Blizzard Drops the Hammer on Popular Vanilla World of Warcraft Nostalrius Private Servers

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

http://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/142634550945/hello-im-super-frequent-and-im-here-to-bother

Worth a read on the subject.

Also and this is in line more with the case of World of Warcraft here is a text from a user who posted in a WOW thread that deleted amd mind you its a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG one so QUOTE:


THE WALL OF NO!

Summary of Blizz?s public stance:

1. Blizz does not believe there are enough people interested in utilizing this idea long term to justify the various costs necessary to bring it about.

2. Blizz feels this idea is counter to the nature of MMO?s; non-progression equates to stagnation and eventual boredom.

3. The original game code does not exist in that form anymore. All the old data has been replaced, with the newer data which was not saved (archived) for later reuse. It was over-written and destroyed. ?There is no switch to flip on the realms to roll back years of patches and changes?? In keeping with the sentiment in expressed in #2, above, it?s gone, never to return. Even if it were ?recoverable? by other means it would still require lengthy and expensive rewrite.

4. They have no plans or desire to recreate the original version from scratch. They refer to the notion of attempting to do so as ?a logistical nightmare,?? and in keeping with their stance in #1, above the time, money and resources required are prohibitive and unjustified.

To paraphrase it all: ?Too much cost, too little interest and it?s not what the game is about? we?re not doing it.?

Proponents are adamant it is a good thing and continue to post it (in various forms), sometimes multiple times a day despite heavy resistance.

Analogies:
Those who argue for ?Classic?, ?Vanilla?, ?Old Content?, ?Old Style?, ?Realm Specific?, ?Locked Progression?, ?Throwback?, ?Retro?, ?Premium? (or any other variant thereof) servers frequently fail to put real thought into their idea. Consider how this would work in similar situations in other venues.

The movie industry:
?The earliest days of film were so much better; we really had fun and such a sense of adventure. We really had to work at understanding what was going on and those that couldn?t read the subtitles were just bad. We want special theaters that play only silent films (Vanilla), those were so awesome and we miss them so much. For those that want black and white ?talkies? (BC) we can maybe have some that do those too, but no further. Technicolor (WotLK) is where the studios went wrong and this fancy Bullet-Time fx (Cata) junk is just taking the whole thing in the wrong direction?Blizz, fix it now! Give us our silent films back!?

The auto industry:
We want our Model-T?s back (Vanilla)? Henry Ford?s stuff was so awesome (blah, blah)?We could support maybe the Mustang (BC), but no further (blah, blah)? Datsun?s 280Z (WotLK) is where it all went wrong (blah, blah)?Chrysler Minivans (Cata) are just too bad to deal with (blah, blah)?

Proponents are asking either for (a) regression to the past where things were not better than they are now?and want to drag everyone else in the game with them? or (b) the ability to segregate themselves from everyone else so they can indulge in their nostalgia. Not only does the majority of the player base not want that, neither does Blizz. Not enough people want it to justify the costs of doing it and? most importantly? it goes against the progressive vision the company -- and players -- have for the game as a whole.

You will have no better chance of getting Blizz to do this than you would convincing the movie industry to revert to silent or even black and white only films or the auto industry to revert to producing nothing but cars like the Model-T or Edsel.

Blizzard specific references on the issue:

They were going to, long ago?
We were at one time internally discussing the possibility fairly seriously, but the long term interest in continued play on them couldn't justify the extremely large amount of development and support resources it would take to implement and maintain them. We'd effectively be developing and supporting two different games.
Drysc (CM), Feb 21, 2008
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/63797/wow-classic-servers

We occasionally see requests for us to open pre-TBC realms, or classic realms if you prefer. Lately there have also been requests for pre-WotLK realms, and I am sure that once the next expansion pack is released there will be requests for pre-Cataclysm realms as well. We have answered these requests quite a few times now saying that we have no plans to open such realms, and this is still the case today.

We have no plans to open classic realms or limited expansion content realms, and you should not expect to see the opening of such realms with the launch of Cataclysm either.

