On the Classic server Elysium for World of Warcraft, things are heating up. Are the admins involved in corruption and exploitation of fans?
Around the pirate server Elysium, where many fans of the “classic” World of Warcraft play, a drama has unfolded in recent days. The administrators and operators of the server are accused of corruption, selling services (such as better loot or unbanning cheaters) for real money.
But let’s start from the beginning: What happened? Some time ago, the closed private server Nostalrius teamed up with Elysium to continue offering a legacy server where players can play World of Warcraft for free like it was 12 years ago – the Vanilla WoW.
At the last moment, however, Nostalrius changed their mind and demanded the source code back. Elysium complied with this request, but since then it has been a steep decline.
A YouTuber, who quickly gained support from others, claimed that the operators of Elysium are offering a lot of “additional services” under the table, such as selling gold, distributing particularly good loot, or re-enabling caught cheaters.
An administrator of Elysium then tried to contain the damage and explained that donations had been allowed again some time ago, as the servers wouldn’t pay for themselves otherwise. He called the whole situation a “witch hunt”.
Another administrator of Elysium, on the other hand, let her frustration run free and wrote a post on Reddit, where she wanted to “reveal the truth quite transparently”. Basically, however, the post is just a string of insults and expressions of massive frustration. Here are some excerpts:
- “This job is harder than raising a child. You can’t go anywhere, you have no time for your family, your friends, or a job. Why? Because the child is constantly trying to kill itself.”
- “For some damn reason, you think we’re swimming in money, but that’s not true. We barely get enough donations together to pay for the servers.”
- “From this moment on, I’m fed up with making excuses for every mistake that happens to us. Either you trust us or you can go to hell. Have a little respect for the people who put their free time into the game you play.”
The community’s reaction seems to be mostly indifferent, and you often read “I’m grabbing popcorn, this will be fun.”
In the meantime, Crestfall, also an operator of a pirate server, has distanced itself from Elysium, as they have “solid evidence of corruption in Elysium’s upper management”.
How much truth there is in this huge mess is still hard to say. In any case, this story is likely to have led to even more critical views of the “private server scene”.
In the “real” WoW, a hotfix is meanwhile trying to restore balance to PvP.
