Nostalrius fans are flocking to the Kronos server after Blizzard Entertainment announced it would be shutting the vanilla World of Warcraft project down. But is Kronos safe from shutdown?
On Monday, Blizzard began the process of shutting down Nostalrius, a “vanilla” or legacy World of Warcraft server hosting 150,000 active players worldwide. According to an announcement posted on Nostalrius.org, the organization received notice of legal action by Blizzard Entertainment, makers of the WoW MMO.
“Yesterday, we received a letter of formal notice from US and French lawyers, acting on behalf of Blizzard Entertainment, preparing to stand trial against our hosting company OVH and ourselves in less than a week now. This means the de facto end of Nostalrius under its current form,” the post read.
While the creators of Nostalrius have no intentions of restarting the project elsewhere, they will release the project’s open-source code to the community for others to begin their own grassroots projects.
“Nostalrius will start being community-driven in the truest sense of the word, as we will be releasing the source code, and anonymized players data (encrypting personal account data), so the community as a whole will decide the form of the future of Nostalrius. We will still be there in the background if you want us to, but will no longer take the lead,” the creators wrote .
In addition, Nostalrius creators issued an open letter petition to Blizzard requesting once again that a legacy server be built. The petition is less than 24 hours old and has already received more than 24,000 signatures. But despite this plea from the WoW vanilla community, Blizzard remains firm in its decision not to create a legacy server.
“It is clear that there is a significantly sized portion of players who are nostalgic for the time represented by this server. While I admire their passion for the game, they’re forgetting some important facts,” the company wrote in a blog about the Nostalrius shut down. “World of Warcraft is the intellectual property of Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard created the game, Blizzard maintained the game and Blizzard brought us this world to enjoy. As such, nobody but Blizzard has the right to accept money to support World of Warcraft … While some may argue that the popularity of private servers such as this one indicate that Blizzard should consider opening legacy servers, Blizzard maintains that they have no interest in doing so.”
With 7 million active WoW players worldwide, 150,000 angry vanilla players is a drop in the bucket, especially when focusing energy on new content expansions, like the upcoming Legion, brings in millions more players each year.
Nonetheless, Nostalrius fans refuse to be thwarted by Blizzards’s plans to shut down the project April 10. Instead, they are flocking by the thousands to another Czech Republic-based vanilla server, Kronos.
While Kronos provides an immediate solution to the Nostalrius shut-down, fans still worry that the private Wow server may soon see similar repercussions if the user base grows too large. In a statement about vanilla WoW servers, Blizzard made it clear that it “does not condone private servers and will not support those who choose to infringe on Blizzard’s copyright of World of Warcraft .”
As we learn more about the future of Nostalrius after the shutdown, we’ll be sure to update.
