Prior to BlizzCon 2016, Blizzard announced that any discussions regarding Nostalrius and the legacy World of Warcraft servers would only happen after the event. However it seems that to the folks at Nostalrius, this was not good enough because the ground has since announced (via Kotaku) that they will be bringing the servers back online.According to the post on the forums, “So, it’s time for us to release our source code and additional tools to the community in the hope that it will maintain the Legacy community as much as possible until Blizzard announces an official Legacy plan – should they decide to do that.”
Basically Nostalrius will be giving the source code to their vanilla World of Warcraft servers to an existing project called Elysium. Nostalrius writes, “This server shares the volunteer spirit and passion for the game we had. Furthermore, an important part of Nostalrius volunteers are already working there, some under different names. We wish them all the best, and hope that they will become a new home for the reunited Vanilla community.”
Now you might be wondering won’t Blizzard just shut it down again? We suppose they could, and chances are they probably will. However with Nostalrius making their code open source, they’re essentially releasing it to the world which means that if Blizzard were to shut down one server, another could just as easily pop online. It would almost be like a game of whack-a-mole.
As for Blizzard’s end, Kotaku caught up with the game’s director Ion Hazzikostas at BlizzCon 2016 where he said that if they wanted to do this, they wanted to do it right and also at a “Blizzard” quality, meaning that it isn’t about flipping a switch and being done with it. “So it’s something we’re still discussing internally, and we wanted to make sure people understood we’re not closing the door on it, but also we don’t have anything to announce just yet.”
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