Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
We wanted to let you know that we’ve been closely following the Nostalrius discussion and we appreciate your constructive thoughts and suggestions.
Our silence on this subject definitely doesn’t reflect our level of engagement and passion around this topic. We hear you. Many of us across Blizzard and the WoW Dev team have been passionate players ever since classic WoW. In fact, I personally work at Blizzard because of my love for classic WoW.
We have been discussing classic servers for years - it’s a topic every BlizzCon - and especially over the past few weeks. From active internal team discussions to after-hours meetings with leadership, this subject has been highly debated. Some of our current thoughts:
Why not just let Nostalrius continue the way it was? The honest answer is, failure to protect against intellectual property infringement would damage Blizzard’s rights. This applies to anything that uses WoW’s IP, including unofficial servers. And while we’ve looked into the possibility – there is not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server.
We explored options for developing classic servers and none could be executed without great difficulty. If we could push a button and all of this would be created, we would. However, there are tremendous operational challenges to integrating classic servers, not to mention the ongoing support of multiple live versions for every aspect of WoW.
So what can we do to capture that nostalgia of when WoW first launched? Over the years we have talked about a “pristine realm”. In essence that would turn off all levelling acceleration including character transfers, heirloom gear, character boosts, Recruit-A-Friend bonuses, WoW Token, and access to cross realm zones, as well as group finder. We aren't sure whether this version of a clean slate is something that would appeal to the community and it’s still an open topic of discussion.
One other note - we’ve recently been in contact with some of the folks who operated Nostalrius. They obviously care deeply about the game, and we look forward to more conversations with them in the coming weeks.
You, the Blizzard community, are the most dedicated, passionate players out there. We thank you for your constructive thoughts and suggestions. We are listening.
J. Allen Brack
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...84206#new-post
It's ironic then, that the very same person that said: You think you do, but you Don't. is now posting a topic, in the official Forums about vanilla realms?
Listen to me, J. Allen Brack
Please do not confuse our dissatisfaction with how retail currently is with our love for classic WoW. This is important. We all want the retail version of the game to be great and enjoyable, the best it can be. If you want to take a look at the philosophy Blizzard built their games around 2005 and try to improve the retail version, then that is great.
But please, do not think that our love for classic WoW is a temporary thing because we currently dislike the retail version. The two are over ten years apart. They are completely different games. We want to play classic WoW, that is our only request. You've said that you would not provide it for us, so out of love for the game and the World of Warcraft community, some people have decided over the years to provide this game for us despite the hardships that come along with it.
There have been classic servers since forever, it's something that provides content almost indefinitely. This is mostly because classic servers were all about the community and the player driven content. If you release classic progression servers, there will definitely be content for years. Just have a talk with the devs at Nostalrius. The server had been up for over a year and we had not even started AQ war preparation. And the great thing about classic WoW is the fact that, even if you do complete all content - there is still a whole lot of things to do, since it's an open world with thousands of people in it.
The demand for these servers are unbelievable and we are all waiting to sell our houses and livers so that we can finally play on them.
The Vanilla communtiy has poked a lot of fun at Blizzard over the years, since we have felt that we've been ignored since Blizzard started to abandon some of the philosophies that we believe made the game truly great. We all want Blizzard to do great and we all want to feel welcome. Now, since we have been silenced in the past many WoW players have no idea how large the vanilla community actually is and I think it's fair to say that Blizzard have forgotten too.
Many people have been scared to 'split the community' by adding legacy servers, but the reality of the situation is this: we've been split ever since you abandoned the 2005 philosophies. But we've managed to do OK on our own, though many of us still subscribed to the retail game. Now, with Nostalrius shut down we just feel stepped on, thus the uproar lately.
We are not trying to steal your profits. We are your fans too. We have been waiting for years to be able to play legacy servers provided by Blizzard.
What we want is simple: Vanilla progressions servers, as they were back then. We don't want any modifications or 'improvements'. The only changes that are acceptable are stability and server capacity. Yes, some people might ask for X and Y to be changed - but that's nothing new. We had those few people on Nostalrius too. It's not difficult to say no and that this is will be servers as they were back then and nothing more.
We just want to go home, we just want Vanilla.