In recent weeks, a discussion has sparked about legacy servers for World of Warcraft. Blizzard does not want them. Competitor Jagex has them – and they are thriving.
Just under a week ago, Blizzard shut down the private server Nostalrius. Thousands of fans played there, with a total of about 800,000 players enjoying an “old” version of World of Warcraft, an extremely old one, in fact. It was nearly 10 years old.
There is undoubtedly a demand for such vanilla servers that operate under completely different rules. Blizzard has decided not to meet this demand by not opening any legacy servers.
Legacy servers are a blessing for Runescape
A game that handles the nostalgia of its fans quite differently is Runescape. There, developer Jagex launched a legacy server after a major overhaul of its live game in 2013, which operates on a version from 2007. Initially, they didn’t want to set up the server, but when half a million players checked “I want this” in a survey, there was hardly any choice, Product Manager Mathew Kemp said in a recent post on LinkedIn.
At first, they were cautious and assigned a small team to it. They expected it to be a flash in the pan at the beginning, which would quickly fizzle out, and then they could reassign the employees to new projects.
But it turned out differently: The “Oldscape” server was a resounding success and now constitutes a large part of Jagex’s business.
Just eight months after the server’s launch, they broke through the 1 million player mark. Currently, they are just shy of 7 million, and two and a half million players have become members. Even though some difficulties arose during development, the legacy server is a blessing for the community and the game.