We realize that some of you feel that the classic game was more fun than the current game, and as a result would like to revel in nostalgia; the developers however prefer to keep the game moving forward as they want the game to continuously evolve and progress.
Vaneras (CM), Nov 28, 2009
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/1659/tbc-wotlk-origional-realms

We have no plans of making pre-TBC realms. This goes against the very nature of an MMO and would be a logistical nightmare. There's no switch to flip on the realms to roll back years of patches and changes, and we don't intend to invent one so that a very small minority of players can play what we feel would be an inferior cousin of the World of Warcraft of today.
Zarhym (CM), April 27, 2010
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/19223/cataclysm-the-wow-killer

Question: The whole topic of classic servers has been popping up on the forums, always on yours - I assume with the release of Cataclysm there's this huge wave of nostalgia here because you can't play in the old world anymore. Is this something you might consider doing after the Cataclysm launch?

Chilton: Currently, my answer would be probably not. The reason I say that is because any massively multiplayer game that has pretty much ever existed and has ever done any expansions has always gotten the nostalgia of, "Oh God, wouldn't it be great if we could have classic servers!" and more than anything else that generally proves to be nostalgia. In most cases - in almost all cases - the way it ends up playing out is that the game wasn't as good back then as people remember it being and then when those servers become available, they go play there for a little bit and quickly remember that it wasn?t quite as good as what they remembered in their minds and they don?t play there anymore and you set up all these servers and you dedicated all this hardware to it and it really doesn't get much use. So, for me, the historical lesson is that it's not a very good idea to do *laughs* - it's a great idea to talk about.
Tom Chilton (lead game designer), Aug 20, 2010
http://www.wowhead.com/news=166540/exclusive-gamescom-tom-chilton-interview-archaeology-details-and-more
(approx. half way down page)

https://twitter.com/ghostcrawler/status/285881503165054976
Greg ?Ghostcrawler? Street, Dec 31, 2012

Additionally, read this player post that might remind you of some of what you ?miss? about Vanilla WoW:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3881718715?page=1

WowInsider has a similar negative view:
May 2, 2012
http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/05/02/5-awesome-ways-world-of-warcraft-has-improved-since-day-one/#continued

Also ?

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6080659727?page=2
I work for a software company with corporate customers. Each of them has rather more invested in equipment than a PC gamer, and they like paying for upgrades even less.

Our products have been advancing technologically over time in a gradual fashion, so as not to lose the customers with the oldest equipment. However, things like operating system support and hardware version support are outside our control--which means we have to keep slowly advancing the requirements, and adjust existing code to match. Over time that means stuff eventually falls off the list of what we can support, because our code, gradually upgraded as it is, starts to require OS or hardware features the oldest equipment can't support.

We couldn't turn the clock back ten years, or probably even five, if we wanted to.

Blizz is no doubt in the same pickle. They've changed their database structure, upgraded the graphics, and likely done a lot of more subtle stuff over the last seven years that makes it fundamentally impossible to support Vanilla code, even assuming that code still exists in pristine form somewhere.

MOP will, as I understand it, very likely require at least a duo core CPU. That's another significant difference that can't be rolled back.

Therefore: what the Vanilla crowd is actually asking for is the development of new code to duplicate old code. That's not easy or cheap, and is going to compete directly for resources with development of current content. There would have to be a monumental ground surge of interest to make it feasible, an order of magnitude greater than what has ever been exhibited on the forums.

TLDR: That's not how software works.

From the EU forums, Feb 23, 2011

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1751857331

MMOChampion poll about whether Blizz should have such servers:
(June 19, 2012)
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1149323-Would-you-play-on-an-official-Vanilla-or-BC-server

It's a line Blizzard has drawn from way back when, yet suggestions or requests for classic realms continue to pop up on the forums. Let me tell you here and now... don't bother. Blizzard will eventually just lock your thread or delete it entirely simply because it's not in their best interests to provide such a service.

http://wow.joystiq.com/2009/03/13/no-vanilla-wow-realms-really/
Mar 13, 2009

Finally: Here?s a link to a past post dedicated to a deeper discussion of the idea. Please read it all the way through ? it is very thorough.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6080659727?page=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HoaFWI5S0Q
http://i.imgur.com/Xw1Dx.gif

Lakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.

