The WoW private server Elysium is shutting down due to corruption and dubious dealings within the operator team. We reveal what happens to the successor of Nostalrius.
Anyone who does not like World of Warcraft in its current version of “Legion” and enjoys reminiscing about old memories has probably thought about starting on a private server. Here, WoW often runs in its original form, i.e., the “Vanilla” game, before expansions like The Burning Crusade.
The most well-known and largest of these servers was Nostalrius, which was later succeeded by Elysium. Several thousand players roamed the server every day, enjoying World of Warcraft (not entirely legally) – until now.
The servers of the Elysium project have now unexpectedly been taken offline, and there has been a major announcement that the project is being discontinued immediately.
Lights Hope takes over from Elysium
The shutdown of the servers does not mean the end of Nostalrius/Elysium. Some members of the team are re-establishing the project under the name Lights Hope.
This step became necessary because parts of the team were apparently corrupt. Donations for the operation of the server were processed through a private PayPal account to avoid legal claims (e.g., from Blizzard). It seems that the owner of the account misappropriated €2,000 and used it to solve private financial issues.
Furthermore, a second member of the team was involved in gold trading. Characters were duplicated to generate gold, which was then resold to certain “service providers”.
To manage the situation, the rest of the Elysium operator team has decided to lock the servers directly and protect them from further access – mainly to safeguard player data.
From the team’s perspective, it is not possible to repair the damage to their reputation that has occurred, and the time spent is simply not worth it. Instead, they are re-establishing the project as Lights Hope, with some core team members, and hope to regain the trust of the community.
Did you play on Elysium and were you aware of these incidents? Or is this a typical “they got what they deserved” story because the players are playing on illegal servers?
Allegations of corruption at Elysium are nothing new – they were already there in February.
