A pirated World of Warcraft legacy server project takes a turn for the bizarre
Joel Hruska

Over the last nine months,
we’ve discussed the fate of the legacy server Nostalrius. The project
was first created by a team of dedicated World of Warcraft
players who wanted to experience the game as it existed prior to the
launch of The Burning Crusade in 2007. It was then hit with a
cease-and-desist order from Blizzard and forced to shutdown.
In most cases, that would’ve been the end of
it. But the Nostalrius’ story was big enough that Blizzard agreed to
meet the team in question, inviting them to company HQ and discussing
the possibility of a legacy server project. When that meeting didn’t
produce the results the Nostalrius team hoped for, the group announced
it had given the Nostalrius code and character records to a different
group, named Elysium. Elysium was expected to bring compatible servers
online, merge the codebase, and handle character transfers.
On Saturday, Nostalrius author Viper posted to
the Nostalrius message boards and, after some dithering, made the
following request:
We ask Elysium to join this effort for Legacy realms by stopping to use data that we provided. We know they aim at official legacy realms as we do. We have already stopped the account transfer process from our side as a first step. Nostalrius community is no longer about private servers, it is about official legacy realms.We will also require your help. You are a massive community and you already got heard. Now you got to explain and convince.
To recap: Nostalrius is requesting that
Elysium, which already modified its code, basically change back. The
request seems to cover both characters and server data, since Viper
makes specific reference to both. While he attempts to argue that only
about 10% of the 300,000 Nostalrius accounts had transferred a character
to the new Elysium servers, dozens of forum posters immediately cast
doubt on this, noting that the token system for transferring characters
has been broken for weeks and that few people had ever had the
opportunity to transfer in the first place. If nothing else, the thread
seemed to make it clear plenty of people wanted to be playing their old
characters but were unable to do so.
The argument Viper presents is giving
Nostalrius’ source code to Elysium was a mistake, because it may have
damaged the cause of getting official support for legacy servers. This
isn’t exactly earth-shattering; I made a similar argument when
Nostalrius announced it would give its code to Elysium. But if handing
code over to Elysium and defiantly declaring that Nostalrius would do what Blizzard wouldn’t was a mistake, then politely asking a separate server to cease using said code after months of work is, at best, damned odd.
Elysium has announced that it will transition
to a new core, codenamed “Anathema.” Nostalrius characters that had
already transferred to the server are expected to remain, but the
Nostalrius-donated core will be removed. The team claims the game will
improve as a result of this transition, and writes: “Nostalrius handed
us the torch, we have no intention of putting it out.”
The full Nostalrius thread is here,
though it’s a veritable hotbed of conspiracy theorizing and
insult-hurling. Explanations for this about-face are thin on the ground,
but that hasn’t stopped people from arguing that Blizzard must have
some dirt on the Nostalrius devs, as if Mike Morhaime was Jason Bourne.
The legacy server issue has faltered
Part of the reason why the legacy server
movement isn’t sparking as much interest as it did is because Legion is
generally considered to be a much better expansion than Warlords of Draenor
was. But part of it, I think, is because it’s genuinely difficult to
imagine what a sustained legacy server initiative would look like. I
won’t deny I’d enjoy running some old raids again, but would I really
want to level up to 60 the “old” way, knowing that eventually, my guild
is going to have Onyxia, Molten Core, AQ40, and even Naxxramas on farm
status? What happens afterwards? True, it would take years for a server
to get to this point, but Blizzard built Warcraft for the long haul and
they’re still minting money, 12 years later.
One of the features Legion implemented is
known as “Timewalking.” Every few weeks, a set of Timewalking dungeons
from a specific expansion are available. Characters who play them are
scaled downward to match level-equivalent abilities, and while the
dungeons still tend to be easier than they were back in the day, it’s a
useful way to showcase older content and give players the experience of
running these instances. I don’t know that Blizzard added the feature to
appease legacy server fans, but it does give players the option to
revisit old dungeons in similar fashion.
The fundamental problem with legacy servers is
that they attempt to freeze the game in time, when much of the appeal
of an MMO is based on the idea that you pay a monthly fee in exchange
for eventually accessing new content. Unless Blizzard wants to launch
legacy servers for each of its previous expansions, its hard to see how
the payment structure would function. The fact that Nostalrius and
Elysium are still functional at all is evidence that Blizzard isn’t
attacking this problem as heavily as it could, but these initiatives can
only continue to exist until Blizzard says otherwise.
A pirated World of Warcraft legacy server project takes a turn for the bizarre
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