How the forums are dealing with the ?problem.?
Buy a stronger whip.
Change riders.
Say things like, ?This is the way we always have ridden this horse.?
Appoint a committee to study the horse.
Arrange to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
Create a training session to increase our riding ability.
Harness several dead horses together for increased speed.
Declare the ?No horse is too dead to beat.?
Provide additional funding to increase the horse?s performance.
Declare the horse is, ?better, faster, and cheaper,? when dead.
Study alternative uses for dead horses.
Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position

 

[Alleged_Alec]

Too bad. I was a real fan of the levelling experience in both vanilla and TBC. Since there are so many people discussing it, I won't quote them directly, but this was my experience with later expansions:

I came back in the last half of WotLK. None of my friends were playing it on the same server any more, so I did all of the levelling content solo. This should be your first warning sign: I was able to steamroll through all content, solo, grouped, without ever running into a barrier. The only quest which went kind of wrong was when I was slightly underlevelled for a 5 man quest; I had to break out my voidwalker instead of my felguard to tank the elite mob. Then I started doing dungeons. These suddenly took only 15 minutes to run, with no pulling of packs and being careful, let alone crowd control. No, these dungeons were done by the tank grouping together as many mobs as he could while the DPS AoEed away without a care in the world for pulling aggro. This happened regardless of the itemisation of the people I was in; quest greens and blues were not a major disadvantage; they just meant that the dungeon would go slightly slower.

So I thought: whelp, I can apparently move on to the heroics then. But I couldn't. Blizzard, in all its infinite wisdom, had decided to put gear level restrictions on doing heroics via the LFG tool. Which is funny, because that was basically the only way to do dungeons at this point; people would laugh you off the server if you would LFG in trade chat.


What I liked about vanilla, and to a lesser extent TBC, was that everything felt like an adventure. Going through a dungeon was doable, but unless you were really overgeared, required some thought. Good examples of this can be found in for example Shadow Labs, where a mistimed pull in one of the larger rooms would pull two packs, which required either judicious cooldown popping to live through, or would signal that a fast retreat was necessary unless you love paying for repairs. Furthermore: team dynamics were important: you had to communicate crowd controlling, or when you were too low to continue to the next pack without a break, or even just having to reduce your DPS output because the tank couldn't compete on the threat meters. Not only this, but classes, and even builds, brought unique advantages and disadvantages to the group.

And as others have said before me, it wasn't just dungeons which were more interesting: levelling itself was too. Areas were more different from each other, in contrast with the 10 different flavours of snowy tundra with undead in them. Levelling took longer, which meant that each level up felt that much better to achieve.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

And as others have said before me, it wasn't just dungeons which were more interesting: levelling itself was too. Areas were more different from each other, in contrast with the 10 different flavours of snowy tundra with undead in them. Levelling took longer, which meant that each level up felt that much better to achieve.

But leveling was also unnecessarily painful, depennding on the class at least 2 mobs have a chance of killing a player when he is solo leveling.

Earning gold is painfully low because everything else is so expensive I tcan take a MONTH to get 100 gold in a game world were prices for things can range from 100-10,000. And why must getting your first mount is restricted to level 40? And cost 90 gold to purchase the training for it.

Leveling would have been so much smoother and balanced if they just give us mounts at an earlier level and a more fair price.

Remember that all this grindyness is to make players run out their subcription time so they can pay again and the grind continues. Which in somecases showcases the problem with Subscription based games.

 

[Alleged_Alec]

And as others have said before me, it wasn't just dungeons which were more interesting: levelling itself was too. Areas were more different from each other, in contrast with the 10 different flavours of snowy tundra with undead in them. Levelling took longer, which meant that each level up felt that much better to achieve.

