How Successful Will Classic Be?

As of today, WoW Classic is only a month away! I'm still excited, but I've been quiet on here because I honestly haven't had much to say. The open beta continued and there were several stress tests, but I didn't participate in either of those things. Commenting on what other people have been doing and saying only gets you so far when talking about games.

However, with launch being this close now, I thought it would be fun to "warm up" the blog again by writing one post a week speculating about different aspects of Classic. Not because I particularly expect to actually be predicting the future, but because I think it will be fun to look back on my own expectations later on and to compare them to how things actually played out.

First off, I wanted to tackle the question of how successful Classic is going to be. One of the biggest problems we run into right away when asking this question is that we still don't really know what made the original World of Warcraft so successful in the first place. Sure, it was a good game, but it would be highly dubious to claim that the degree to which it was better than its competition was directly proportional to the size of its success.

I think one aspect that undoubtedly played a large role is that - for whatever reason - the game managed to acquire a huge "newbie hose" as Eric Heimburg used to call it. We know that even pre-Cata, the majority of players who tried the game didn't stick with it for long. For it to have seen as meteoric a rise in players numbers as it did despite of that, the number of new players signing up on a daily basis must have been insane during those first few years.

One way or another, WoW achieved virality. Looking back at an old personal diary of mine, it doesn't seem like a coincidence that about two weeks before I started playing myself, I noted that a lot of my online friends had been talking about this thing called World of Warcraft lately, and the time stamp on that entry is the 6th of October 2006, two days after the release of the infamous South Park episode...

Anyway, lightning is unlikely to strike twice, but even if we were to assume that the game is bound to have much more limited appeal in this day and age (which I don't think is actually a given) and that most of the target audience are lapsed former players, that still leaves us with a potential audience of several tens of millions of players. How likely are they to show up again and stay?

Despite of their unique status, I actually think that private servers are the closest thing we have to a working prediction model. They've basically followed one of two paths:

First there's Nostalrius, which launched with a decent amount of fanfare for a private server and then continued to grow and grow, until Blizzard sent that fateful cease-and-desist letter.

All other private servers pretty much fall into the other group, whose fate has tended to play out like this: the server launches to a small to medium amount of fanfare (again, for a private server), maintains a healthy population for a while and then slowly slides into obscurity/inactivity as players drop off and aren't replaced by new ones.

I cannot for the life of me imagine WoW Classic sharing the fate of those latter servers, because from what I can tell the two main reasons they decline are 1) increased risk of some sort of drama or technical issue over time and 2) lack of marketing: It's one thing to produce a shiny launch trailer to attract a decent-sized crowd for launch day and quite another to continue to maintain a healthy influx of new players for years.

I'm certain that Classic is going to be safe on the stability side, as I have no doubt that Blizzard will stick to their word of maintaining it even if it doesn't turn out to be super popular in the long run, and while there has been a curious lack of marketing for Classic, the simple fact that it's going to be on the Blizzard launcher should guarantee a continuous influx of new players of at least moderate levels for a long time.

The question is: Will Classic be able to do a Nostalrius? It seems hard to come up with reasons why it shouldn't. It's certainly going to be the most faithful and stable recreation of Vanilla WoW available on the market, and easily accessible through the Blizzard launcher at that, without requiring any illegal download shenanigans.

The same people who were invading the YouTube comments of every WoW video throughout 2015 and '16 to tell everyone that they should ditch modern WoW and come play on Nost instead can go campaign for their friends to join them in Classic now. Hell, I've already done it by bugging my own friends from back in the day! One shouldn't underestimate the influence of passionately positive word of mouth, especially when professional marketing has been so curiously absent.

While gaming news have dutifully reported on every stage of the Classic development process, I have no doubt that a huge chunk of the aforementioned potential audience still doesn't even know that Classic is about to become a thing. Once it launches and their old friends urge them to come back, there's no telling how far that could go.

Oddly, I think that the biggest risk to things working out as I described is probably modern WoW. The barrier to entry for playing on Nostalrius was such that only people who were quite passionate about trying it even got a foot in the door... and if you went through all the effort of downloading an illegal copy of the client just to find out that you didn't actually like it, you probably weren't going to shout it from the rooftops.

