[Updated] Petition for Legacy World of Warcraft Servers Passes 230k

Published: April 16, 2016 3:20 PM /

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World of Warcraft Classic

Update: As of 11:30 AM EST on April 26th, 2016 – the petition for Legacy World of Warcraft servers has now reached over 235,000 signatures.

Original Article:

World of Warcraft, the highly popular Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game created by Blizzard Entertainment has been running for almost 12 years, with over 100 million accounts being registered as of January 2014. Since its release, World of Warcraft has had six expansions that changed numerous locales as well as adding new places and stories for players to experience. 

While expansions are welcomed by all, there's always a major factor of nostalgia for players who experienced the original iterations of a game, as they look back on things used to be. This has caused many veteran players to request official servers that purely run what is called "Vanilla WoW", so that they can go back to the days where the max level was 60 and raids required a full group of forty people to complete. Now, after the shutdown of a privately run "Vanilla WoW" server by the name of Nostalrius, players are signing a petition for Blizzard to create servers that will run the original iterations of the game.

According to the petition, Nostalrius had over 800,000 accounts registered and 150,000 active players on their international server that allowed players to experience the "original progression [Blizzard] created throughout patches and content release" again. Before they were ordered to shut down all activities, they were even slated to release the Ahn Qiraj raid on the server.

In the petition, the creators of the Nostalrius server explained how they ran the server with a team of volunteers - seeking to recreate many of the processes that Blizzard itself has running on their own servers such as Game Masters, Software Validation, and more. Acknowledging that Blizzard may have already planned out what they could do to bring "Vanilla" servers to their players, the Nostalrius Begins team offered their assistance if they could help in any way:

We never saw our community as a threat for Blizzard. It sounds more like a transverse place where players can continue to enjoy old World of Warcraft's games no longer available, maybe until a new expansion appears; a huge and powerful community of fans that remains attached to future Blizzard games, as we have in no other gaming company.
We don’t have the pretention to come up with a complete solution regarding legacy servers that you and your company didn't already think about, but we'd be glad and honored to share it with you if you're interested, still on a volunteer basis.

At the time of this writing, the petition is at about 112,000 signatures of its 150,000 signature goal. With widespread support from the gaming community, YouTubers, and even veteran World of Warcraft developer Mark Kern, there is definitely a large community that wants to make legacy servers a reality. The question is whether or not Blizzard feels that it's something that they want to bring to their players.

You can read more about the petition for Legacy World of Warcraft Servers here!

What do you think of this petition? Are you a current or former World of Warcraft player that would pay to play on legacy servers? Share Your thoughts in the comments below!

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Rutledge Daugette
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Rutledge Daugette is the Guides Editor & Founder of TechRaptor. Rutledge's degree in Game Programming ultimately led him to found the site in 2013, with… More about Rutledge