World Of Warcraft Vanilla Server Petition Surpasses 150,000 Signatures
Posted on April 18, 2016, 2:20 am By
World of Warcraft


There has been a dedicated audience of gamers who enjoy playing on the private vanilla servers for World of Warcraft. In fact, more than 800,000 players registered to play on the Nostalrius servers to rekindle those fond memories of the vanilla version of the game before all the expansions were added.

TechRaptor is reporting that the petition to bring back a vanilla server for World of Warcraft has surpassed 150,000 signatures. You can check it out on the main page over on Change.org.

The Nostalrius server was home to a regular amount of 150,000 active accounts. That’s a very sizable amount of regular and active players. A lot of free-to-play MMOs wish they had that many active players.

Nevertheless, Blizzard shut down the private server, Nostalrius. They ended up on the receiving end of some DDoS attacks for their efforts.

Nevertheless, the volunteers and players signed the petition asking Blizzard to return a vanilla server to World of Warcraft. It spread enough that it became an operation by the League for Gamers, a pro-consumer advocacy group headed up by Mark Kern, a developer who once worked on World of Warcraft.

Captain_Hat on Twitter

Please take a moment to check out this petition. #tech #Blizzard #WorldOfWarcraft #gaming #gamers #gamedev #indiedevhttps://ln.is/www.change.org/p/5TZqr …

The petition is to get Blizzard to either allow certain legacy servers or potentially make an official one. Blizzard originally stated that fans asking for it think they want it but they don’t, but that response didn’t sit well with the 800,000 registered players of Nostalrius, nor the 150,000 active players.

Even ESL commentator James Kaelaris chimed in on the matter, tweeting out the following.

KAELARIS on Twitter

I never played the server because of the moral implications… but I would so love to play a legacy server for WoWhttps://www.change.org/p/mike-morhaime-legacy-server-among-world-of-warcraft-community?recruiter=522873458&lang=en-GB …

A lot of gamers are hoping that Blizzard will respond to the hundreds of thousands of gamers interested in playing vanilla World of Warcraft, and that hopefully the company’s only response isn’t made when under attack from groups like the Lizard Squad.

The entire thing has been vexing to standard gamers who just wanted to play vanilla WoW, but if Blizzard’s stance truly is that they won’t provide servers for gamers who want it, I wouldn’t be surprised if the subscriber base dropped from 5.5 million down to 4.5 million in the next quarterly report.

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18 comments Categories: Industry, News, PC Tags: , , ,
  • Ghost

    I was hoping you would do an article on this issue. To me this is really about hiding their shame. Nostalrius was a constant reminder of their failures. People don’t want what modern Blizzard is selling and that’s because it’s all garbage. Playing modern WoW is like having a clown dress up as your deceased dad and pretend to be him. Sure he’s wearing the same clothes, but it’s not at all the same thing and it’s wildly disturbing.

    • Gerg Arata

      The thing i constantly heard was “BC was better” . I never got a chance to play during BC… but people spoke of it so fondly

      • Ghost

        BC added awesome content but WoW was still WoW. Nothing had inherently changed, it was just the addition of new content. BC maintained what was awesome about vanilla WoW. Wotlk is where we started seeing serious changes to the core of the game. I loved questing in Wotlk, but it was at the same time the beginning of the end of what Vanilla had created.

      • DizzyGear

        Back in the day there was allot of grumbling and “WoW is ruined” about TBC when it was released.
        Personally I loved the improvements. It really showed that the team had learned allot since Vanilla.

        Wrath did fix allot of long standing QoL issues like ditching reagents, blinding powder, arrows, etc that I found very welcoming. But of course some people called it dumbing down. These people probably did not play rogues, hunters and priests. lol

        Hence why take the current moaning about modern WoW with a grain of salt. I kinda wanna check out modern day WoW out myself to see if the complaints are valid but the subbing fee + x-pac prize keep me from it.

        But one major change in late TBC I had mixed feelings about was the cross realm dungeon finder. On one hand it was a blessing for low pop realms and finding groups for the less popular instances. On the other hand it ruined the community feeling on a realm. Ninja looting and being an asshole in groups was a good way to get shitlisted on a realm but after the change the attitude of people got worse because you’d rarely run into the same people again.

      • Wrath was the first step in the wrong direction.
        It essentially scrapped CC and group challenge in favour of accessibility and aoe (shiny numbers)

        It’s gotten WAY worse since.
        With Cata they increased 5man heroic difficulty at launch, but people were lazy and used to instant gratification. The complaints were loud and the nerfs quick.
        From there it’s just been a decline into dumbing things down to serve a “casual” audience that only exists in the heads of businessmen and people with no time/will to PLAY an MMO.
        They think that “casual” means inept.

        A lot of the QoL changes have been great (I don’t even mourn talent trees) some have been daft (streamlining loot means no real thinking about upgrades. It’s mostly obvious and you don’t really need to care about balancing your gear or strategising… I miss avoidance cap, basically)

        The problem with LFG was only *partly* to do with community. The problem is that they need to fuel that apparatus, and when certain roles are difficult, the queues become unmanageable. They had to make those roles easier to more players could perform them to make the system more painless to use.

        Obviously the focus put on accessibility also removes the INCENTIVE for players to join communities that may involve abiding by rules and meeting attendance requirements.

