Turns out we were sort of right, but it isn’t Blizzard the ones who are shutting it down, but rather Nostalrius. In a post by the team’s project manager Viper (via Kotaku), it seems that they were the ones who are requesting that Elysium to stop using their source code and data. Apparently it seems that the direction they were hoping the Elysium Project would go was not going according to plan.
According to Viper, “We know that Nostalrius carries the hopes of the legacy community but moving from ‘fan server’ to ‘pirate server’ reputation makes it harder to convince that legacy fans have a place on the WoW community. Until this stigma is removed, it’s unlikely any true progress towards official legacy content can be achieved.”
Elysium seems to have agreed to comply. In a post on the forums by Shenna, “It is with sadness that we must act under such circumstances. However, rest assured that our loyalties remain with the community in all things. All characters that have existed in the game world since Elysium’s launch until now will be maintained and all Nostalrius specific data will be wiped… All future Nostalrius related data will be denied. The new realms will not be affected, and Elysium will not disclose any Nostalrius’ data such as the databases and core.”
Basically what this means is that as far as Nostalrius’ source code and character data are concerned, it will no longer be part of Elysium. Elysium’s servers will keep on running but it looks like it won’t have anything to do with Nostalrius moving forward.