Meanwhile Classic will share its subscriber base with current WoW players, which means that at its launch a sizeable number of those trying out Classic will come from the current game with its decidedly different sensibilities, and I strongly suspect that they won't be quiet about it if they don't like it. So any positive buzz will likely have to compete with comments along the lines of: "WTF Blizz, why did you waste money on making this instead of adding another raid tier?" instead of simply projecting a unified image of how great the game is.

Anyway, after all that waffling, what do I actually think will happen? I think that launch will attract a very large number of both current and lapsed players, and overall reception of the game will be mixed. I expect that those who don't like it will drop out quickly, causing the initial numbers to plummet again, but then, as the community of actually interested players starts to solidify, word of mouth will become more positive and Classic will actually start to see growth again as more and more former players become aware of it and get sucked in again. That's my theory at least.

Dungeons and Drama

Happy New Year, Everyone!

I'm continuing to level my dwarf priest on Nostalrius Elysium PvE, but progress is slow. One of the downsides of Vanilla WoW gameplay that I absolutely admit is there is that it doesn't lend itself very well to short play sessions, so I only really play on the weekends when I have the time to play for several hours at once. Unfortunately one or two such play sessions don't necessarily provide me with enough content for a proper blog post, so the blog stays silent even if I'm happy with having made a level or two of progress, especially since there isn't as much novelty to the process as there was when I rolled my first character on Kronos.

I'm currently sitting at level 25 and have only really quested in Redridge since leaving Westfall and Loch Modan behind, with all my other experience having come from dungeons.

First I tried to give the Deadmines another go, but that run was pretty awkward and ended up getting aborted halfway through. I should have known that it wasn't a good group considering that the leader was advertising via /yell instead of general chat. Still, the real problem wasn't anything anyone did... as far as I could tell anyway. We'd had a wipe in the forge and had just run back in, then had to run back out again when someone pulled a nearby patrol before we'd all reassembled, and the next time I ran in, it suddenly said that everyone had left the group simultaneously, which was way too much of a coincidence to have occurred naturally. Some sort of group disband bug? I don't know. Either way, since things hadn't been going so great anyway, I made no effort to whisper anyone about putting the group back together, and they didn't contact me either.

Then there was Blackfathom Deeps. What was funny about that one was that we spent ages looking for a warrior tank since the group leader (a ret paladin) insisted that this would make for the smoothest run. Then we finally found one, but the moment we actually stepped into the instance it turned out that he had neither a shield nor any interest in tanking. I don't know if he was intentionally deceiving us, didn't know what he was doing, or if the invitation issued by the paladin had been unclear, but nobody made a fuss and we just moved on with the hunter pet tanking. (Could have had that experience without waiting for half an hour, that's all I'm saying...)

Ironfur the bear was actually doing a pretty decent job at it for most of the instance too, but when we reached the part with the Twilight cultists, our pally DCed, never to return, forcing us to continue with one man down. This did not go well on the part with the braziers, where we wiped on every single one as far as I recall, and on some of them more than once. When we didn't wipe, I at least still died on every single pull (since I instantly got healing aggro from everything and the hunter was the only one trying to get things off me) and had to make the long corpse run from Darkshore every time because nobody had a res. By the end my armour was nearly broken and I was seriously losing the will to live, but at least I got a Rod of the Sleepwalker out of the whole ordeal.

In contrast to these, running the Stockades was a breeze, with a tank who seriously knew what he was doing and made it a great experience. I happily joined him for another round when it turned out that his friend had forgotten to pick up some quest items and needed to go again. I was disappointed only when I got my Seal of Wrynn at the end of the lengthy quest chain, as it was only a pesky green! I can only guess that this is another one of those "back in patch 1.x it hadn't been upgraded to a blue yet" things that the Nost team seems to love...

Speaking of the Nost team though...

