Team Behind Unauthorized WoW Server That Was Closed to Meet With Blizzard

The administrators behind Nostalrius, an unauthorized World of Warcraft server running a vanilla version of the PC MMO that Blizzard recently shut down, will meet with the game developer at its headquarters. This was announced today, May 1, in the Nostralrius forums.

"The last few weeks have been full of exciting events that we did not anticipate," administrator Daemon said.

The administrators of the server are currently in the process of scheduling a meeting with Blizzard to be held at the developer's Irvine, California office. However, there was no mention made regarding when this meeting will take place or who from Blizzard will be in attendance.

One possible candidate is community manager J. Allen Brack. He was the one who broke Blizzard's silence on the closure of Nostralrius, which was done with a cease and desist order. He explained last week that the closure was necessary to "protect against intellectual property infringement" that would damage Blizzard's rights.

In the new statement today, Daemon said the team is looking forward to speaking with Blizzard to discuss how it might one day be possible to play older versions of World of Warcraft.

"We are very excited to be able to help Blizzard understand the part of their community asking for legacy servers and many other related topics, in the hope that they will eventually make it possible to legally play previous game expansions," Daemon said.

The post also mentions that the Nostralrius team will not release the game's source code and database as part of its discussions with Blizzard.

"Keeping the sources private could be useful at some point during the discussion with Blizzard," Daemon said. "They proposed to discuss together and we want to have all the chances on our side, for the community we represent now.

"Furthermore, if official legacy servers were to be released at some point in the future, the emulation would become, in essence, obsolete for our community."

You can read the full Nostralrius statement here.

For its part, Blizzard has said it is discussing the potential to offer "classic" or "pristine" servers, though no announcements have been made at this stage. "From active internal team discussions to after-hours meetings with leadership, this subject has been highly debated," Brack said in his statement.

In April, the Nostalrius team said lawyers ordered their hosting company to cease and desist on behalf of Blizzard, and that they had less than a week to take the servers offline. In response the Nostalrius Begins PVP, Nostalrius Begins PVE, Nostalrius TBC servers were shut down.

Nostalrius was active for around a year and developed a community of 150,000 active players. A petition has been created asking Blizzard to support legacy servers in the World of Warcraft community.

World of Warcraft will receive a new expansion this year called Legion. Additionally, a movie based on the game is set for release in June.