To the WoW Legacy fans, and Nostalrius community
Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2017 3:16 pmDear community,
In our last major announcement, we shared our plan to honor our core values and reunite the Legacy WoW community once again. As we explained, the goal was to relieve pressure on Blizzard by providing a home for vanilla WoW in order to lower tensions and begin building a WoW community that includes Legacy WoW players.
However, when looking back to what happened, we have the feeling that the main objective was missed.
The following values that have always been at the heart of any of our actions:
Almost 300.000 people supported this with the petition we initiated on change.org last year. Some were former Nostalrius players, others never played on private servers.
Today, only 10% of the former Nostalrius players have generated a token to join Elysium, and we believe that we failed to satisfy this community entirely, as at the same time legacy fans acquired a reputation of “pirates” on the official WoW community.
Contrary to our expectations, our decision to release our source code and character database to Elysium actually made our 2 goals harder to achieve, implying a thought decision to make.
So what is the plan now?
We have already demonstrated that there is a true desire for Legacy WoW content, and players in need for a home. Only a few people deny the viability of legacy content. You have been an amazing community demonstrating this to the world, this step is as a consequence achieved.
Now we need to continue convincing the World of Warcraft community that it would bring continued value to the entirety of World of Warcraft, something we missed to achieve so far because of our last announcement. We know that Nostalrius carries the hopes of the legacy community but moving from “fan server” to "pirate server" reputation makes it harder to convince that legacy fans have a place on the WoW community. Until this stigma is removed, it's unlikely any true progress towards official legacy content can be achieved.
Thus, we are asking you a tremendous sacrifice.
We ask Elysium to join this effort for Legacy realms by stopping to use data that we provided. We know they aim at official legacy realms as we do. We have already stopped the account transfer process from our side as a first step. Nostalrius community is no longer about private servers, it is about official legacy realms.
We will also require your help. You are a massive community and you already got heard. Now you got to explain and convince.
We saw YouTubers such as Sodapoppin, JonTron, Nixxiom, TheLazyPeon, AtheneWins, BellularGaming, Swifty and many others making wonderful videos to present Vanilla WoW to the whole community, explaining the lore, the gameplay, their memories there. We also saw the original WoW team lead, Mark Kern, join our cause.
For us, Legacy fans can still be part of a broader and stronger WoW community. The original versions of WoW deserve preservation and there should be an opportunity for veterans and newcomers alike to experience the game in it's original forms. World of Warcraft is as important to the larger gaming community as some of the most iconic video games in history, like Mario or Zelda, and the versions of the game that originally created that significance should be able to be experienced by anyone at anytime.
From our side, we keep on working on multiple ideas which may go in the right direction.
We want to apologize to the former Nostalrius players who transferred their account. We understand that our decision to ask Elysium to stop using our data might bring you pain.
Our community has always been the center of our actions, and we still need to find the proper solution to please WoW community as a whole.
Best Regards,
Nostalrius.
In our last major announcement, we shared our plan to honor our core values and reunite the Legacy WoW community once again. As we explained, the goal was to relieve pressure on Blizzard by providing a home for vanilla WoW in order to lower tensions and begin building a WoW community that includes Legacy WoW players.
However, when looking back to what happened, we have the feeling that the main objective was missed.
The following values that have always been at the heart of any of our actions:
- Achieving official Blizzard Legacy servers
- Helping as much as we can to unify the WoW community together
Almost 300.000 people supported this with the petition we initiated on change.org last year. Some were former Nostalrius players, others never played on private servers.
Today, only 10% of the former Nostalrius players have generated a token to join Elysium, and we believe that we failed to satisfy this community entirely, as at the same time legacy fans acquired a reputation of “pirates” on the official WoW community.
Contrary to our expectations, our decision to release our source code and character database to Elysium actually made our 2 goals harder to achieve, implying a thought decision to make.
So what is the plan now?
We have already demonstrated that there is a true desire for Legacy WoW content, and players in need for a home. Only a few people deny the viability of legacy content. You have been an amazing community demonstrating this to the world, this step is as a consequence achieved.
Now we need to continue convincing the World of Warcraft community that it would bring continued value to the entirety of World of Warcraft, something we missed to achieve so far because of our last announcement. We know that Nostalrius carries the hopes of the legacy community but moving from “fan server” to "pirate server" reputation makes it harder to convince that legacy fans have a place on the WoW community. Until this stigma is removed, it's unlikely any true progress towards official legacy content can be achieved.
Thus, we are asking you a tremendous sacrifice.
We ask Elysium to join this effort for Legacy realms by stopping to use data that we provided. We know they aim at official legacy realms as we do. We have already stopped the account transfer process from our side as a first step. Nostalrius community is no longer about private servers, it is about official legacy realms.
We will also require your help. You are a massive community and you already got heard. Now you got to explain and convince.
We saw YouTubers such as Sodapoppin, JonTron, Nixxiom, TheLazyPeon, AtheneWins, BellularGaming, Swifty and many others making wonderful videos to present Vanilla WoW to the whole community, explaining the lore, the gameplay, their memories there. We also saw the original WoW team lead, Mark Kern, join our cause.
For us, Legacy fans can still be part of a broader and stronger WoW community. The original versions of WoW deserve preservation and there should be an opportunity for veterans and newcomers alike to experience the game in it's original forms. World of Warcraft is as important to the larger gaming community as some of the most iconic video games in history, like Mario or Zelda, and the versions of the game that originally created that significance should be able to be experienced by anyone at anytime.
From our side, we keep on working on multiple ideas which may go in the right direction.
We want to apologize to the former Nostalrius players who transferred their account. We understand that our decision to ask Elysium to stop using our data might bring you pain.
Our community has always been the center of our actions, and we still need to find the proper solution to please WoW community as a whole.
Best Regards,
Nostalrius.