WoW Vanilla Server Nostalrius Petition Gains Support from Mark Kern

Not long ago, we learned that Blizzard demanded the shutdown of the vanilla server Nostalrius. People were... to put it lightly, pretty pissed about it and unfortunately, the volunteers behind the project had to cater to these demands. Since then, a petition for the retainment of the server has garnered a lot of signatures and voices. However, there may be a light of hope. An ex-World of Warcraft developer, Mark Kern, expressed his support for the petition, going onto say this:

"If we can get 200k sigs on this petition, I will personally send it to Mike Morhaime. But if we're going to convince Blizzard, we need more than 100k. 100k is well, not enough to move them. My guess is that if Nostalrius can do 850k signups, then there are probably a couple million who would do legacy."

"It doesn't matter if Blizzard cares, it matters if we care enough to push them to do it. So please send a message to Blizzard to listen to their fans. Sign the petition so I can bring it to Blizzard."

You can also check out his message on the petition page:

"I was the team lead for vanilla WoW (@grummz on twitter to see that its really me). People have been asking for my thoughts on the Nostalrius servers.

After giving it a lot of thought, I feel Blizzard could have found a way to support these significant fan efforts to bring back vanilla servers, rather than resorting to scary legal tactics. Blizzard, these gamers are not your enemy, they are some of your greatest supporters. Hire them, but them out. Almost 900,000 players say they want to see this. Don't ignore them. Don't tell them "You think you do, but you don't" and instead tell them "we love you guys and we want to thank you for your fandom." My suggestions:

1) You say you lost the original source for vanilla, so use Nostralus' version.
2) Hire the team that did it and let them run/support the service under the Blizzard banner.
3) Add cloud based support so people can spin up private legacy servers on Bnet, chose an expansion, and play with their friends.
4) Profit. :)

Mike, I helped build this game for you, I hope you'll hear me out. Support these fans and dedicated gamers."

Despite this light of hope, it's just a small light. This won't guarantee that Blizzard will listen in the end, but maybe, just maybe, there could be compromise in the end that would make everyone happy. If you want to support the petition, you can sign it here.