You may have read about Blizzard sending a cease & desist letter to owners of the legacy World of Warcraft server, Nostalrius Begins. If you haven’t, here’s a very fast breakdown of the situation: Thirty volunteers host an international legacy server for World of Warcraft which lasts roughly one year, Blizzard send them a letter telling them to close the whole thing down.
Here’s where things start to get interesting: Mark Kern, former team lead of the World of Warcraft team, has jumped on board with the petition. In addition to his support, he has also offered to deliver the petition to Mike Morhaime (president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment) if the petition reaches 200,000 signatures.
Kern has written a post on the website that hosts the petition, pleading to Morhaime to revoke the cease & desist. Kern included a number of suggestions that he thinks may help the situation:
“1) You say you lost the original source for vanilla, so use Nostralus’ version.
2) Hire the team that did it and let them run/support the service under the Blizzard banner.
3) Add cloud based support so people can spin up private legacy servers on Bnet, chose an expansion, and play with their friends.
4) Profit. :)”
Blizzard have watched World of Warcraft’s subscriber numbers drop year after year, perhaps this is what they need to spark an interest in the series. Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