But leveling was also unnecessarily painful, depennding on the class at least 2 mobs have a chance of killing a player when he is solo leveling.

It was a design choice. It can be one you disagree with, but it isn't a wrong way to do things. Vanilla WoW asked you to make a certain decision, both in deciding your class and in your build: what do you want to be good at? Take for example shamans: they could go for resto and they'd never have issues finding a group for any instance, but levelling would be slow, but steady; you'd go through all levelling content without a real fear of dying, but you'd do so at a slower pace.

Earning gold is painfully low because everything else is so expensive I tcan take a MONTH to get 100 gold in a game world were prices for things can range from 100-10,000.

I'll come back to this later, but yeah. If you did not have a gathering profession, or already a good stockpile of gold to play the auction house with, money will have been tight.

And why must getting your first mount is restricted to level 40? And cost 90 gold to purchase the training for it. Leveling would have been so much smoother and balanced if they just give us mounts at an earlier level and a more fair price.

Because it adds to the perceived size of the world. You couldn't just go anywhere you wanted fast; you'd either have to walk there, have your heartstone set to that place or cough up the few silver for the gryphon/bat/wyvern ride to that general area, and that was fine. It fitted the generally slower pace of Vanilla. Furthermore: it gives players something to look forward to and build towards: getting your first mount is a major turning point in the game. It marks what's more or less halfway the grind to 60, and once you had it, you were generally accepted to be in the big boys league. Sure, if you weren't a paladin or a warlock, you'd have to give up a lung to get one. I remember it took a friend of mine to level 47 or so to finally cough up the dough for the training. But I also remember how exited he was once he had it.

Remember that all this grindyness is to make players run out their subcription time so they can pay again and the grind continues. Which in somecases showcases the problem with Subscription based games.

WoW came out in a time where MMO's, even freemium ones, were much more grindy in general. Runescape was a huge grindfest, for example. It wasn't really out of the ordinary in that sense.



And no, I, and I think not many proponents of Vanilla in general, will argue that WoW was better back then mechanically. It had some serious issues. Molten Core shat all over fire mages, shadow priests were pretty bad all around in and rogues were pretty much consistently OP in PvP (good old days of World of Roguecraft... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWqaBjgAaUI) and some of the trees were just plain bad to put points into.. Furthermore, I do like some of the 'new' (never played after WotLK, so can't comment on that) mechanics changes, such as the changes to soul shards, and the addition of two possible specs you can switch between. I'm fine with others, such as the simplification of stats.

But it's not just about the mechanics, but also about the game feel and experience, and in that regard I feel Vanilla, and to a lesser extent TBC, were way, way better than later expansions. I think we Vanilla proponents may be a slightly masochistic bunch, to be honest.

Though I may have moaned about being ganked while levelling in Hillsbrad, I also loved it. It gave us a good excuse to stop doing what we were doing and group up and continue levelling as a group, or just get plain revenge on that one fucking pink-haired gnome rogue which had been bothering me for the better part of 30 minutes.
World PvP in general was really fun, and seemed to have all but disappeared from TBC onwards. I remember the excitement of that one time a level 55 paladin attacked my level 48 warlock, and that I was able to beat him over the course of 10 minutes by good kiting. Some of my best memories to WoW was our relatively small guild (40ish people, all below level 50) setting up huge raids of over 80 people on Astranaar, drawing a line of destruction and rivers of blood and the tears of night elf hunters from Ashenvale to Darnassus.

And I, and my friends who also prefer Vanilla, loved the difficulty of the dungeons. Have so many good memories about frustrating runs which suddenly did work out because of tactics which were frankly stupid to even try. I'm one of the insane people who actually liked doing Sunken Temple, for example, despite its horrible layout and, if I'm honest, too large amount of trash mobs, because of fond memories to a run where the tank dced and I was able to quickly summon my voidwalk and tank the trash pack with it, sparing the group a corpserun. I loved trying to CC three mobs at a time with judicious use of fear, Curse of Recklessness and my Succubus while still doing enough dps to finish the pack before our healer went OOM.