The Vanilla WoW community continues to provide endless entertainment in the form of pointless drama. Remember how this whole Nostalrius relaunch came about? Because the Nost devs were ticked off that Blizzard wasn't responding to them and released their code and database to former rival server Elysium to recreate Nostalrius. While many were happy to get the server back, people were also shaking their heads at the Nost team's behaviour, as acting like that was an obvious slap in the face of Blizzard after they had considered themselves the champions of getting official WoW legacy servers previously.

Well, it seems that a couple of months later, they've finally realised this too, and are akwardly backpedaling by asking the Elysium team to stop using the code and data that they've been given only a few months prior. Unsurprisingly, the Elysium team replied with what can be summed up as: "Sure, we'll change the name from Nost to something else and go back to using our own core. Thanks for gifting us this massive community!" So nothing really changes except that the former Nostalrius team has officially disavowed private servers I suppose? One can only guess that this has something to do with Blizzard, whether they privately expressed an unwillingness for any further talks because of what had happened, or whether the Nost team is actually dealing with legal action that forces them to officially cut all ties with the project.

Little to nothing should change for those of us who are simply playing on the servers. Maybe my Seal of Wrynn will actually turn blue. And I guess I'll have to go back and re-tag the previous posts about this project "Elysium" instead of just Nostalrius.

The Adventure Continues

Suddenly (to me), the gold sellers have invaded. I had heard people talk about them being a scourge upon the land previously but hadn't noticed any myself, but one day I logged in and suddenly I, too, was getting bombarded by spam channel invites and whispers at a rate of up to one per minute. Maybe they wait until you've hit a certain minimum level or something. It's literally impossible to manually add all of these people to your ignore list. I just started to mentally block them out after a while.

I've also learned that Nostalrius has a somewhat odd concept of server progression. Releasing content like dungeons and raids in the order they were originally introduced to the retail game is a well-known strategy by now, but apparently the Nost team are sticklers for details, without being able to implement them in a good manner. What this means is that you can buy and train certain profession recipes, but when you actually try to craft them, you get an error message that "this spell isn't available to you", according to general chat because that particular ability wasn't added until patch one point so-and-so. Do you really expect me to have memorised every little detail of the Vanilla patch notes? And what am I to do with all these Raw Sagefish now? Bah.

I've said before that the key to enjoying playing on a retro server is to find a balance between indulging your nostalgia and experimenting with things that are new to you. The latter is covered by me being a dwarf instead of a night elf priest this time, and by my choice of professions: tailoring and enchanting. My original nelf priest was a tailor too, so that bit is familiar, but her second primary profession was skinning, which was easy to level and actually earned some money. While enchanting makes a good partner for tailoring, it's a huge pain to level (looking forward to having to visit the trainer in Uldaman over and over again!), and tailoring is no slouch either. I've turned hundreds of pieces of linen cloth into cloth bolts already, yet I'm barely able to craft gear intended for level 12s.

More so than on my pally, I'm also finding that grouping up for random quests is incredibly beneficial, because as a priest I don't have the same survivability while solo that I had on my pally. I had a fantastic time grouping with a warlock for the final part of the In Defense of the King's Lands chain in Loch Modan, which involves killing lots of troggs - I was one step ahead in the chain and he said he would understand if I didn't want to go back to re-do the last part with him, but why ever would I not? All I have to do is dot, wand and cast the occasional heal, and it rains both XP and cloth, much easier than it would ever do when I'm out on my own.

Speaking of wands by the way, I was so excited when I got my first wand. As a fledgling priest player, I remember being told to spec into wand specialisation asap. Current WoW players just wouldn't understand.

I was actually level 19 by the time I got into my first Deadmines run, but I got all my quests done and won that excellent priest shirt from the last boss. I just had to craft myself a red shirt to hide the fact that it left my dwarf's chest pretty damn exposed. But I'll probably want to do a few more runs for cloth if nothing else!

More Nost Impressions

I'm continuing my levelling on Nostalrius-PvE on and off, but it's extremely slow. Now, Vanilla levelling is slow by default and generally I consider that a feature rather than a flaw, but the high population on Nost really makes things harder than usual.

