The Nostalrius Team Says Blizzard Wants Legacy Servers

[ffronw]

The Nostalrius Team Says Blizzard Wants Legacy Servers

//cdn.themis-media.com/media/global/images/library/deriv/1328/1328071.jpgAfter meeting with Blizzard, the team behind the Nostalrius legacy server says that the company wants legacy servers, but there are issues.

When Blizzard's legal team dropped the hammer [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/167113-Blizzard-Sends-Cease-and-Desist-to-Nostalrius-Vanilla-WoW-Private-Server] on the Nostalrius private WoW server, everyone though that would be the end of it. After all, what recourse would a group of people who were basically running a pirated server have?

Instead of disappearing into obscurity, the players from the server put together a petition that garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures, and Blizzard meeting with the server's admin team [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/167259-Blizzard-Responds-to-World-of-Warcraft-Server-Closure-Complaints]. Now that meeting has taken place, and after the planned two-hour get-together stretched out to five hours, the Nostalrius team says they're convinced that Blizzard wants legacy servers, but that there are challenges to overcome.

Over on the Nostalrius forums [http://forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=44218], the group posted a summary of their day at Blizzard. They met with many familiar names at Blizzard, including CEO Mike Morhaime, WoW Executive Producer J. Allen Brack, Game Director Tom Chilton, Assistane GAme Director Ion Hazzikostas, and Blizzard Community Manager Randy Jordan.

The team learned that while Blizzard does have the source code for vanilla WoW, they may be missing other important parts of the equation, like models, maps, and other data. The team summed it up, saying, "Not all of this information was under a version control system." It turns out that the parts that are lost will likely have to recreated, and that will take time, money, and effort on Blizzard's part.

Still, the Nostalrius team came away from the meeting feeling that Blizzard does want to create vanilla servers if they can. The team wrote of the meeting, "To sum up: the good surprise of the meeting was the level of engagement of all these Blizzard people toward making legacy servers a reality. "The downside is the technical difficulty it will take to reach our objective. Blizzard is now well aware of the amount of players willing to play legacy servers, something which wasn't the case until Nostalrius shutdown."

We'll have to wait and see what the future holds for legacy WoW servers, but one thing is certain: Almost no one expected the response that Blizzard got from the shutdown, and even fewer people expected Blizzard to spend the time they have considering it. Who knows what may come of it?

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[Fappy]

I saw this on the WoW sub-reddit earlier. Sounds promising, but I wouldn't expect anything solid from Blizzard for awhile. I think it's highly likely we'll get some form of Legacy servers eventually. At the very least they'll roll out expansion-specific servers once they're done making new content for good. Hopefully they can get out ahead and implement something a little more interesting though. I'd love to play on a TBC or WotLK progression server.

 

[The Lunatic]

I imagine at this stage, Actiblizzion is willing to do pretty much anything to recover some lost subs.

 

[MonsterCrit]

Typical BS. We don't have the models. Like feck they don't, if that were the issue then none of these private servers could exist. Everything that is used in the game, is in the game's client. THey really just don't want them, because here's the proof.

Okay, say we believe they weren't thinking in terms of legacy servers when Vanilla was the thing, fine; but ask them about any plans for WoD legacy servers when Legion rolls out and they'll give you the same answer.Heck the fact that they don't start with MoP legacy servers shows that they really aren't interested. Why? Because then that divides the playerbase and you will have fewer people going into their shiny new turds and thusly fewer people will want to.

Sad but true, Blizzard pays lipservice to the idea but they really don't want to because they need people playing their new stuff. Hell, that they say they're going to slow down levelliung again, do you think it's because they appreciate the difference between the old system and the new system? or because they want to sell new instant upgrades?

As someone happily playing on a private server-- btw thanks Blizz, if you hadn't made such a big showy thing about this I would have never gotten the idea of it, sure quite a few others wouldn't as well. -- I can say they are fairly faithful, outsiude scripting errors here and there but the games are perfectly fun and playable.

SOme of them have even done some rather interesting ideas like, custom quest chains, races, heck there's even a few classless servers where you gain class skills through quests allowing some mixing and matching.

 

[sonicneedslovetoo]

"And by the way, you don't want them either. You think you do, but you don't" -Some guy from blizzard.

Now I can just take that foot in mouth quote and just shove it right up their ass.

 

[anthony87]

Well I was going to say "Inb4 people on this site who have a better idea of the internal workings of Blizzard than the company themselves" but it seems I'm too late.

 

[Synigma]

Actually this is kind of what I was expecting. They want to offer the option but are skeptical of how much they need to spend on setting it up vs how much it will actually bring in.