I'm starting to ramble a bit, but the point is this. WoW has changed, both mechanically and in the sense of game feel and difficulty. While the game has (mostly) improved mechanically, me, and I think a significant portion of those who prefer vanilla, feel that these mechanical improvements did not justify the other changes which accompanied them, and that the game got worse because of them. And that the groups disagree on this is totally fine. The world is large enough and we are mature enough to allow for differences of opinions. But it boils down to this: there has never been an MMO, before or after, which felt as good to me as Vanilla WoW.

 

[Strazdas]

No what Blizzard do is release their own official private server, just because the server is original code does not negate the fact the GAME itself is free of DMCA "abuse" the server is theirs, but "WORLD OF WARCRAFT" is Blizzard's copyright.

Does not it matter how the server is utilized it is law that they should not make a server with a copyrighted game already in use which violates their terms of service.

I mean shit there is a reason why we cannot advertise Private Servers on other website forums like the Escapist.

And let me get this out of the way and say that as someone who did play on a Private WOW server just to experiance what the world of azeroth looked like before the Cataclysm, Vanilla WOW is not that great from a gameplay perspective.

Classes were unbalanced, Bosses had bullshit mechanics, it is increadibly grindy in certain areas of gameplay (such as re-specing)

It is very difficult to build a team of 40 people for raids especially if they are all geared out perfectly like say in Molten Core we needed ALL 40 people to get Fire Resist Gear and that was a ***** to farm. And many classes were not viable which means that when it comes to endgame some class specs were utterly worthless. Paladins and Bear Form Druids were not viable as Tanks only the protection Warrior. And in Nax 40 you needed 8 tanks for one boss.

The server they hosted is all original code copyright property to those people that ran the server. Blizzard has NO legal claim to it. What they do have a claim is people using their WOW client to play that server because blizzard does own those clients.

Terms of service does not matter as those people never agreed to those terms to begin with. Only the players did.

We cannot do many things on the escapist that are completely legal, such as talk about adblockers or insult people.

I wont argue on the gameplay itself as that was never a point of contention to me. I find WoW absolutely boring as a game.

Also here is a post from someone in the WOW forums talking about the issue of hosting Private Servers:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/20743204146#8

Says the topic is unavailable to me. I think they deleted it.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

No what Blizzard do is release their own official private server, just because the server is original code does not negate the fact the GAME itself is free of DMCA "abuse" the server is theirs, but "WORLD OF WARCRAFT" is Blizzard's copyright.

Does not it matter how the server is utilized it is law that they should not make a server with a copyrighted game already in use which violates their terms of service.

I mean shit there is a reason why we cannot advertise Private Servers on other website forums like the Escapist.

And let me get this out of the way and say that as someone who did play on a Private WOW server just to experiance what the world of azeroth looked like before the Cataclysm, Vanilla WOW is not that great from a gameplay perspective.

Classes were unbalanced, Bosses had bullshit mechanics, it is increadibly grindy in certain areas of gameplay (such as re-specing)

It is very difficult to build a team of 40 people for raids especially if they are all geared out perfectly like say in Molten Core we needed ALL 40 people to get Fire Resist Gear and that was a ***** to farm. And many classes were not viable which means that when it comes to endgame some class specs were utterly worthless. Paladins and Bear Form Druids were not viable as Tanks only the protection Warrior. And in Nax 40 you needed 8 tanks for one boss.

The server they hosted is all original code copyright property to those people that ran the server. Blizzard has NO legal claim to it. What they do have a claim is people using their WOW client to play that server because blizzard does own those clients.

Terms of service does not matter as those people never agreed to those terms to begin with. Only the players did.

We cannot do many things on the escapist that are completely legal, such as talk about adblockers or insult people.