I mentioned in my previous post that you might as well forget about doing any quests that require you to pick a specifically spawned item off the ground, but finding mobs to kill is hard as well. For the purposes of getting a kill quest done, this can be alleviated by grouping up, but that only goes so far. (For example I went to Elwynn and found the mighty Hogger being spawn-camped by about four full adventuring parties.) Grouping in Vanilla WoW also incurs a hefty XP penalty on mob kills, and as I observed when I levelled my paladin on Kronos, Vanilla expects you to actually gain most of your XP through mob kills. Nost leaves you between a rock and a hard place in that regard, as you can group up and kill more mobs, at a pittance of their normal experience value, or try to set out on your own and find most of the landscape already depopulated.

The one amusing exception I found to this were caves. In Vanilla everyone knows them to be death traps, so few people dare to venture all the way into one without grouping up. However, you can then end up in the bizarre situation of multiple groups crowding a cave to such an extent that the spawn timer goes nuts and spawns new mobs almost faster than people can kill the existing ones.

On a more general note, I've also found grouping on Nost to be strangely impersonal. Vanilla has this reputation of being a more social game because grouping is harder and you value your group mates more - and that was certainly my experience on Kronos as well - however Nostalrius' huge population pretty much negates this effect to the point that grouping out in the world feels more akin to the silent dungeon finder groups of modern WoW. You run into an area where people farm mobs, someone quietly throws you an invite because you all know that you're all there for the same reason, you kill things until you're done and then wordlessly leave again - since there is such a high turnover there is no point in engaging in conversation or sticking around.

I've also found that Nost's scripting does indeed appear to be somewhat less solid than that of Kronos, as much as the more hardcore Nostalrius fanboys would like to deny it. My dwarf is only into her teens, and already I've run into all kinds of bizarre issues, though admittedly they were all minor. Quest hand-ins that weren't marked by yellow question marks, or the other way round: NPCs having that same yellow question mark over their head even though I didn't have a quest for them. While trying to fish in the Forlorn Cavern in Ironforge, I kept getting a "your cast didn't land in fishable water" error three times out of four, even though I was practically surrounded by water. Ranged attacks seem to largely ignore line of sight, with spells and projectiles going right through hills, trees and walls - I think I would find that one a lot more annoying if I didn't use ranged attacks myself. Finally, there was that one occasion in Loch Modan where upon my death, my corpse suddenly decided to start sliding halfway across the map until it was stopped by a mountain range. I'm glad the mountain was there to stop it or I might never have been able to catch up with it again!

The one thing that Nost does better than Kronos is group loot, which actually seems to work properly as far as I can tell. On Kronos, at least when I last played there, the loot distribution for the default setting was clearly uneven and not working as it should, and every corpse always sparkled for every group member even if it had nothing on it, which was super annoying.

Anyway, I continue onwards and for now my first big goal is to hit level 18 and start running the Deadmines as much as I can to alleviate those XP gaining issues a bit.

Nostalrius-PvE Re-Launch Impressions

I nearly forgot that it was Nostalrius' big day yesterday and only remembered about half an hour after the servers were already supposed to have gone up. Of course, upon checking it turned out that there had been technical issues and both servers were already down again.

The PvE server soon came up again, however the PvP server had bigger problems and remained down, causing all the people who really wanted to play PvP to clog up the PvE server queue instead because they were bored. When I tried to log in I was presented with a queue of over 11k.

That estimate was optimistic to say the least.

I decided to stay in the queue but minimised it to do other things in the meantime. Initially I kept checking on it quite frequently, anxious that I might miss my turn, but based on how slowly things progressed I eventually gave up on that. Of course, when I finally did check my position in the queue again for the first time in over an hour, I had been disconnected and would have had to start over at 9k+, which was not going to happen as it was getting quite late for me by that point.

This morning things went somewhat better and I managed to log in right away, though a quick /who command showed that even so the server was already close to approaching its purported cap of 5000 players per faction again.

As decided previously, I rolled a dwarf priest, and found Coldridge Valley to be quite busy. I can only imagine how much worse things must have been in the human and nelf starting areas. I would say that there seemed to be about as many player characters as mob spawn points, which meant that it wasn't totally impossible to get things done, but it was rare for a mob to live longer than a few seconds after it spawned. It took me several laps of the Valley just to get to level 3.

