Blizzard is finally speaking to the community weeks after shutting down popular vanilla World of Warcraft server Nostalrius. J. Allen Brack took to Battle Net to open up to the community some of the thoughts the team has had since the closing of the server.
First, he talked about why Blizzard had to close Nostalrius...
"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."
Then he discussed why there are not already classic servers in place. In short, the reason was not because "you think you want it, but you don't," as opposed to "it's hard for us to do."
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.
Is that true? Undoubtedly Blizzard would need a couple people on staff to handle bug fixes and such, but what people want is a vanilla game. They don't want (what I'm taking from this) the Blizzardification of bringing vanilla WoW to be as profitable as current WoW. They did hint at the possibility of a legacy mode, however...
Over the years we have talked about a “pristine realm”. In essence that would turn off all leveling 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.
They ended the letter saying they were still in conversation with the servers of Nostalrius, but who knows what or if that means anything for the community.
