On Monday, thousands of World of Warcraft players gathered to say goodbye to Nostalrius, the fan-run server that hosted a vanilla version of the iconic MMORPG until Blizzard shut it down.
Nostalrius, which we profiled last year, used World of Warcraft v1.12, otherwise known as the game’s latest incarnation before 2006’s Burning Crusade expansion. From Onyxia runs to 40-person Molten Core raids, Nostalrius had just about everything players might remember from 2005. According to Nostalrius’s creators, the server had around 800,000 registered users and 150,000 active players, some of whom showed up on Monday to pay their respects.
For hours before the server ended, fans formed big lines and mass gatherings across Azeroth. Here are a few different videos of the last minutes:
On Reddit last week, Nostalrius’s volunteer administrators took questions from fans and expressed sorrow about Blizzard’s decision to shut down the server.
“The heart behind all private servers, including Nostalrius, is to recreate a version of the game that many enjoyed and that Blizzard no longer provides,” wrote testing team leader Nano. “Our hope is that Blizzard someday embraces the idea of legacy servers and that is the reason for our petition addressed to Michael Morhaime. The dream of our community has always been to have Blizzard open legacy servers. Through this petition, we show our willingness to share our experience, knowledge, data, really anything at all that would help Blizzard consider opening legacy servers.”
The petition, which asks Morhaime and Blizzard to reconsider their decision, has 85,647 supporters as of this article’s writing.
“When I heard the news that Nostalrius was going to have to shutdown, I nearly cried,” Nano wrote. “I’ve never experienced as rich of a community, both as a player with my guild and working within the Core team. I have friends from retail vanilla WoW still 12 years later and I believe in 12 years from now I will still have friends from Nostalrius.”
Comments
10 responses to “The Last Minutes Of World Of Warcraft’s Shuttered Fan Server”
I would actually love a WoW Legacy server on the official ones. How fun would it be to go back and play the game at Vanilla, BC, Wrath etc etc all over again? Sure it won’t be the same as when you first played it but the thought of going back to the game’s roots certainly entices me, even if the grinding was a lot more apparent than current WoW games!
Jon captured my sentiments perfectly, specifically 3:55.
Amazing video, so simple but so true in his sentiment, I LOVE Burning Crusade, and would seriously consider re-subbing to WoW if they provided decent legacy servers. As It stands all I do these days is sub for 8 weeks per expansion; just enough time to realize that it still sucks, cancel and walk away for a year or so…
Yeah I watched that section at 3:55 about twenty times, he’s spot on and he cracks me up, the double whammy!
Heh. I think the same thing will continue to happen, though.
If Blizz opens legacy servers, folks will re-sub, play for just long enough to realize they’ve got nostalgia-goggles on and it actually was kinda frustrating and tedious back then and you can’t ever recapture the joy of discovery, and they’ll cancel and walk away from the servers.
They’d certainly serve as an excellent counter-point to the provably false yet mind-bogglingly frequent assertions that WoW has been ‘dumbed down’.
Nice avatar
hahah the Monkey returns!!!!!
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2006-02-18/monkey-magic-set-for-revival/802372
you guys, there’s just “not enough interest in a Legacy server,” “you think you want that, but you don’t!”
I played nost for a bit and it was way better than current wow with the socialisation and what not but the lag from european servers was too much to put up with. If blizz made aussie legacy servers i would be all over that. Im just not sure if there would be enough australians playing to make it feel like it did back then.
I haven’t subbed since cata but i would if there were official vanilla servers.