The private server Nostalrius starts again. The launch of the WoW Classic server will start later this month.
Ladies and gentlemen, buckle up and prepare for a new round of “Vanilla fans against Blizzard,” as the once-closed pirate server Nostalrius celebrates its new launch. The former operators of Nostalrius have teamed up with the “colleagues” from Elysium (also a classic server) to breathe new life into the closed server.
As the joint team of Nostalrius and Elysium announced, the new “Elysium Project” will launch on December 17, giving all fans of the original version of World of Warcraft a (legally questionable) home again. There is even a small announcement trailer:
During the stress test of the servers, many players gathered to push the limits of capacity. More than 10,000 players were reportedly online at some times simultaneously.
Whether and how Blizzard will respond to the reopening is still uncertain. So far, Blizzard has not commented further on Nostalrius or Elysium.
The origin of the whole “back and forth” with Nostalrius was a community issue raised to Blizzard, asking them to provide vanilla servers. After no such announcement was made at the last BlizzCon, they simply revived the server, with the motto: If you won’t give the fans what they want, then we’ll do it ourselves.
Cortyn says: I believe I have said often enough by now that I do not support this kind of server. On one hand, it is nice that so many people can get excited about a project, but on the other hand, in my opinion, it is still Blizzard’s work and their decision about which servers they offer. I even hope that the operators “fall on their face” and that appropriate penalties come from this.
Mark Kern is meanwhile happily grabbing developers from Nostalrius for his own project Em-8er.
