Do you think Blizzard will make any statement about shutting down Nos PS?

[Surfd]

And Vanilla servers are offering a service that Blizzard refuses to do, also doesn't impact their business - the offer isn't the same as their own, and they actually EXPRESSED a DISinterest in providing it.

What is their impact ?

It does not matter that they are offering a service blizzard refuses to provide. AT ALL. Blizzard has the final say in what you can do with their IP. Just because you want it really badly does not give you some magical right to it. And yes, it DOES impact their business. You are using their IP in a manner they dont want you to. And you are doing so illegally. They are LEGALLY REQUIRED to at least nominally defend their IP or risk losing the rights to it. It's that simple. If you can't understand that, there is no help for you.

I mean, everybody LOVES classic cars. Shame literally all of the cool ones are no longer manufactured. But I guess you could just provide that service, since the auto company no longer does, right? I mean, I dare you to try setting up a factory and reproduccing 1966 Shelby 427 Cobras or 1969 Dodge Chargers to give away. "Were not manufacturing them the same way, and we arent making a profit off of them, so it isnt copyright infringement!" I would LOVE to see how far you would get with that before a very pissed off Auto company stuffed a bag of lawyers down your throat.

Save for proving more and more people think retail WoW is shit and the game was better before they ruined it ?

And sorry, but I am not even going to try to argue with that rediculous strawman of an arguement....

[Kuntantee]

While I would prefer them not to shut down private servers, it's in their right to do so. Player base is not entitled to an answer in legal issues.

[Zindai]

I had a feeling that Blizzard would go for Nostalrius for a long time. They did shove it in Blizzard's face through Twitch and Twitter on many occasions. I played on the direct competitor (they launched around the same time), and I just thought that it was great for us that Nos was stealing all the official attention. I was raiding in retail for years while also casually levelling on private servers. There were usually enough things I wanted to do in retail to stop me from enjoying myself elsewhere (this sounds like an argument for cheating, whoops), but I don't feel that way anymore.

That said... I don't get why there can only be two alternatives: an official server hosted by Blizzard OR an illegal private server hosted by ___. I'd love to see Blizzard officially tolerating specific private servers, maybe including some requirements that a server like Nos would mostly already fulfill. If there's going to be an official statement at some point, I hope it's that - but I highly doubt it.

I'm also surprised that MMO-C has kept these Nostalrius threads open.

[Tome]

I'm also surprised that MMO-C has kept these Nostalrius threads open.

It's the same with reddit. Posting about private realms is against the rules there, but this once a huge AMA thread about Nostalrius was kept on the front page approved by moderators. Mainly because Nostalrius became rather big and the most well known classic server.

It's not in people's interest however, to let others enjoy what they want to enjoy.

It's similar to these LFR threads. You see these posters absolutely shit on people wanting classic realms, almost telling them to go and kill themselves, but they defend the LFR threads with "you don't need to play LFR, let the people who enjoy LFR play LFR!"

It's a bit scary.

[Surfd]

It's similar to these LFR threads. You see these posters absolutely shit on people wanting classic realms, almost telling them to go and kill themselves, but they defend the LFR threads with "you don't need to play LFR, let the people who enjoy LFR play LFR!"

The issues surrounding LFR and the issues surrounding Private servers are completely different, and drawing false parallels between them in an effort to somehow validate your arguement isnt going to win you any points.

- - - Updated - - -

I'm also surprised that MMO-C has kept these Nostalrius threads open.

General disccussion of Private servers is frowned upon because, you know, they are Illegal: Hey, I want to buy some Coke, anyone know where i can buy some coke? I would love to talk about how awesome this coke i just got is.

Discussing Illegal things because they are Relivant Industry News is not prohibited, because we are discussing the nature of the News, and not nessicarily the illegal topic in a frowned upon manner: Hey, the cops just busted a major kiddie porn ring operating in X city. Appearently Politician Y might have been involved. Lots of interesting news, nothing to do with things you shouldnt be asking about kiddie porn.

One is a news story. The other is discussion about promotion of or engaging in illegal activities. Not exactly rocket science.

[Zindai]

General disccussion of Private servers is frowned upon because, you know, they are Illegal: Hey, I want to buy some Coke, anyone know where i can buy some coke? I would love to talk about how awesome this coke i just got is.

