Playing World of Warcraft when it was still fresh – hearing that original log-in music, choosing a character based on Warcraft’s original races and classes, grinding out your mid-teens in The Barrens – none of this will sound special to you unless you were there. Playing through vanilla WoW was an experience the likes of which we may never know again. There’s something magic about the game as it used to be, and there are tens of thousands who feel the same way. In fact, a huge team of volunteers got together to recreate that vanilla WoW experience through a privately run server called Nostalrius.
Nostalrius was a haven for 150,000 active users who were all after that timeless, original experience, and the team running the show was incredibly dedicated. They went the extra mile to make sure that players could enjoy everything that made the original game so great, even going so far as to train Game Masters (customer service) and hunt down gold sellers.
It seems Activision Blizzard isn’t so fond of the project, though, and issued a formal letter asking the team to shut Nostalrius down or face legal consequences. As a result, the server will go down on April 10. The team has composed a passionate petition on change.org that you can check out (I signed it), with hopes that some kind of arrangement can be worked out. If nothing else, maybe ActiBlizzard will host its own legacy server ( don’t hold your breath – people have been begging for one for years – ed. ). At this point that’s the only thing that would bring me back to official WoW servers. May it be.
Source: PC Gamer