We explored options for developing classic servers and none could be executed without great difficulty,” he added. “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.”

The only solution Blizzard has currently is something called ‘pristine realms’, but according to Brack these would in essence “turn off all levelling acceleration including character transfers, heirloom gear, character boosts, Recruit-A-Friend bonuses, WOW Token, and access to cross realm zones, as well as group finder.” Reception for this has been mixed both on the forums and on Reddit, as many people are saying that pristine servers are a good idea, but not what people want.

As for the official reason for Nostalrius’ closure, it looks like this: “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.”

It also seems that Blizzard has been talking to the Nostalrius team as Brack wrote: “we’ve recently been in contact with some of the folks who operated Nostalrius. They obviously care deeply about the game, and we look forward to more conversations with them in the coming weeks.”