What The Community Failed To Know About Blizzard’s Response To Nostalrius Closure

Blizzard Entertainment has officially responded to the closure of Nostalrius, the legacy World of Warcraft (WoW) server. Nostalrius ran a version of vanilla World of Warcraft for fans that were actually looking for something a little more old-school.

In a news report on Game Reactor, Blizzard Entertainment finally broke its silence after Nostalrius' closure that has caused the community to raise a lot of questions concerning private servers as well as legacy servers, but mostly about why Blizzard Entertainment will not support them.

According to the statement of J. Allen Brack, Executive Producer and Vice President for WoW, on the game forums, the company has been discussing classic servers for years, and more especially over the past few weeks. "It's a topic in every BlizzCon and especially over the past few weeks," Brack said. "From internal team discussions to after-hours meetings with leadership, this subject has been highly debated," he added. Brack, moreover, noted that the said closure was to safeguard against intellectual property infringement.

Even as Blizzard Entertainment has taken into account the possibility of supporting classic servers, there is no, really, apparent legal path to safeguard Blizzard's IP as well as consent to 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," Brack further said. Nevertheless, there are huge operational challenges when it comes to integrating classic servers, not to mention the continuing support of numerous live versions for every aspect of WoW.

Even if Nostalrius would come to an end, Brack asserted that the creation of a brand new realm that would function as a classic version of WoW remains an open topic of argument.

Through the years, Blizzard has already talked much about a pristine realm. Such realm would essentially turn off all leveling acceleration that include character transfers, character boosts, heirloom gear, WoW Token, Recruit-A-Friend bonuses, access to cross realm zones and group finder.

"We aren't sure whether this version of a clean slate is something that would appeal to the community and it's still an open topic of discussion," Brack further said as cited on Gaming Bolt. Regarding Nostalrius' owners, Blizzard emphasized that they deeply care about the game and are even looking forward to more dialogues with them for the weeks to come.