Just last Sunday (April 10th), thousands of loyal players gathered to say their goodbyes to a dying private server; the most popular server to host a vanilla version of the iconic MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) video game “World of Warcraft”. This private server, named Nostalrius, was a fan-made recreation of a time in “World of Warcraft’s” history before the release of any expansions when it was just the initial base game. After an investigation, developer and “World of Warcraft” creators, Blizzard Entertainment, deemed that the server infringed on their terms and conditions, prompting them to officially shut down the player-ran private server.
Why is this particular event such a big deal? For starters, it has sparked several debates between player-bases and developers alike. For those who don’t know, “World of Warcraft” is an online game that runs official servers for players to play on, given that they’re paying a subscription fee. On these official servers, you are limited to only playing a portion of old content and strictly stuck to playing whatever the latest expansion is. Since the writing of this article, currently players can only mostly play content from the latest “Warlords of Draenor” expansion. Whereas private servers are player-ran servers that anyone can play essentially for free with hardly any limitations on the actual content. One big question being asked amongst the community is whether or not Blizzard Entertainment was right in doing this.
On one end of the spectrum, one could argue that this game is ultimately Blizzard’s property, thus they are free to do whatever they want with it. However, in most cases, player-ran private servers are ran off of donation fees and pure passion alone. These players who run the servers don’t make a profit off of them as they run the servers at their own cost. That being said, if no harm is being caused and no one is making any money off of the private server, perhaps some may consider Blizzard Entertainment’s actions to be overkill.
Aside from the ethics of the shutdown, the other debate sparked from this whole situation was the question of ‘Legacy’ servers and if they could work. To explain, ‘Legacy’ servers are a hypothetical idea of an implementation of additional official servers that would let you play previous expansions as they were when they first released. When asked about the implementation of these servers at BlizzCon 2013, Blizzard representative J. Allen responded with “No, you don’t want that either. You think you do, but you don’t.” Essentially saying that it was the nostalgia of our thoughts talking and our wants weren’t rationalized.
So then who was really right here? In light of this whole ordeal, it has become quite apparent that there are a strong number of people who support the idea of implementing Legacy servers. Nostalrius reaffirmed this belief, having had a population of over 150,000 active players when the server was still up. Twitter account @NostalgiaWoW made a poll asking people if "World of Warcraft" should introduce legacy servers. With 1,025 votes, 80 percent of voters were in support of this idea, again proving that there is a market yet to be had.
In conclusion, this whole debacle has sparked
somewhat of a movement with many coining the hashtag #YouThinkYouDoButYouDont.
It is evident that a good portion of the player-base wants Legacy servers or at
least an alternative. And why shouldn’t Blizzard try to do something about
this? Even if Legacy servers weren’t a big success, they could still serve as
museums to the original game that changed the MMO game industry forever. Coming
from a person who actually played during that time in “World of Warcraft’s”
lifespan, I too hope to see the return of the base game. Perhaps one day,
Blizzard Entertainment will hear the concerns and find a way to bring it all
back.
