Fans take classic World of Warcraft server offline on behalf of Blizzard

The Nostalrius servers, which kept the original version of World of Warcraft playable for gamers, have been taken offline. The fans who maintained the servers did so after Blizzard’s lawyers demanded that the plug be pulled.

The Nostalrius servers were running World of Warcraft version 1.12, the last version of the game before the first expansion came out. As a result, the game also did not contain any of the content from the many expansions that came out later for the game. Nostalrius has been around for about a year, but will be taken offline on April 10 by order of Blizzard. The company believes that there is an infringement of its copyrights.

The World of Warcraft version had 800,000 registered players, of which 150,000 were actively playing the game. Before it became known that Blizzard wanted the servers offline, the team behind Nostalrius, Nostalrius Begins, was developing the Ahn’Qiraj raid. In this version of the raid it is possible for forty players to go to battle together in a dungeon.

The team behind the servers has decided to make the source code and anonymized player data freely available soon, so that the community can determine “what the future of Nostalrius looks like.” Presumably, the developers hope that the initiative will continue as a result. In a petition to Blizzard, they ask the company to allow the servers anyway and to make it possible for volunteers like themselves to maintain so-called ‘legacy’ servers. The petition has collected 21,000 signatures at the time of writing.