Blizzard Explains Shutdown of Fan-Run Server

A while yonder back, Blizzard had themselves a little community kerfuffle when they up and decided to close down a fan-operated server called Nostalrius, which was dedicated to running the game in its pure, undiluted, vanilla state, for the enjoyment of nostalgic fans. This move was criticized by the community, and countless petitions soon followed as people began to request the return of what they saw as an important part of their shared culture and history.

Up until now, Blizzard had been silent on the matter. But as you could probably tell,that’s since changed: no the ultimate fate of Nostalrius, but Blizzard’s silence.

In a forum post by Nethaera, an employee at Blizzard, we get this:

“We have been discussing classic servers for years - it’s a topic every BlizzCon - and especially over the past few weeks. From active internal team discussions to after-hours meetings with leadership, this subject has been highly debated. Some of our current thoughts:

Why not just let Nostalrius continue the way it was? The honest answer is, failure to protect against intellectual property infringement would damage Blizzard’s rights. This applies to anything that uses WoW’s IP, including unofficial servers. And while we’ve looked into the possibility – there is not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server.

We explored options for developing classic servers and none could be executed without great difficulty. If we could push a button and all of this would be created, we would. However, there are tremendous operational challenges to integrating classic servers, not to mention the ongoing support of multiple live versions for every aspect of WoW.”

Disappointing news, but it’s not without precedent. Legally, there was a similar case in 1989 when Disney threatened to sue three day-care centers for using their trademarked characters. In the suit, Disney explained that while it was sympathetic to the daycares, if they didn’t protect their IP at every opportunity, it put them in an unfavorable legal position: if someone should steal their IP for less altruistic purposes and they tried to sue, the perpetrator of that crime could point to previous leniency and likely win the case.

The same logic applies here. If Blizzard showed leniency in this instance, then other pirate servers might get a free pass, and that would create a legal headache no company wants to endure.

So yes. We’re not about to see the return of Nostalrius anytime soon, but there was some good news:

One other note - we’ve recently been in contact with some of the folks who operated Nostalrius. They obviously care deeply about the game, and we look forward to more conversations with them in the coming weeks.

Good to see there’s no bad blood, eh? Hopefully they can do something magical together…