        Blizz pretty much designed themselves into a corner by trying to serve a “casual playerbase” that may not exist, at least the way they think it does.

      • C G Saturation

        Sounds like ass.

      • The actual BOSS encounters are as fantastic as ever, it’s just the ENTIRE rest of the game. Basically, the whole game is dumbed down, then you get to endgame raiding and the difficulty spikes so high that most of the player base cant take it.

      • DizzyGear

        The AOE spamfests in Wrath were awful indeed and made instances really boring. TBC instances were not perfect but they at least required some careful planning.

        Shame to hear nothing has changed.

        It does not really surprise me they ended up ditching talent trees. They idea is great on paper but in practice nearly everyone ran with the same cookie cutter builds. This was a thorn in Blizzards eye as far back as the TBC.

        I do understand they wanted to avoid another situation like Naxxramas that only a very small percentage of players stepped foot in at the end of Vanilla but it seems they went too far.

      • Pretty much.
        The raids are still good, but everything outside of that is not up to snuff (getting people to do ANYTHING outside of progress raiding is tough, and getting people to STICK with progress for significant lengths is tough too.
        The attrition is worse now than ever, and I’ve jokes about our raid turnover for years (this tier we picked up, and lost, 20 players minimum, probably nearer 30. The next offtank we pick up with be my 16th partner since Ulduar, not counting off spec helpers)

        The talent system now is better imo.
        Still plenty of “cookie cutter” but there are significant choices that effect playstyle.

        Their major mistake was fixing the problems with accessibility…. like 3 times over. Amusingly, they still left in a barrier for new players (the “legendary ring” is kinda mandatory to be competitive, and can take months to get)
        Attunement chains were bullshit. Attunement quests WOULD be fine, if they were independent. A barrier to entry HELPS things.
        The rep grind was a pain… to do on alts! Nobody minded doing it their first time, because it was none trivial content that rewarded you with what you needed to start raiding. Just making it account wide unlocks would have fixed THAT problem.
        Lastly, catchup gearing. It could be a RIGHT pain. Now there are MULTIPLE ways to catch up on gear (except the dumb legendary ring)

        The problems seems to always be that blizzard doesn’t know how to reward player loyalty without also punishing late adopters.
        The stupid thing is, it actually punishes the loyal raiders, because it forces us to carry undergeared people in the hopes they don’t quit when they’re caught up. Back in the day you could at least be useful (I started in my current guild healing BT in t4 okay healing isn’t the most gear reliant, but dps now can get 20-30%~ of their dps from their ring)

      • scemar

        Overall, the best point of world of warcraft was between vanilla and TBC.

        Vanilla had better content.

        TBC brought great changes to all classes and specs and itemization, that was all around great.

        But TBC’s PVE endgame was not as smooth as Vanilla’s. It lacked the same level of quests fun and depth, the same sort of progression stages, it lacked the fun of big instances like BRD or UBRS that filled a good gap, and the endgame progression wasn’t as nice either.
        And the PVP experiment with arenas was a disaster that led to a wave of sweeping buffs and nerfs and changes to all classes that destroyed all the things that made the game fun in PVP.

  • C G Saturation

    I will be amazed if Blizzard gives a damn. They’re probably raging hard that mere peons dare to not want to play their current World of Warcraft.

    “Stupid people! They’re too stupid to appreciate my game design genius! They should all stay on our shitty servers so my girlfriend whose race and class I buffed ten thousand times can singlehandedly kill everyone in the universe without having any mana!! Or else I won’t get laid tonight! Damn them!”

    • The subscriber numbers is embarrassing. It doesn’t matter how old the game is, League of Legends is maintaining a strong player base, along with games like Runescape. The age of the software has little to do with people having fun through the provided platforms.

      The fact that Nostalrius had nearly a million registered users in under a year speaks volumes to Blizzard’s missteps with providing the people with what they want. I don’t think they’re going to respond unless another DDoS attack takes place, sad as that kind of scenario may be.

      • C G Saturation

        Maybe they’ll start blaming the lack of subscribers on GamerGate’s Organized Hate Squads ™.

      • Ghost

        That would go in line with ButtGate.

  • Gerg Arata

    I don’t understand… if people are paying / paying what’s the big deal?

    • Well Nostalrius was a free private server funded by the people who played on it. Blizzard, I suppose, saw it as a threat and had it shut down.

      The real issue is that you’ve got hundreds of thousands of gamers willing to pay to play the old vanilla game and Blizzard denying them that opportunity. There’s really no positive spin to put on it in Blizzard’s favor.

      • Gerg Arata

        gotcha

  • scemar

    Well, if this doesn’t make them reconsider their stance on vanilla wow, nothing will. The momentum seems very big and it’s their chance to react to it.

    They could offer it themselves, their own classic servers, but if they don’t see it as a viable business or as they say “people think they want it but don’t” they could always test that hypothesis by letting the unofficial servers do their thing and seeing how that goes. Work with them, not against them.

    They really got nothing tangible to lose at all from experimenting and in fact could gain a lot from taking any smarter option available. They could get a new business model, and profits, or at least some valuable information and feedback, and don’t underestimate the fact that they’d make their fans happy and that matters too.

    If blizzard refuses to change its current stance, they are stupid, there’s no other way around it.

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