I wont argue on the gameplay itself as that was never a point of contention to me. I find WoW absolutely boring as a game.

Also here is a post from someone in the WOW forums talking about the issue of hosting Private Servers:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/20743204146#8

Says the topic is unavailable to me. I think they deleted it.

I copy pasted the exact text of the post here in the thread and its the above WALL OF TEXT but here is a link:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.936812-Blizzard-Drops-the-Hammer-on-Popular-Vanilla-World-of-Warcraft-Nostalrius-Private-Servers?page=2#23606783

 

[scw55]

I agree with Tom Chilton's philosophy. We do tend to look at the past with biased affection.
However, given the popularity of Nostalrius Begins, it has shown there is interest and sustained interest in Vanilla servers. Therefore, Blizzard should consider Vanilla Servers.

WoW is still a subscription based game. However, there are lots of MMOs out there which do not have a subscription feed model, and rival WoW with its polish. WoW's biggest threat is Guild Wars 2 who is subscription fee-free and is not pay-to-win. Its free-trial version is very generous and fair to everyone who uses the game.

Warlords of Draenor felt underwhelming. The expansion feels like a massive Caverns of Time instance. The story feels only to serve setting up the Legion expansion, which was teased heavily in Mists of Pandaria. Created the interesting observation of "Did the shattering of Outlands cause all its inhabitants to gain worse polycount?" Comparing Outland models to Draenor.

Warlords added "player housing" but missed the point. The garrisons are a trap. They discourage you from exploring the world. Blizzard's response is to make a worse version of player-housing and instead give every class Ebon Hold. A step backward.

World of Warcraft is going to lose steam because every day there is less reason to want to play.

The nice looking stuff of Legion such as Demon Hunters or Class Artifacts normally would look as cool features. But now come across as desperate. Like how Blizzard offered Beta access to MoP and a free copy of Diablo 3 if you stayed subscribed for a year (when SWTOR was going to be released).

More examples of why WoW is falling behind. Rift offers free character server transfers. You can play with your friends on any server. Guild Wars 2 allows you to be in a guild with anyone from any server from any territory (e.g. Mixed US and EU guilds). Given a lot of WoW players have played for around 10 years, it feels unfair to expect them to pay over ?100 just to keep playing with their friends in an active social guild. Especially since within EU/US you can play with anyone from the same faction. You just can only be in a guild in the same pooled servers.

Blizzard, World of Warcraft have problems. You need to address them. One way of helping people think of you more fondly is to offer nostalgia servers. Not all your players are dedicated to the MMO. You have Hearthstone, Diablo 3, Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch as Multiplayer gaming experiences without a subscription fee. You are dividing your player base. We are getting tired of paying a sub fee for a game we play less often, which has higher restrictions with how we play. You say WoW is more fun to play with others, why do you make it frustrating to play with friends?

 

[Strazdas]

I copy pasted the exact text of the post here in the thread and its the above WALL OF TEXT but here is a link:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.936812-Blizzard-Drops-the-Hammer-on-Popular-Vanilla-World-of-Warcraft-Nostalrius-Private-Servers?page=2#23606783

Right, thanks. As somone that isnt going to play either way, i really dont care which is better or worse or which gets the players, so im not going to discuss that part.

3. The original game code does not exist in that form anymore. All the old data has been replaced, with the newer data which was not saved (archived) for later reuse. It was over-written and destroyed. "There is no switch to flip on the realms to roll back years of patches and changes..." In keeping with the sentiment in expressed in #2, above, it's gone, never to return. Even if it were "recoverable" by other means it would still require lengthy and expensive rewrite.

Well thats very odd, though not unheard of (Rockstar lost its source code for Red Dead Redemption after all). However there actually is a very easy and cheap way to replicate it without a rewrite - Just buy the Nostarlius source code. you will have like 90%+ of the job done by that.

Analogies:

The difference however is that all those retro movies are still available and people that want them actually watch them instead of the movie industry going "nope, lets burn all copies of silent films because we moved on now". Same for classic cars.