While I was talking to a vendor, I suddenly got disconnected and found that the server had been rolled back a couple of minutes. Fortunately I hadn't been in the middle of anything critical. However, something seemed to have gone wrong, as all the mobs had disappeared and nothing would respawn. I decided that this was a good time to take a break.

When I checked back about two hours later, there were still no mobs, but apparently this didn't dissuade people from logging in. The /who command still showed over 4000 (Alliance?) players online. I saw some dwarves and gnomes stand in a circle in Anvilmar and engage in what appeared to be roleplaying, but for me, a mobless Azeroth wasn't interesting.

Fortunately things were fixed by the time I checked back in in the late afternoon, and there was a queue of 2k+ again. I waited this one out and fortunately it didn't take too long. I did some more laps around Coldridge Valley and eventually managed to struggle my way to level 5. Any quests that require you to pick an item off the ground you might as well abandon instantly, as the spawn points are camped to oblivion, but at least people were happy to group up for the troll kill quests.

Can you guess where the item for Felix' quest spawns?

Around Kharanos things got a little better as people were able to spread out more, though it still took me ages to get all my boar meat and I had to abandon another pick-up-the-item quest as a hopeless endeavour. At level 7 I decided to make the trip to Ironforge to learn some professions and more. Just before I could return to questing I was disconnected and was unable to log back in, causing me to call it a day.

So far, it's been interesting to be a part of this "event", but I can't say I'm a huge fan of what many Nost lovers apparently consider a "healthy" population. Seeing a lot of people around you is nice, yes, but when it gets in the way of making progress, not just with one quest but in general, it kind of makes me long for Kronos' more convenient population size.

EDIT: On my next login I also found that I had been rolled back to level 6 and had unlearned all my professions again. Sigh.

Nostalrius-PvE to re-release on December 17th

In a bit of a turnaround of the original announcement, it's now been decided that Nostalrius' PvE server will make its comeback at the same time as the PvP version instead of being relegated to the end of the release queue. In fact, both servers will re-launch as early as December 17th!

I'm not sure I will have much time to play this close to Christmas and with SWTOR just having launched a new expansion, but I'm definitely tempted to at least log in on Saturday just to see how crazy the lauch hype is going to be.

Fortunately I have been able to acquire another Vanilla WoW client, though it was once again a journey fraught with difficulties. The dodgy Czech file sharing website where I downloaded it last time has since disappeared from Kronos' download instructions and they just tell you to torrent it. As someone who doesn't do torrenting, this is super annoying! Eventually I managed to find a download for which I "only" had to temporarily install a special toolbar, and after the download failed two times, the third attempt finally succeeded. I'll have to make sure to save the client somewhere where I will remember to back it up this time, so I won't have to go through all this nonsense a third time later on.

Now the most poignant question for me is actually which class and race to roll. I know I want to play Alliance, because even though I spent more years playing as Horde than as Alliance in retail, Vanilla is distinctly "Alliance-flavoured" to me. If I ever started on a Burning Crusade server, I would probably go Horde. I just levelled a paladin to 60, so I don't want to do that again. I considered a hunter, since my tauren hunter on Kronos didn't get all that far, but from what I've heard the crazy high population on Nostalrius makes it very hard to peacefully solo-quest/grind your way to cap as mob spawns are so highly contested. From that point of view, something with high group appeal would probably be better, but I don't want to re-create my night elf priest yet again since I could already tell on Kronos that this came too close to "trying to relive the past" and made me a bit sad. Maybe a dwarf priest to make it feel just a little different? Hmm...

On a side note, even the BBC is writing about the Nostalrius relaunch. They are going to be so busy.

Legion & Legacy - End-of-year Thoughts

Just because I haven't been playing WoW doesn't mean that it has been completely off my radar. For one thing, the launch of the Legion expansion in late summer was hard to miss. And I do have to hand it to the WoW community: They are very good at building hype. I actually watched a video of someone talking so enthusiastically about just how much fun he was having with Legion that part of me was genuinely tempted to give it a try. I know better of course, but I have to give kudos to people for still managing to rouse these kinds of feelings in me after all these years and despite of my brain knowing better.

