Looking Back At: Blizzard and Nostalrius

Looking Back At is going to be a sort of "series" of topics that I never got to give my input on since I did not have a blog at that given time, keep that in mind when you read this series' posts.

I'm just gonna put it out there right now, this post is gonna revolve around the "beating of a dead horse" subject. If you've already heard/read enough about this subject, then go ahead and ignore this post.

My reason for making this post is that I wanted to share my own two cents on the subject and the thing that made me wanna share these two cents was JonTron's video (so forgive me now if I unintentionally quote him by mistake), also the fact that I used to be a huge Blizzard fanboy back in the day (no, I'm not talking about what went down between Blizzard and Nostalrius, I stopped being a fanboy when I found out that Blizzard stopped giving a crap about ever making a WarCraft VI). Now I would have made this post earlier if not for the fact that this went down way before I even created this blog - by about 4 months, give or take - so that's why I'm "beating the dead horse here".

So without further ado:

Before reading on, keep in mind that I've never really been that much into World of Warcraft and I'm blogging about this situation from a purely business related standpoint.

World of Warcraft and Blizzard

To start with, here's a quick little rundown of all World of Warcraft's expansions plus the original (vanilla):

• Vanilla (November 23, 2004)
• The Burning Crusade (January 16, 2007)
• Wrath of the Lich King (November 13, 2008)
• Cataclysm (December, 2010)
• Mists of Pandaria (September 25, 2012)
• Warlords of Draenor (November 13. 2014)
• Legion (August 30, 2016)

From what I've gathered, things have started going south ever since the inclusion of Cataclysm as shown by this graph over WoW's subscriber count (take it with a grain of salt as far as the absolute numbers go, but it shows atleast a clear trend):

Supposedly, Blizzard doesn't even report their subscriber count anymore...

So now that we know what Blizzard and World of Warcraft are about, let's talk about Nostalrius.

Nostalrius and World of Warcraft

Nostalrius was the name of a server and community that hosted the original Vanilla version of the game, it was a "private" server which - as far as my knowledge goes - wasn't in any way regulated or endorsed by Blizzard. As such, this (and several - if not all - private servers) are seen as illegal to a certain degree. Either way you look at this, from a legal standpoint, keep in mind that I'm not a lawyer, Nostalrius clearly broke certain paragraphs of copyright law. This means that whichever way you try to look at this, from that standpoint, Blizzard are in their full rights to do whatever they want with their IP (here having the meaning of Intellectual Property) i.e shutting down Nostalrius for infringement of copyright law, among other things.

Blizzards dickmove

The thing that alot of people and myself doesn't really understand is why Blizzard would be such a bitch about this, considering that they weren't accepting any form of donations, they didn't have any form of a subscription based system, they were sacrificing their own time to host a server for those who would've liked WoW to stay in its Vanilla form, of course, this doesn't excuse its illegal nature. Personally, I thought they did this because they were putting up a legacy server with Vanilla for people who would've liked to play that version... but if you look at JonTron's video, there's one section where he puts a video on where there's one fan who straight out asks that from one of Blizzards staff from a con, or something of the likes, where the guy that answers straight out says "No, and you don't want that either..." (plus alot of stammer)..........

Small personal rant

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME BLIZZARD!!!???

You fucking thickheaded pompous shitstains!! These are your fans, your fucking core goddamn demoraphic telling you what they want!! And you're gonna completely disregard that fact and be all like "You think you want that, but you really don't, you want to play our new expansion because we put alot of time into it without listening to our fans and as such, we can feel that we actually did something worthwhile with our time.."-shit!?

Personal thoughts

Alright... time to cool my tits... look, I can sorta guess why they dismissed this question, probably because the time, staff and money needed to keep up several servers with several different versions of the game would be huge, okay yes I get that, but I would therefore like to ask the question: why aren't you directly supervising e.g this server or just straight up buying the server and it's staff for your own? Personally, this seems as such a huge waste of potential, these people mange to script together everything from Vanilla and I can only imagine what a huge undertaking that must've been, so these people probably know what they're doing.

Conclusion

I would just like to end this by clarifying a few things, of course I understand that Blizzard is a huge company and WoW is their own IP, ergo, they're in their full legal right and they can do whatever they want with it, but what I don't get is why they neglect seeing the bigger picture here... there's clearly a big demand for legacy servers and as I stated above, I've full understanding that even though Blizzard are a huge company they still don't have the resources to keep that many servers up and running in order to please everyone. But it was just unnecessary to issue a formal letter to a bunch of people who had a non-profit, love-of-the-game server running and were capable of maintaining it, as they could've outright bought the already finished scripted server and all of it's staff. (The following are pure speculation) While maybe not all of the people who were playing on Nostalrius would migrate over to a subscription based system - and many would probably bitch about it - many would still accept it sooner or later and any and all cost of that merger/purchase would be covered in probably a year.

This has been the ramblings of an average gamer.

Remember to stay awesome, TAG signing out!