World of Warcraft is probably the biggest videogame ever created with millions of fans worldwide. Even if you are like me and have never played it, you still know how big the game is. Some of World of Warcraft's millions of fans don't want to play the game with any expansions, they want to play the game like it was back in the day when they started.
When World of Warcraft started getting expansions there were fans who still wanted the 'vanilla' experience they paid for, but could no longer access. That's when vanilla servers were created to let players experience the game like it was when it first came out without all the added features that made the game more casual and less hardcore.
Nostalrius was one of the biggest vanilla serves with PvP, PvE, and The Burning Crusade servers and many enjoyed playing on them. Blizzard was not enjoying that since the numbers of active paying players slowly but steadily dropped and the vanilla servers were private servers and the players didn't pay any subscription fees to Blizzard. So now they decided to shutdown one of the biggest servers.
The Nostalrius team are not going PvP Blizzard in court about this and they wrote "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 servers are going down by the end of the week "all related servers will be definitively shutdown at 23:00 server time on the 10th of April 2016, if our hosting company keeps the server online for that long."
With the server shutdown Nostalrius wrote an open letter to Blizzard to explain and show why the vanilla community exists and that all they wanted was to re-live the glory days of vanilla WoW. They are also urging the rest of their community to send this open letter to Blizzard. But if Blizzard really wanted a vanilla community then they could have created their own vanilla servers a long time ago, instead they are focusing on new updates and a Warcraft film. But who knows, maybe at BlizzCon 2016 they will address the vanilla community in some way.
So if you are a Nostalrius player you have until April 10 23:00 server time, this Sunday, to say goodbye to all of your server friends that you may never find again. After that, they will pull the plug on the servers.
