Having successfully resurrected the popular Nostalrius vanilla World of Warcraft servers following last year’s Blizzard shutdown, Project Elysium gives players a chance to take a fresh stab at old school player-versus-player with a brand new vanilla PVP server. It’s going to be so crowded.
World of Warcraft has come a long way since it launched back in 2004, and while plenty of players are happy with the latest official developments from Blizzard, many feel that the game was at its best during the first couple of years, back when things were much more difficult and complicated. When Blizzard shut down Project Nostalrius in April of 2016, the popular free-to-play vanilla fan servers had some 150,000 active users spread between two servers.
After Blizzcon 2016 came and went without a Blizzard announcement about official vanilla servers, Project Elysium brought the two Nostalrius servers back, and now it’s expanding. Sunday, January 8 marks the launch of the Elysium PVP server, a completely fresh start for folks who enjoy their levelling with a side of getting ganked. The server is scheduled to go live at 4:00AM AEDT on Sunday, after which point the project’s ability to handle a massive influx of players will be put to the test.
The free-to-play fan servers are definitely not Blizzard-sanctioned, so play at your own risk. Knowing that a shutdown notice could come at any time is part of the excitement.
Check out the Project Elysium website (via Eurogamer) for info on what you’ll need to do in order to play some old school World of Warcraft this weekend.
Comments
17 responses to “A Brand-New Unofficial Vanilla World Of Warcraft Server Launches This Sunday”
And Cease and Desisted in 3…2…
Do you honestly think they would bother bringing the server back just to get another cease and desist? It’s been offshored.
Blizzard would be smart to actually embrace this…
Why? The pirates are half-assing it right now.
If Blizzard does it – which they’ve expressed interest in – they’ll do it right and probably come up with some pleasant surprises to boot. Folded into your current subscription, for example. Stable servers, regional servers (vanilla was fucking horrible to PVP in from Australia – perpetual bullshit out of range errors), the ‘perfect’ build that accurately reconstructs last-minute-pre-BC mechanics but incorporates stability/UI-modability fixes to make it compatible with current rigs and drivers. Possibly even bonus shit like pre-gen character creation/portability, or recurring running of originally one-time-only events (eg: Opening AQ). Hell, they could even go the bonus as far as doing a pre-Wrath server/build, and a pre-Cata server/build for all the folks who thought BC/Wrath were the pinnacle of WoW’s glory. All legal, all the money going where it deserves to be, all account issues safe and secure.
The only down-sides I can think of are, “But I want it NOW,” or, “But Nost doesn’t charge as much as Blizz.” I’m not particularly sympathetic to either.
The old idea of supply and demand? I mean Blizzard embracing this as in *doing it themselves* rather than just snubbing it. People clearly want it. There actually is a market for old WOW. I mean I myself would actually play it for example. The pirates are indeed half arsing but if Blizzard could bring back the old style WOW with the old map etc, shit, you could bet there would be people who would come back and play. Again, supply and demand.
Ah, I misread as embrace the fact that the pirates are running a private server. Give them their blessing, kind of thing. (Which is what a lot of folks were asking for, around the shut-down.)
I guess it’s a case of ‘let them be’ if they can, as long as they’re not charging (because they moment they start making money, that’s a different question. But, if they could get a few official legacy servers going, that’d be sweet 🙂
They can’t “let them be” as they need to take legal precautions. If they let them be for an extended period of time their copyright ownership might fizzle in a future battle in a court, as it can be used against them. Blizzard is defending it’s IP.
Many people expressed a willingness to pay a $15 p/m sub when Nostalrius was closed. Obviously, there are some who would rather not pay, but from what I recall reading endless forums and comments, and friends of mine (myself included) who did play on Nostalrius, would rather an official server and are more than willing to pay for it. The latency is definitely a big reason. 300ms + makes melee unplayable lol.