Following the reactions to Legion once the launch hype had died down was also interesting because... either Blizzard really never learns, people will complain no matter what, or maybe a bit of both. The reason I'm saying this is that after all the "there's nothing to do" moans about Warlords of Draenor, we are now back to people complaining about excessive grind and alt-unfriendliness - the exact same things that people were criticising about Mists of Pandaria. It's pretty fascinating to observe even without playing myself.

Meanwhile, I have been feeling a genuine itch to play some Vanilla again, but after just getting a new PC I'm uncertain about how to go about it. The memory of how much of a hassle it was to get the Vanilla client up and running last time doesn't exactly endear me to going through all of that again. And it makes me kind of sad to say it but... I also think I'm pretty much done with Kronos. I didn't really put down deep enough roots on it, and the fact that it's a PvP server just makes it too hard for me to casually enjoy myself on my own. I was really hoping that the opening of the gates of Ahn'qiraj would invigorate my interest somehow, but seeing how I wasn't even able to observe the event peacefully, the opposite was the case. It's annoying that the private server community has such a hard-on for PvP servers that good PvE options are few and far between. Mind you, I don't regret giving it a try, but it also taught me that PvP servers are not worth my time in the long run.

But oh, what's this...?

The drama around Nostalrius continues, and apparently they have now decided to relaunch. I've previously written about why I don't think Blizzard will ever create official Vanilla servers, but it's hard to not feel at least a spark of hope these days considering that they've gone on record only this month to say that they are still thinking about it. The Nost team on the other hand, previously the community's untiring official champions for legacy servers, have now decided to throw their toys out of the pram and will just do the same thing as other private server hosts, which is to keep going and simply ignore any cease and desists from Blizzard. One can't help but see this as unhelpful to the cause... if you thought that official Vanilla servers ever had a chance that is. For many that were quite happy to play on private servers on the other hand, the return of Nost is a joyous day. And you know what? I think at this point it might be for me too... because they are also relaunching their PvE server.

It will be the last one to go up as part of an incredibly badly thought-out staggered release and will likely be the least populated... but all that is perfectly fine by me. Maybe in the new year I will give levelling another Vanilla character a shot, this time without constantly having to worry about gank attempts.

Refugee Crisis

The Nostalrius shutdown continues to make waves.

Kronos got absolutely swamped with refugees. To some degree, this was to be expected, but in practice it's still been awe-inspiring. I think that previously the server had been averaging slightly more than one thousand concurrent users each day, which multiplied by several factors overnight. The server admins have been doing overtime to make sure that both hard- and software could handle the stress, but nonetheless it's been a disruptive experience for the existing community, and not just because there were sudden queues and the /who command is now limited to the first fifty results like it used to be on retail instead of showing you the entire server pop.

Former Nostalrius players have been accused of lowering the quality of world chat (which is doubtful, considering the depths to which Kronos players were able to sink entirely on their own) and there was a sudden and to me very confusing rise of xenophobia in regards to Chinese players. Some players are just crabby with the newcomers because of the former rivalry between the two servers and remembering things like Nost players rolling alts on Kronos just to troll world chat with accusations of how dead our server was (which is highly ironic in hindsight). Others just enjoyed the lower population, especially since it made the PvP aspect less aggravating. I can understand that one, but as far as everything else goes, I think we'll just have to get over it. Let's focus on the fact that we're all here for the same reason - enjoying a version of the game that's otherwise not available anymore.

The story of the Nost shutdown was big enough that it even spilled over into mainstream media - check out this article on the BBC! And of course blogs and YouTube videos have been alight with discussion. Even Nils crawled out of whatever hole he had been hiding in to suddenly comment on the subject of Vanilla WoW. I've been kind of delighted with how many positive reactions there have been in favour of the concept of Vanilla servers, if for no other reason that my tastes rarely seem to overlap with the mainstream anymore and it's kind of cool to see other people also like something that I've already been enjoying for a while. Of course from Blizzard's point of view, it must seem like their move to get Nostalrius shut down has backfired at least in the short term, as it has provided private servers with more positive publicity than they ever could have hoped for.