Let's be real here, they can't charge the full price they are charging for new WoW and since you're appealing to people that previously played it they won't want to rebuy a game that they already paid for once. So right off the bat the amount of $$ is limited... then you add in the fact of how many people are going to sign up for a month and realize they just can't recreate the original experience (they are older now, don't have the time to play like they used to, can't find a guild like their old one, etc...)

Throw in complications with version control and the costs associated and it value to the company gets iffy. I mean they weren't the mega company they are now and with all the issues they had in the first year I can totally believe that version control got cast aside... and it's not as easy as just picking up an original CD and copying the models back.

 

[Morti]

Blizzard is now well aware of the amount of players willing to play legacy servers, something which wasn't the case until Nostalrius shutdown."

No they aren't. Situations like this are notorious for the "Gimme this!" "OK, here you go." "Not interested anymore, goodbye."

 

[jurnag12]

I refuse to believe that a company that has thrown millions at developing shit before tossing it out when it didn't meet their standards like Blizzard has doesn't have some spare interns around to fix this shit, especially when the Nostalrius devs managed to do this as a fucking fan project.

 

[JayRPG]

As much as Blizzard has tried to push the new expansion to be like The Burning Crusade, it just won't be, it won't be anywhere near as good as The Burning Crusade was.

Screw Vanilla WoW legacy servers, give us TBC legacy servers. People would return in droves, I know I would... I definitely won't be returning for this Legion shit.

Blizzard has enough money and resources to basically put a B team onto a Burning Crusade legacy server, and even add new content to it, like an alternate WoW timeline.

They've got Jeff Kaplan, one of the greatest dungeon and raid designers (if not the single greatest) in the video game industry, on the TF2-clone FPS Overwatch for god sake.

 

[Synigma]

I refuse to believe that a company that has thrown millions at developing shit before tossing it out when it didn't meet their standards like Blizzard has doesn't have some spare interns around to fix this shit, especially when the Nostalrius devs managed to do this as a fucking fan project.

Well it's probably more complicated than that. Nostalrius probably mocked up a server for the original version of the game, barebones connection to mimic what a battle.net server used to do back in the days of vanilla WoW.
So they have 2 basic options:
1) Do what Nostalrius did and try to build server software that will allow the vanilla client to work with the new B.net. This however prevents them from updating the client at all and would be a bandaid solution.
2) Try to rebuild the original client and just update how it interacts with current B.net. A better solution but depending on how bad their version control was it could mean completely re-writing a lot of code.

 

[weirdee]

Step 1: Copy and paste the Nostalrius source code.
Step 2: THERE ISN'T A STEP TWO FFS

 

[Neverhoodian]

Possible solution; hire the Nostalrius team? It's not unheard of for companies to offer jobs to folks that exploit or retool their software. Valve hired Tony Paloma (aka "Drunken F00l") after banning him for breaking Steam's TOS via exploits and third party programs for TF2.

 

[Damir Halilovic]

This is PR talk for "big fucking nothing".

 

[ex951753]

The Co-optional podcast brought up some very good reasons why Blizzard did what they did a while back. If anyone's interested:

Starts at 1:47:01

 

[JayRPG]

As much as Blizzard has tried to push the new expansion to be like The Burning Crusade, it just won't be, it won't be anywhere near as good as The Burning Crusade was.

Screw Vanilla WoW legacy servers, give us TBC legacy servers. People would return in droves, I know I would... I definitely won't be returning for this Legion shit.

Blizzard has enough money and resources to basically put a B team onto a Burning Crusade legacy server, and even add new content to it, like an alternate WoW timeline.

They've got Jeff Kaplan, one of the greatest dungeon and raid designers (if not the single greatest) in the video game industry, on the TF2-clone FPS Overwatch for god sake.

It'll be better, if anything.

Burning Crusade was a pretty so-so expansion. Nothing was really changed. It kept pretty much every single problem of vanilla WoW, but threw in a couple of slightly improved raids/dungeons, and a couple of new races. Pretty much the only good feature were flying mounts.

Wrath of the Lich King was a far superior expansion.
-Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel were two of the best raids which have ever been in the game
-Looking for group was a godsend compared to standing in Dalaran typing "need tank and healer Violet Hold HC" for 30 fucking minutes
-Leveling was made way faster which in turn ended up being way nicer. People whine that "slower leveling feels like more of an achievement", but having high level content which you can never fucking play just sucks, and slow leveling is absolute bullshit to those who don't want to be locked into one specific class choice when they start the game.
-Death knights felt like actual new content, where Blood Elves and Draenei were glorified cosmetics.
-Questing was made better, with some quest lines which were way more interesting. Assault on Undercity felt really epic the first time I played through it.
-It was aesthetically better than any expansion before. The Nordic tones were nice, and the music was fantastic in some of the zones.
-Wintergrasp was really fun world PvP with the introduction of siege vehicles.