Discussing Illegal things because they are Relivant Industry News is not prohibited, because we are discussing the nature of the News, and not nessicarily the illegal topic in a frowned upon manner: Hey, the cops just busted a major kiddie porn ring operating in X city. Appearently Politician Y might have been involved. Lots of interesting news, nothing to do with things you shouldnt be asking about kiddie porn.

One is a news story. The other is discussion of illegal activities. Not exactly rocket science.

Good perspective. It was just my understanding before that they wanted to avoid any mention or discussion of private servers.

[Tome]

The issues surrounding LFR and the issues surrounding Private servers are completely different, and drawing false parallels between them in an effort to somehow validate your arguement isnt going to win you any points.

Just because you decide to call it "false parallels" doesn't make it so, and it doesn't help you win any point either.

[Surfd]

Just because you decide to call it "false parallels" doesn't make it so, and it doesn't help you win any point either.

Blizzard provides the player with multiple methods of participating in raids with various levels of difficulty / skillcap / reward. A bunch of people somehow get it in their head that because "they" are superior to LFR, that everybody who actually enjoys LFR is somehow ruining their game, and so bitch up a storm. They dont think other people should enjoy the game the way blizzard intended them to, even though blizzard provided all the various tiers of interaction so that everyone could have a shot at end game content in their own way.

Blizzard provides the player ONE way to experience WoW: You play the current version, as the game progresses. There ARE no other options. A bunch of people think that blizzard somehow owes them the ability to experience the game the way THEY want to, which Blizzard has absolutely no obligation to do at all. Bitching about wanting something that you dont have, is in no way equivilent to bitching about having something, but not wanting / liking one of the options.

The two topics have no common foundation......which makes any comparison you try to make between them pretty much groundless. IE: False parallels.

[Santti]

I think they are better of not doing anything. They are not obligated to explain shutting private servers down. Blizzards words will be just twisted to find some hidden meanings between the words to fit the narrative of the guys playing in these private servers. For example:

"I'm sorry, we had to do it to protect our IP"

"Condescending assholes, how dare they!"

[Deleted]

They are LEGALLY REQUIRED to at least nominally defend their IP or risk losing the rights to it. It's that simple.

That is also not true. This case is about copyright, and you cannot lose your copyright. It's trademarks that require the owner to protect them.

[Spl4sh3r]

You vastly overestimate the ripple effect Nost has.

Even if we assume double Nost's account number quit, that's in the neighborhood of 300k.

Now let's just be mean and assume WoW has 4 million subscribers left right now.

That's about 7.5% of WoW's playerbase.

We lost more than that because WoD, the current era of the game, was bad.

You make it sound like WoW would lose subscripters. I believe it is a higher probability that the majority who are active on Nos aren't playing official WoW.

[Thelxi]

If it doesn't die down of course they will. But even if they do, what do you really expect to get from it other than masterful PR?

[towelliee]

Blizzard doesn't need to respond to any wrong doings as they did nothing wrong. Depends also on who you are asking to give a response? The CM team? The Dev team? Those workers had nothing to do with this. The amount of hate pointed towards individuals who work at Blizzard who have no say in these situations is disgusting. WoW devs getting hate when all they are doing is their jobs and working on the current WoW.

[Deleted]

Leaving aside that integration into battle.net isn't that simple, which is a big reason why they don't want to classic servers... i tried this in my head for my company:

We have a old product, we wanted to get rid off. It was buggy, hard to maintain and based on technology 15 years old. We made (based on the code of the old product) a new product and migrated our customers over to it. Some of them quit our services while this transistions, which is sad, but it didn't make any sense for us to support this old version.

Now if someone would get the hand on our old code and hands it out for free, we should integrate them into our company? give them full access to our internal management tool (which would be b.net in this case) and let them just do it? People who already STOLE from us?

wow...

No you shouldn't. But these people managed to do this in their FREE time, for FREE. They didn't get paid to do so. Imagine if these people, with the talent to maintain a classic vanilla server for 150k active users, worked for you and did all the "hard" work for you? They basically already did all the hard work for Blizzard the only thing they needed to do with cash in.