Of course, not everything that people have contributed on the subject has been useful. Some have used the whole thing as just another excuse to rant extensively about everything that annoys them about Blizzard and current WoW, which I can understand but doesn't really contribute anything new. On the other side we've had hardcore denialists insist that anyone who enjoys Vanilla WoW more than the current iteration is just deluding themselves and stuck in the past (you better not enjoy anything that was created more than ten years ago). And of course there's been the argument that since private servers are illegal, that should be the end of the discussion, which is simply self-defeating - laws are made by people and can be changed. I certainly think that MMOs with their malleable nature could be used to question certain aspects of copyright law.

Either way, while the whole thing has been interesting to watch, I can't say that I feel very strongly about the subject from a personal point of view. If Kronos were to shut down tomorrow, I'd just spend that extra time on other games again - I've had my fun and no regrets. Would I play on an official Blizzard Vanilla server? Hell yeah, but I still don't think it's likely to happen as the whole concept just doesn't mesh with their business philosophy. For now I'm just curious to see what sort of other effects the drastic population increase will have on Kronos.

In The News: Blizzard Shuts Down Nostalrius

Now there's a piece of news I didn't expect to see in my newsfeed this morning: Blizzard is getting Nostalrius shut down. Of course they have every right to do so and I do think that everyone who makes the decision to roll on a private server has to be prepared for that kind of thing to happen sooner or later, but it's still kind of surprising to see it happen at this precise moment and to Nostalrius in particular, mostly because unlike other private server projects that don't hide the fact that they enjoy making money off their work by integrating cash shops into the game and the like, Nost prided itself in being a non-profit work of love.

On the other hand, in some ways I'm not surprised at all. Nostalrius was increasingly becoming bad PR for Blizzard. When you've previously claimed that nobody really wants Vanilla servers, a single one of such servers boasting 800,000 accounts and 150,000 active players looks kind of awkward. That's the population of an entire niche MMO right there, on a single private server! Plus, Nostalrius players were absolute zealots. They were everywhere and they were passionate. If I had a penny for every YouTube comment I've seen that urged people to start playing on Nostalrius... I would have a not insignificant amount of money. They were genuine too, not just advertising for the sake of it. I remember the commenter who said that in five days of playing on Nostalrius he had made more friends than he's made in retail WoW in the past five years, or the one who compared all the achievements of his level hundred character to his poor Vanilla alt, whose bags were always full and who couldn't afford a mount, and who elaborated on why he loved the latter so much more.

"Nostalrius" had become shorthand for "playing classic WoW on a private server". The other day I even saw someone link to an article in a print magazine that referenced it. A YouTuber I follow and who played on Nostalrius commented that before his Twitch stream got shut down the other day, his Nost stream had risen to fourth place among the most popular World of Warcraft streams. Basically, Nostalrius and its community were really good at promoting their cause - in fact, they were too good at it. I don't think Blizzard decided to issue them with a shutdown notice because of financial concerns. They know that those players won't love them for it. But Nostalrius was making a point of making live WoW look bad and the mainstream was starting to take notice. I can see why they couldn't let that stand.

For all the forum wars and "my server is better than yours" sniping I've seen over time (even in my own comment section!), I genuinely feel for all the Nostalrius players who lost their home today. We are united in our love for the game that once was and is no more. Here's hoping that they may find a new home, whether it's on Kronos, a different private realm or in a different game altogether.

The Nost team, ever so optimistic and proving themselves to be fans to the end, actually started a petition for official classic server support to submit to Mike Morhaine. I'm fairly certain that it will be completely ignored. Blizzard pride themselves in their polish and in their expertise when it comes to what's (supposedly) fun and what isn't. Lending any sort of credence to the idea of classic servers would mean admitting that - just maybe - not everything they've done with World of Warcraft over the past ten years was a good idea and that actually, they did make it worse in some respects. That would be unacceptable. Those of us who loved previous iterations of the game and have felt lost in the last few expansions are just like a clingy ex to Blizzard that can't let go, long after the company has got over us and moved on to new pastures/customers.