Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[Deleted]

the only reason legacy servers exist is cos blizzard dnt make them, if you dnt wanna be copied by others then you offer the service yourself, its just blizzard lazyness saying they wont add classic servers, and when they say that ofc people are gonna make there own, if blizzard had classic,tbc and wrath servers there wouldnt be any private ones to begin with its there own fault

That's a retarded thinking of life. Should Blizzard then provide servers for every single patch in the game?
If i re-release FIFA 2001 with my own master server because EA shutdown theirs, does that mean i'm allowed to? Ofcourse fucking not.

if blizzard had classic,tbc and wrath servers there wouldnt be any private ones to begin with its there own fault

You sound like those people who say "If she didn't dress skimpy, she wouldnt be raped! It's her own fault!"

[Deleted]

Yet I still wonder why only a select few private servers actually get shut down. If you do some googling you can see there are a gigantic amount of private servers. I feel like this isn't just to protect IP. It is damage control. Retail WoW is crumbling as we speak and a bunch of nerds manage to get a rather significant portion of their playerbase with an extremely outdated version of the game they reverse engineerd.

I think they are actually butthurt at Blizzard about it.

I think it's pretty basic really:

1) there are hundreds of private servers, but they are insignificant. Servers with less than 100 players are the great majority of the private servers.

2) Nostalrius was getting out of hand. In a few months it doubled the population. There were loads of gold sellers, there were loads of streamers, and players were making publicity of the server all over the place. If it was something related to WoW in any website, it was bound to receive a comment from some Nostalrius player.

3) Blizzard "allowed" them to exist up until this player boom was significant and specially when they decided to public ask for money to pay for a server upgrade. They asked to the players to pay 360€ per month for the rented hardware to be upgraded so it could support the huge intake of new players.

4) Intellectual Propriety works by "being challenged". There is not supreme council that checks if the person A or B is infringing copyright and trademarked stuff all the time. The ones having it propriety being misused are the ones that have to try to protect it, otherwise, if it gets unchecked they risk to lose the Propriety of... the propriety. lol The cheer size of Nostalrius, all the advertisement and now the massive donation they were asking, all could, one day, return to bite in Blizzard ass if it was left unchecked.

Those 4 points made Blizzard act. Sure you can say that are there pretty successful private servers that have micro transactions and such, but they are not really on "the open" as Nostalrius was in the past 3-4 months.

[Deleted]

Theft is theft and it's illegal. They had no rights to Blizzard's property and people expressing their outrage is irrelevant to the decision of pursing the people responsible for stealing their product and taking their customers.

Its only illegal (and not in all countries, mind you) because of antiquated laws and these guys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

Theft is only morally wrong for one single reason and thats cause by committing it, you cause harm but you cant really steal intellectual property anyway.

[Deleted]

Theft is theft and it's illegal. They had no rights to Blizzard's property and people expressing their outrage is irrelevant to the decision of pursing the people responsible for stealing their product and taking their customers.

"Taking their customers".

You don't own people. In all likelihood, most of these players already cancelled their subs for the travesty that WoW has become.

We're either forced to play Live or leave, right?

You do realize there is a world outside of Blizzard, right?

[Mumba]

How popular was Nost compared to other private servers? It's not like Blizzard isn't aware of how many there are so I'm wondering if it became too big for it's own good (too much attention and too high costs).

[Deleted]

I never bothered with Nostalrius, (I really had to stop myself trying it) as I knew it was only a matter of time before Blizzard pulled it down. I'd much rather pay for a legacy server with uninterrupted service endorsed/hosted by Blizzard than one that is not and for free. Several people I know feel the same way and I'm sure many others out there were in the same boat.

Yep, same, but in my case, I assumed private servers would be laggy and have 4x exp rates and their admins/mods playing favorites.

[Deleted]

The fact is Blizzard usually let's things of this nature grow to a fairly formidable size before taking action themselves. Many private servers are still open that have been around a lot longer than Nost but by taking Nostalrius down they have had to say to themselves "this is a genuine threat to us now, a lot of people are using this instead of our game" which totally contradicts their statement of "no one is interested in playing vanilla servers"... Clearly there is a hell of a lot of interest or you wouldn't be taking your current path of action. As someone else said, if there is a demand for something, someone will come to supply it whether it is illegal or not. It's how the world works.

[Kolvarg]

If i re-release FIFA 2001 with my own master server because EA shutdown theirs, does that mean i'm allowed to?"

No. It means that if you allow people to play a game that isn't available anymore for free, while still being illegal, you're certainly not causing as much harm as if you were doing the same for a game that is currently available, and certainly not comparable to theft.

Playing an illegal Gameboy ROM on an illegal Gameboy emulator isn't the same as stealing a gameboy and the game, especially if you can't buy said things through legal means anymore.

