Nostalrius team meets with Bilzzard's top guys to bring WoW legacy servers to life

A selection of senior Blizzard and World of Warcraft employees has met with the team behind Nostalrius, a legacy server for World of Warcraft that was one of the game's biggest private servers until it was shut down by Blizzard on April 10, 2016.

However you choose to look at the events that led to the closing of the two servers (onePvP, one PvE) that around 150,000 active players called home - this Change.org Nostalrius petition against the closure has over 260,000 signatures - nobody expected this story to culminate in the team being invited to Blizzard for a meeting with Mike Morhaime (Blizzard CEO), J. Allen Brack (WoW's Executive Producer) Marco Koegler (Technical Director) and Tom Chilton (Game Director).

It's been just a little over two months since Blizzard's legal team brought the wrath of… well, an angry legal team down on their heads and now they've been invited to a five hour meeting and talked about their feelings on the event afterwards on the Nostalrius forum.

In short, the meeting has revealed that Blizzard are after legacy servers of their own and that they do have the source code for vanilla flavoured World of Warcraft, but they may not have all the other elements of a build like the 3D models, maps and data. A failing in the version control system meant that not all of this information was available, and the maps have slowly changed over time, with a complete re-imagining changing up everything in the Cataclysm expansion.

Anything the team doesn't already have is going to have to be recreated from the ground up, and Nostalrius's team has noted in its forum post that anything released by Blizzard needs to be very polished before it reaches the public, which could add to the mountain of work they'd need to undertake to get the servers ready to launch.

The Nostalrius team wrote, 'the downside is the technical difficulty it will take to reach our objective. Blizzard is now well aware of the amount of players willing to play legacy servers, something which wasn't the case until Nostalrius shutdown [sic].' So, perhaps vanilla WoW legacy servers could be coming back. We'll find out if Blizzard has more to say about it in the coming weeks.