Today the petition from the Nostalrius Begins team after their server was taken down for copyright infringement for Blizzard to open legacy WoW servers reached 200k signatures, which has been the recent goal since former Team Leader of the Vanilla World of Warcraft team pledged to personally send it to Mike Morhaime if it reached that number.
If we can get 200k sigs on this petition, I will personally send it to Mike Morhaime. #YouThinkYouDoButYouDont https://t.co/QcXqoQFWJ3
— Mark Kern (@Grummz) April 15, 2016
The petition from the Nostalrius team states:
We are the team of Nostalrius Begins, a community dedicated to World of Warcraft’s first version, also known as “Vanilla”. We were a team of about thirty volunteers, and used to host an international legacy server for this version of WoW. For roughly one year, it was an amazing journey for all of us, and for the 800,000 players who registered an account, including the 150,000 players who were active. We passionately reproduced the original progression you created throughout patches and content releases. The mighty Ahn Qiraj raid was to be released next month.
However, the french provider hosting our server recently received a formal letter written by french and US lawyers asking to shutdown our services because of Copyright Infringement prior to a lawsuit. As soon as we received the information, we decided to schedule the final shutdown of our World of Warcraft realms, as requested.
Since then there’s been a flury of activity from the community covered from major news outlets such as the BBC, and a recent interview with Mark Kern by PC Invasion offered some great points on the current state of the game as well as why Blizzard is making such poor choices by ignoring the fans.
PCI: There is concern that vanilla servers would fragment the community. What’s your thoughts on that?
MK: What community? Cross realm, flying, LFG/LFR and garrisons have already made it into a single player game. You never see anyone anymore and the people you meet are soon forgotten in your next group. Old servers had community, we worked really hard to make sure it was a social experience. Old servers would bring back community, bring back friends, and be a far “stickier” experience that will retain players longer, because social bonds are what keep people re-subbing and playing.
More articles:
- Warcraft fans’ fury at Blizzard over server closure
- Former World of Warcraft Team Lead to take Vanilla server petition to Blizzard
- The Last Minutes Of World of Warcraft’s Shuttered Fan Server
- Be brave and embrace legacy servers, says Runescape designer
- Gamers Petition Blizzard To Support Official Legacy Servers For World Of Warcraft
- Petition Starts To Save Shuttered World Of Warcraft’ Server
- Team behind World of Warcraft’s biggest private server calls for change after shutdown
- Ex World Of Warcraft Dev: “Old Servers Would Bring Back Community”