Not saying that makes it not illegal, or "ok" to do. Just saying despite having potentially being harmful to the current WoW / Blizzard, doesn't mean it isn't doing some good either. Most stories have 2 sides, piracy and in this case specifically emulation and/or distribution of no longer available games, isn't the devil incarnate.

[zorkuus]

How popular was Nost compared to other private servers? It's not like Blizzard isn't aware of how many there are so I'm wondering if it became too big for it's own good (too much attention and too high costs).

Many private servers are in countries Blizzard can't legally touch, Nost wasn't. I'll go with Occam's Razor rather than a conspiracy theory.

[Deleted]

Yet I still wonder why only a select few private servers actually get shut down. If you do some googling you can see there are a gigantic amount of private servers. I feel like this isn't just to protect IP. It is damage control. Retail WoW is crumbling as we speak and a bunch of nerds manage to get a rather significant portion of their playerbase with an extremely outdated version of the game they reverse engineerd.

I think they are actually butthurt at Blizzard about it.

If you read all the forum threads linked from their site, it looks more like they are a victim of their own success.

They have had to deal with a big influx of players and the extra-demands of this alone nearly shut the service down but since that people have started organising fund raising for it and there's speculation that the organised fund raising it what caused Blizz to act.

Clearly Blizz, as public company, will do what's necessary to protect share-holder interests. It's not cost effective to send the lawyers around for every breach so they likely have a threshold before this happens and they crossed it.

That said, this site was very popular. The active and current numbers are significant. We knew what Blizz's subs were but not the active/concurrent numbers nor what the regional breakdown was. Even if Blizz still have 5M globally, how many of those are EU/NA? If Nostralius were allowed to continue to grow as it has done, it's player base would likely soon cease to be trivial relative to the Blizz's active players.

[Deleted]

How popular was Nost compared to other private servers? It's not like Blizzard isn't aware of how many there are so I'm wondering if it became too big for it's own good (too much attention and too high costs).

it was the biggest private server and it was growing pretty fast ...

[Arenis]

That's the thing, though, offering them a free service takes money from Blizzard. Some may never have had intentions of being a Blizzard customer, regardless if the Private Server didn't exist, but many still would have, yet didn't because this other free option was available.

I seriously doubt that. There are many private servers with a retail experience that are also free, but people did not go there. They don't want to play that version, whether it's live or pserver. And because of that I think a massive majority is perfectly willing to buy a sub fee in the impossible case that Blizzard would actually launch a classic-like server. They were willing to back then, and atleast I am willing to now.

[zorkuus]

Official legacy Servers from Blizzard would have many many more Players than all private Servers combined.

Yeah for like a month.

[Deleted]

Many private servers are in countries Blizzard can't legally touch, Nost wasn't. I'll go with Occam's Razor rather than a conspiracy theory.

And most likely many more are in places they can legally touch yet still are to this day open and running for a lot longer than 1 year.

[towelliee]

How popular was Nost compared to other private servers? It's not like Blizzard isn't aware of how many there are so I'm wondering if it became too big for it's own good (too much attention and too high costs).

This is my theory as to why it was shut down.

[Vintersol]

Theft is theft and it's illegal. They had no rights to Blizzard's property and people expressing their outrage is irrelevant to the decision of pursing the people responsible for stealing their product and taking their customers.

By that logic, CD/DVD Burner are illegal, because people can copy things....

[Deleted]

No. It means that if you allow people to play a game that isn't available anymore for free, while still being illegal, you're certainly not causing as much harm as if you were doing the same for a game that is currently available, and certainly not comparable to theft.

Playing an illegal Gameboy ROM on an illegal Gameboy emulator isn't the same as stealing a gameboy and the game, especially if you can't buy said things through legal means anymore.

Not saying that makes it not illegal, or "ok" to do. Just saying despite having potentially being harmful to the current WoW / Blizzard, doesn't mean it isn't doing some good either. Most stories have 2 sides, piracy and in this case specifically emulation and/or distribution of no longer available games, isn't the devil incarnate.

The problem that you are not accepting is that World of Warcraft vanilla doesn't exists... There is only ONE game, World of Warcraft. That game has been updated a few times, but, legally, it's still the same game. So that "the game is not available" theory doesn't exists, because the game IS available. What is not available is the version of the game that you want. But the same can be said to any of the 12 original patches or any other of the dozen patches we had since TBC.

[Deleted]

This is my theory as to why it was shut down.

why are you here u fat fuck ?

infracted

[sabe]

That is the reality of your situation Nostalrius players. Blizzard is a entertainment company in the end and it's about money lost. If enough of you stop playing wow then maybe(lol) they will listen and spend resources on recreating the old content instead of new content.

Wish i had seen anything called content that is new lately.

[Nuckels]

This is my theory as to why it was shut down.

I think its because they asked for donations back in march and ergo started making money of it. Blizzard doesn't like that.