Blizzard Won't Do a Vanilla Server, and Here's Why

A lil' while back, popular fan-run vanilla WoW server Nostalrius was shut down by Blizzard following a cease-and-desist letter, a move that was met with a lot of anger from fans, who were both supportive of Nostalrius's ambitions and annoyed with Blizzard 'bullying' the creators. Well, both sides tried to make it clear there was no ill will between any of them, and Blizzard even swore they would enter talks with the admins of Nostalrius to see if they could hammer out a solution.

Turns out: they weren't just talking out of their butts. They really did meet the people who ran Nostalrius, and Viper, the administrator on their forums, actually wrote a big long write-up detailing their journey and meeting with the Blizzard bigwigs.

While it's worth a read, here's the summary: bad news, Nostalrius itself isn't coming back in any way, shape or form, either as a fan run server or as an official server run by Blizzard. And here's why:

“First, they DO have the source code for Vanilla WoW. Code version control systems are not something new, as it has been a standard in the industry for a long time. With these systems, they can retrieve the code at any given previous backup date.”

“However, in order to generate the server (and the client), a complex build system is being used. It is not just about generating the ‘WoW.exe’ and ‘Server.exe’ files. The build process takes data, models, maps, etc. created by Blizzard and also generates client and server specific files. The client only has the information it needs and the server only has the information that it needs.”

“This means that before re-launching vanilla realms, all of the data needed for the build processes has to be gathered in one place with the code. Not all of this information was under a version control system. In the end, whichever of these parts were lost at any point, they will have to be recreated: this is likely to take a lot of resources through a long development process.”

Still, while the news wasn't good, it wasn't grim either, and Viper ends his report on a high note:

"This meeting with Blizzard was the accomplishment of the petition you signed and of your unexpected level of engagement. We expressed your thoughts and voices the best we could and we saw that Blizzard listened really carefully. We hope that we will hear from them soon, and will keep you updated: this meeting isn’t an end point for us, more like a milestone.

J. Allen expressed his will to keep in touch, and the whole Nostalrius team would be excited to work further in this process that could bring back legacy servers.

We still have things to provide to the community, so stay tuned !"

So, it was a productive meeting, if nothing else. And more than that, it's great to see Blizzard is so invested in its community that it was willing to actually engage with these people rather than dismiss them outright, the way so many game developers would.

So, good on you, Blizzard. We look forward to hearing more about the Nostalrius project and what we can do with it.