The team of the private server Nostalrius met the developers of World of Warcraft. Read here how the meeting with Blizzard went.
A long meeting with little progress
After significant media attention for the former private server Nostalrius, which was shut down by Blizzard, the server team has now met with the developers of World of Warcraft. The Nostalrius team saw this as an opportunity and prepared a two-hour presentation in which they showcased their project, the experiences gained, but also the problems to the developers. Blizzard showed so much interest and asked so many questions that the presentation was extended to 5 hours.
The fact that Blizzard took the meeting quite seriously is also evident from the developers present: Mike Morhaime, J. Allen Brack, Tom Chilton, Ion Hazzikostas, and Marco Koegler are among the top decision-makers of World of Warcraft.
However, those expecting a concrete commitment to “Classic” servers were once again disappointed. Blizzard still owns the source code of the original WoW, but the effort would still be high. In the Nostalrius forum it says:
“To create the server and the client, a complex system is used. It is more than just merging “WoW.exe” and “Server.exe”. This build process requires data, models, maps, and so on, created by Blizzard, as well as server-specific files. The client has only the data it needs, and the server has only the data it needs.”
The “assembling” of this data would be difficult, and even then, many things would have to be recreated. At the same time, it is added:
“In addition to the technical aspects related to launching a legacy server, Blizzard has to provide a polished version of the game to its millions of players – something that existing unofficial servers cannot offer.”
The author of the post, Viper (administrator and project manager of Nostalrius), also explained that he was previously afraid that Blizzard was holding this event just to manage damage control. Fortunately, that was not the case. He literally said:
“When Blizzard offered us this meeting a few weeks ago, we were concerned that it was just a PR stunt or damage control. Now we realize that this is not the case.”
For the team of Nostalrius, this is not the end; they will continue to stay in contact with Blizzard. They view this conversation as a “milestone” and hope it ultimately leads to something that benefits all WoW players.
However, whether legacy servers will ever be released remains to be seen. Fans suspect that new information can be expected no earlier than BlizzCon 2016 in November.
We will keep you updated as soon as there is news.
For more news and articles about Blizzard’s MMORPG and the former server Nostalrius, you can find them on our World of Warcraft game page.
