One of the big hopes for Blizzcon this year was a potential announcement on the status of legacy servers for World of Warcraft, otherwise known as vanilla WoW.
But it’s not coming. In a post on the official forums, a Blizzard representative has confirmed that vanilla WoW won’t enter the conversation until after Blizzcon.
Via one of the company’s community managers, the WoW team and J. Allen Brack wrote this morning that they “won’t have any updates to share on that until after the show”, they confirmed that “we’re still discussing the possibility” of running legacy servers.
“You’ve heard us say that the launch of Legion was just the beginning of the story we want to tell in this expansion,” the team said.
“What we will focus on at BlizzCon is how the team is committed to making sure we bring you a steady stream of content going forward, and we can’t wait to share what’s next for Legion.”
The update has frustrated quite a few on the forums, if only because the ongoing disconnect between Blizzard and the players who frequented Nostalrius has been running for well over a year. It’s been six months since the classic server was shut down, and to be told that the company won’t have any updates at their major annual event isn’t exactly a surefire way to calm the flames.
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20 responses to “Blizzard Won’t Talk About Legacy Servers Until After Blizzcon”
Whatever you do don’t cause any commotion at Blizzcon. We will talk about legacy servers AFTER Blizzcon we promise.
From Blizzard’s perspective, they’ve improved the game so much since Vanilla that they probably can’t understand why people would want to roll it back.
Also I imagine it’s a non-trivial amount of engineering to get that old server code running in their current environment. Their back-end will have improved in lock-step with the client-side changes.
You hit the nail on the head mate. If I remember correctly that’s exactly what a Blizzard Engineer said. That to get the old code running would take a lot of work, and they aren’t sure if it would even work.
Hire the Nostalrius guys – they seemed to get it running fine
They made up their own standalone code that doesn’t interact with Battle.net
I can imagine to get that working would take a lot of effort.
So, How’d Nostalrius get them up and running? Better engineers than Blizz?
I don’t buy that line from Blizz, i know it wouldn’t be simple, but if Nost can do it, surely the guys that made it could?
They made up their own server code. Game sends the server a request, then they made the server respond with the expected answer that would make the game do what was expected.
They were essentially making a replica black box where it would usually respond the same as an official server, but in reality is probably built in a completely different way.
This.
Things like monster hp were running on estimated values, not true values.
Oh, ok. Some good points below too. That does sound rather complicated to hack together.
The main issue i could imagine would be linking everything together, when i was focused on “just running the game”.
I was a Vanilla player, slacked off the last 2-3 expansions though. Don’t even own the latest one.
I’d probably dip my toes into a vanilla server but that’d be it.
In addition to what others have said, they also don’t have to make it work with the Battle.net infrastructure, accounts etc.
What are people hoping to find in Vanilla wow? I was there, some great memories too. But the game itself was practically rubbish compared to what exists now (a kind of hot rubbish for different reasons).
Sure, Nostalrius was a thing, people congregated looking for something that resembled what they remembered and instead found a community of like minded individuals.
If Blizzard gives them what they want I suspect most will not find what they were looking for. Some will, but most won’t.
heres the big thing.. how many of those people will also be willing to actually pay for it. the big attraction to the likes of Nos and other priate servers is the simple fact that you dont have to pay to use them. theres no monthly fee and all you need is a copy of the game which you can find on the piratebay and other warez sites
I recently got back into WoW after a long break (near the end of Cata) and have been enjoying Legion. That said, if they had a server where you just change the content at log in I would certainly roll an old school character too.
People only complained about the illegal server being shut down because of the massive content drought between HFC release and Legion. now that legion is out and that 7.1 releases tonight/tomorrow, nobody but the extreme ultra diehards for vanilla wow care about so called legacy servers.
Yes Nos had 280k people playing on it.. but that 280k compared to the 5.1 million that were playing just before legion arrived and the now 10million that are playing legion
Blizzard became trash after the abomination that’s called Diablo 3. They are the worst gaming company when it comes to balance. 10 years on, and pvp in wow is still terrible.
The fanboys ( which are the worst I’ve ever see of any company) will still praise them. Even after how hard heroes of the storm failed.
Not sure what they are going to be talking about at blizzcon this year then. SC 2 is done, little bits of dlc are all thats coming, D3 is over as most of the dev team got stripped out of them, and the new wow xpac has just come out so no big releases coming there.
Please please please let this happen. I just watched my sub expire and have been playing Vanilla on Krono for the last few months. It’s not just nostalgia. The old game up until mid Wrath is objectively better.
People keep saying that the old game wasn’t balanced, but it was. It was working perfectly as intended before the fanbase demanded that Blizzard change THEIR art to suit the needy lollers. Hybrids weren’t meant to main tank, main heal, or main dps, they were there for support and utility and warm bodies. Warriors were meant to tank. Priests to heal, etc.
Yeh i played Krono earlier this year and i agree that the game back then was objectively better. What I liked most was how social it all is. In WoD I leveled a character to max and the only time I had a conversation with someone was when a rare mount dropped. Whereas in vanilla your already talking to people in the first zone.
I would 100% pay for vanilla on a stable lag free server.
For sure man. Are you on Kronos I (PvE) or II (PvP)? If you’re on II hit me up! /friend Fenryz 😀
Oh also there’s a rad sounding private in closed beta just now – it’s blizzlike except for one MAJOR bit – you get “Spell” and “Talent” essence as you level, and you can put these into *any* skill/talent in the game; i.e. you could actually build a functioning tankadin out of an Undead or a Tauren in vanilla out of a mish mash of prot warr and pally.