People look at vanilla WoW in rose tinted goggles, but Wrath of the Lich King was where the true quality was. Mostly because it was WoW before negative features like Raid finder and Guild leveling came in.

They changed a lot in TBC, saying they didn't change much is a huge exaggeration. I don't look at Vanilla WoW like it's perfection, I know it wasn't that great, but I felt WoW peaked in TBC.

Wrath was fine, it was good, but for all those things you listed, there was also a whole lot of crap. You mention Ulduar (one of my favourite raids) and ICC (Overrated imo.. a lot of boring junk bosses and near-clone bosses in between a few gems) but Wrath also brought us Argent tourney.. and Naxx HD, both pretty awful raids, some of the worst ever.

The problem with Wrath for me is that Blizzard seemed to signal (with Wrath of the Lich King) that they were done with catering to the crowd that made the game so popular in the first place. I am not an elitist, I don't despise casual gamers, and I don't think that it's bad for WoW to be more inclusive, but Wrath was the slippery slope that lead to making a game almost purely for casual gamers in a bid to get more subscribers.

Subscribers peaked in Wrath of the Lich King, but if you follow the sub numbers quarter by quarter, the increase in subs was much slower than it was in TBC. TBC saw sharp increases every quarter, while wrath saw a sharp increase early on and really fizzled out, and overall Wrath gained less players from TBC than TBC gained from Vanilla. Subs did peak in Wrath but it remains to be seen whether those sub numbers would have been reached regardless of Wrath or not.

The problem with catering to a more casual crowd, and/or less experienced crowd is that, in general, they don't stick around as long as the dedicated MMO player that WoW used to be for. The casual crowd just move on to the next thing, or stop playing, or play so little that it doesn't sustain the game. You see it with every subsequent expansion, people flock in at launch and then they lose 2-4 million subs in a few months. This never happened in TBC, it kept growing, incredibly strong, throughout the entire expansion all the way until the end.

TBC had a good 7-8 million subs of mostly dedicated players and I always felt that Wrath marked the decision at Blizzard to go for pure subscription numbers over everything else, regardless of retention, or anything that may happen after they hit their next milestone.

I raided in a US (and briefly world) top 200 guild in TBC, Wrath, and Cataclysm, and while Ulduar is one of my favourite raids (Jeff Kaplan's last raid FYI.. and look what we got after he was moved to Titan), most of my favourite memories of raiding are from TBC, Wiping for weeks on Morogrim Tidewalker in SSC, TK and SSC were both amazing raids, Black Temple was amazing, Karazhan was stunning, I struggle to think back on any raid I didn't like in TBC, and none of them were as weak as some of the pathetic attempts in Wrath.

I liked Wrath, I loved TBC, and it will always be my belief that if Blizzard stayed on the same path as TBC the game would be far healthier today than it is.

I also just wanted to add that it wasn't like TBC was only for hardcore players, Blizzard took a number of steps to make it easier for the casual gamer, there were multitudes of casual raiding guilds, thousands of them. TBC had a good mix of elements for both the hardcore and casual crowd. Wrath tipped the game into casual's favour, and everything after that just made it worse and worse.

(P.S I know it seems like I'm really negative towards the casual gamer, but I am really not, I am mostly a casual gamer myself nowadays, I was just trying to get the point across that an MMO community is harder to sustain with a vast majority of it being casual gamers.)

 

[Wrex Brogan]

Yeah, fair enough. Tech problems are always a pain in the ass.

Personally, legacy servers aren't for me - despite cutting my teeth on Vanilla (almost literally, I wasn't even a teenager when it came out) and having lots of fond memories of TBC (emergency tanking a raid boss as an Enhancement Shaman because the Warrior's shield broke mid-combat is something I'll never not love doing), I have... little desire to return to those days. Probably because I've slowly moved away from raiding and now just do questing and leveling, and that sucked ass back in the classic days.

Still, if Blizzard thinks there's a viable market for it and they can pony up the cash to get around the tech issues, go nuts. Though I wonder if there'll be any interactivity with the cross-server things they've got atm (i.e. Bind on Account Gear, Mount Tabs, the upcoming Legion transmog system) or if they'll do it fresh.

 

[deadish]

Nah.

They don't want to maintain 2 code bases.
They don't want to split the user base.

End of story.