Most MMOs don't even hit 300k subscribers, these people manage to hit 150k. Sure, maybe you'd get 100k or even 80k active subscribers out of Nos, if more people knew about it, as said in various threads across the web, they might have played as well. So let's stick to 100k an even number for now. 100k active subscribers from code laying in your basement rotting away you'd get approx 1,3 million dollars a month EXTRA cash in subcribers. If these people could maintain these servers for what seems just donations and their free time, I'm sure Blizzard could maintain it as well.

This entire discussion comes down to a simple point. Imagine if all the games you grew up with and loved suddenly just disappeared. They can never be played again and their predecessors are numbed down versions of the game you once loved and played every day, suddenly these 4...nothings just made a working server and PROVED to Blizzard that their is a demand for these type of servers. Imagine if you could never play Warcraft 3 again, Starcraft 1 or Diablo 2, that be a pretty big hit in the nuts wouldn't it ?

[zorkuus]

Imagine if you could never play Warcraft 3 again, Starcraft 1 or Diablo 2, that be a pretty big hit in the nuts wouldn't it ?

Err... No??? Because I have a life? I would be like "meh whatcha gonna do"... and play other games.

Be a little less melodramatic next time, holy crap.

[Ciddy]

I think Blizzard wants to keep it as quiet as possible and just hope it'll eventually be forgotten. From what I've seen, pretty much any mention of Nostalrius on the official forums is getting heavily moderated and shut down quickly.

That said, considering the popularity of Nostalrius and the amount of rage over its shutdown, there might be a blue post. But it'll probably be a fairly generic "They did something we didn't like, so we shut it down, any other private servers will meet the same fate. End of discussion."

At any rate, Blizzard has no obligation to make a statement about it.

[Akka]

Err... No??? Because I have a life? I would be like "meh whatcha gonna do"... and play other games.

Be a little less melodramatic next time, holy crap.

Say the guy who spend his whole day writing crap on a Blizzard-related forum :lol:

[Deleted]

WoW has a estimated 2 million Asian players, 1.2 million American players and 800.000 players in Europe. With those numbers in mind its pretty clear that Blizzard was shitting in their pants when they noticed a single private vanilla server having 300K active players and fastly growing while retail WoW is declining.

Putting out a statement would be admitting that they screwed up with WoD.

[zorkuus]

WoW has a estimated 2 million Asian players, 1.2 million American players and 800.000 players in Europe. With those numbers in mind its pretty clear that Blizzard was shitting in their pants when they noticed a single private vanilla server having 300K active players and fastly growing while retail WoW is declining.

Putting out a statement would be admitting that they screwed up with WoD.

Nice try, it was 150k active players. You guys just can't help it can you? The desperation is real.

[Thetruth1400]

At most it's going to be some half hearted bullshit excuse like, "This was done because someone was stealing our intellectual property only. We love and care for our players, and hope that they continue to enjoy our products through us, where the product can and always will maintain it's integrity and always meets our high standards." yadda, yadda, yadda.

I truly and honestly believe that they fear Vanilla servers because if they become popular, Blizzard will have no choice but to come out and say that their changes over the years were mostly shitty, and that they as a company have clearly lost touch with the community. It's clear they have lost touch with the community though, because when they make a change that players say is bad but they feel is good, it's always, "Well, we can't listen to the vocal minority." but when they make a change like buttgate it's immediately, "Well, we got feedback from our customers and we think they have some valid concerns." Basically, they use the community when it benefits them, but overall they don't give a damn about what the community says.

This entire discussion comes down to a simple point. Imagine if all the games you grew up with and loved suddenly just disappeared. They can never be played again and their predecessors are numbed down versions of the game you once loved and played every day, suddenly these 4...nothings just made a working server and PROVED to Blizzard that their is a demand for these type of servers. Imagine if you could never play Warcraft 3 again, Starcraft 1 or Diablo 2, that be a pretty big hit in the nuts wouldn't it ?

That's pretty much how I look at it too. If every time you bought a game they required you to send back the previous version of it, things would never advance. That's kind of what Blizzard is doing here. I get it that an MMO is a bit different than a disc based game, but at the end of the day, is it really? Is there a reason that Vanilla servers can't exist? If a brand new person comes along, don't they deserve to see the content as it was, not as the shell it has become?