Yeah, definitely one of the best reasons for Blizz to pick it up and do it properly. Oceanic servers – back in Vanilla, I mained a rogue, and even though subtlety was considered king, I could only get any success with combat, because it didn’t rely on being behind the enemy. 300ms+ meant an endless stream of, “You must be behind your target,” error messages while actually being behind the target.
Embrace blatant piracy and copyright infringement?
It’s been done before. There’s stranger ways to appease your fanbase. People tend to only see in black and white when looking at situations, do or do nots. There’s other ways around situations that can be found that can generally appease all sides.
There is only one side to this. Blizzard sends Cease and desists to these lazy fucks. For all we know blizzard is working on legacy, It just has to be up to their standards. Its not as simple as everyone thinks.
Pretty much all of these privates servers do charge for stuff like level boosts, Ingame items and characters. They are using blizzard’s IP which they worked hard on to generate profit for themselves.
Privates servers are scum
You’ve got your opinion, that’s cool. They’re also providing a legacy server for people who don’t wish to play the latest version. You’re a bit too militant on the opinion there for my liking personally, throwing a few insults around that weren’t needed. But either way, you have your opinion which I don’t agree with either. Have a good one.
Im not insulting you. Im well aware people want legacy. But it does not negate the fact these private servers are commiting fraud. They are using something blizzard worked hard on to generate profit for themselves.
And blizzard has embraced it, Did they not meet with the team behind nostalrius? But now nostalrius has ruined all the good with they had with blizzard by acting like spoilt petulent children and chucking a sooky la la because they didnt get their way.
I think if you read Nostalrius’ reasons for why they released the source code to Elysium, you’d probably understand why they did. There comes a point where you provide someone/thing with everything that is required and they still don’t take action. That was the case in this situation. The Nostalrius team are extremely competent and understand processes. Therefore, Blizzard can’t get away with the excuses they make, like they can with the majority of the player base. For the last 8+ years, Blizzard denied having the original code for classic wow, that was their main reason why they would not release an official server. Since nostalrius was shut down, they ended up admitting they had the code this entire time and literally lied to their player base.
My point is, they had no reason not to, at the very least, make an announcement at blizzcon with any sort of info at all on a classic server.
See, this shits me. I sympathize with wanting to agitate for what they want, but how they handled it, and what they expected? It was utterly childish.
Dude. They gave an ultimatum on a deadline, and it was a trivial amount of time.
The Nostalrius team might’ve been competent at running a pirate server, but they very clearly have absolutely no fucking idea what it would take to do the thing officially and properly in a way that Blizzard – per consumer law – would have to actually stand by. Anything breaks when it’s pirate, they shrug and say, “It is as-is. Take it or leave it.” Blizzard can’t/won’t/shouldn’t have that luxury.
I see this all the time. It’s like when all the arm-chair animators said that it’d be ‘easy’ to create a second playable character in AC:U over a weekend, utterly ignoring every single connected point of work that would be required. It’s like when our clients at work think that it’s easy to have one or two staff manage their entire point-to-point telecommunications infrastructure. All they see is a bill they don’t want to pay, and time-frames that take longer than they got their home phone line or home mobile purchase completed in, and understand NOTHING about the issues that arise from being involved in enterprise and the obligations it imposes.
Until they take it over and try to do it themselves, fuck it up royally, and end up running back asking us to take it over again because holy hell, they didn’t realize how hard it is and how big it is.
It’s like all these developers crying that publishers are the worst and that game development would be better without them… then they kickstart their project and fuck it up royally because it turns out they don’t know jack shit about finance or project management.
Doing big things is a big process – it’s hard and time-consuming and requires a LOT of planning and approval and buy-in and requires far more parties be involved than they even knew existed. It’s the perfect storm of arrogance and ignorance on the Nost team’s part.
Those idiots could provide all the ultimatums they fucking want, the point is that action does NOT need to be taken on THEIR schedule. It takes place in a world they’re obviously not even capable of imagining, and the stamping of their feet and pretending they have any more power than petty disobedience that can be shut down with one legal letter reeks of a teenager’s petulance.