An Open Letter From <GRIZZLY>

[Grim]

To Eso and co... Best of luck! We had a lot of good moments while the server was still in its infancy, both pvp and pve wise. I'll never forget how the joint task force of Grizzly and Dreamstate, with a few helping hands on the side, managed to obliterate more then twice larger opposing alliance force on the server first night of Azuregos' appearance, and claim server first for the horde. Was just glorious

I've read everything you wrote and well.. I do have some opinions of my own on similar matters, but for obvious reasons I am going to refrain from discussing such here.

See ya on CC, u bunch of crazy yanks.

Peace

[Roddan]

Here we go again.. Another GRIZZLY Drama on another vanilla server.

Tip: stop make these posts. You're just making other people paranoid and confused about the server.

[Hvemklomater]

How does this even come as a surprise to anyone lol.

[Aklol]

To all the people that are saying "no one gives a fuck" or "who even are you" or something along those lines, maybe you should read the first paragraph again, or hell, the entire post, because clearly you didn't.

To those in support of our post: Thank you, and we wish better days to come for you on this server.

[aammiinn]

*Writers note: This was done at the request of a high-level GM after I told him we were no longer playing here. He asked me to send this to him via a PM on the forums so he could forward it to the entire staff (for what I’m assuming is a learning experience, considering the top guild on the server is leaving). I decided to post this here after getting some support from other current/former guilds on Nostalrius (you may see similar letters/stories/experiences posted here following this post).

Ok so I'm going to try to sum this up as best as possible (in chronological order for the most part). I'd like, for whoever ends up reading this, to keep in mind that any current existing bugs I talk about have most definitely been reported and not fixed (to the best of my knowledge).

The problems all started when a group of 5 of our players got banned for a week for spawning mobs while leveling (in Azshara) even though two other guilds were doing the same exact thing (with gorillas in STV) and they got a simple warning (one was before us, one was after us if I remember correctly).

The rest of the leveling process wasn’t all that bad. Our next major issue was in MC. We had multiple members grind their last few levels in Silithus to get their Hydraxian Waterlords rep up so we could use Aqual Quintessences in our first clear in order for us to finish off all of the raid in one sweep. Of course, we found that the Quintessences were not in the game. We were gated for a night, and we thankfully received our Quintessences the next day where we swept through Majordomo and Ragnaros with ease. But of course, more problems there. Ragnaros didn’t give loot. After a few days of waiting and unnecessary back and forth with GM’s, they gave us our loot.

Several days after our Ragnaros, we went in to Onyxia’s lair, where we got yet another server first, even though Alliance could literally auto-complete their attunement quest in BRD when you got to that point (nice scripting). And of course, yet another issue with loot, no drops. We got both of our T2 set pieces in the next couple of days and had to wait ~2 MONTHS to get our first off-piece. This even after we spent a considerable amount of time spent talking with GM’s about receiving it. I had to personally PM Daemon with a very demanding message to finally receive it. We also received an Onyxia’s Head, to which we were told right away not to use (even though we knew Alliance guilds had received one for their kills), but it was all eventually deleted from our respective inventories. As far as bugs go with Onyxia, she still doesn’t even fly into phase 2 or during phase 2. If she does it’s for a very short amount of time. We’ve also been deep breath’d on literally 30 seconds in to phase 3 (hello??).

There was one particular incident I wanted to point out that we had with <Exiled>. Basically, we caught <Exiled> outside of MC. If people don’t know this bug, now you do: You can die outside of an instance and run in with your ghost and respawn in, even if you died outside the instance. After ganking them previously and realizing what they were doing (they purposefully would drown themselves in a lake or die to us to be able to zone in and raid LOL), we came up with a new plan: Chain CC one or more of their members. One night, we got word they were going to MC, and we had people stationed on both sides of Blackrock Mountain. On the Burning Steppes side, we spotted Zetox. We had him sheeped, feared, MC’d, and all of that fun stuff for a very long time. He eventually got away and was ported to Stormwind, flew to Burning Steppes where he appeared in front of one of our members, and then quickly disappeared and appeared in Redridge, and then shortly after appeared in front of Spoh in MC (random locations confirmed by Imbaheals and MC port confirmed via stream, there were no warlocks around him and they didn’t use the summon exploit to get him in). We asked for clarification on it for a long time, and eventually was rewarded with something along the lines of “he was being harassed in game and a GM mistakenly decided to teleport him to MC as a result.” I’m sure this is definitely what happened. It was clear to us what really happened after seeing this on the forums: https://archive.is/GbRjG

One thing that should’ve been changed in Nostalrius’ original policy is character restoration. We lost multiple people to random deletions, including one officer who had our entire guild bank, which was full of herbs that included WAY more than any guild had at the time (hundreds of Black Lotus, thousands of Gromsblood/Dreamfoil/Mountain Silversage/etc.). We had planned specifically for herbing like mad men in the beginning of the server because we knew pubbies would level up soon after and it would be near impossible to herb (still actually impossible, can only get decent herbs by getting extremely lucky or teleport hacking around to herbs). We never really recovered from that loss. We have members in our guild that have worked on fairly high-population vanilla servers before, and they know just how easy it is to restore someone's character. Change it.

As far as Azuregos goes, the first overall problem was that he was ~1 month late according to your CONTINUING advertisement of progressive releasing of content. He was supposed to come along with Kazzak at the same time directly after the server first kills of Onyxia and Ragnaros. So we waited, and went to Azuregos, where we were fortunate enough to have a guildie tag it at the end for the killing blow. This after countless hours of ridiculous resetting of the boss, including health not regenning when it reset (thank God this was finally fixed just recently). We didn't care much about Kazzak (~2 months late according to Nostalrius’ progressive release schedule) because the loot in that "patch" was complete shit, but it had the same problem as Azuregos with not regenning health back when reset (as we were told by other guilds).

After all that, it was time for Dire Maul (nearly ~1.5 months late according to Nostalrius’ progressive release schedule). We tested the living shit out of every wing multiple times and submitted a very lengthy bug report. For the most part, it wasn’t all that poorly scripted, but it had some very dumb bugs. In DM West, the hunter/bear boss automatically aggros to you through ground (I'm pretty sure this happens STILL). Also in DM West, you literally can't even get to the Mindtap/Amplifying Cloak boss because the trash is completely unbalanced (you NEED a priest for shackles unless you pop a ton of consumables/cooldowns and get lucky).
With all of that done, we got another opportunity to test more content on the test realm. This time for Alterac Valley. Our first experience with testing was logging on and having everyone queue up and be put in completely separate battlegrounds. This was fun. They forgot to turn off debug mode. Thankfully, they eventually fixed that and we had random members go in and test with alliance friends as well as a scheduled game with <Exiled> where we polished off our final bugs and tested out a complete stomp victory.
Everything that has been said above altogether completely demoralized our guild. Some quit, most stuck around and raid logged. We even started a guild on a WOTLK server because we thought it would help morale here on Nostalrius. That said, we decided to have a big guild meeting the night before AV release. The officers told the mumble full of our players to buckle up and start concentrating more on this server so we could be prepared for BWL. We pumped players up. Many were stoked for AV release and BWL in two weeks following on the PTR.

There's all of that above, and then straw met camel’s back.

This past Saturday- Alterac Valley’s release (I lost count on how many months late this was according to Nostalrius’ progressive content release schedule). What a fucking disaster. Bugs all over the place (hello thousands of archers spawning in a spot one shotting people), most of which was reported on the PTR (if not by us, by other guilds we’ve talked to). Not only that, but the staff banned Gilnash, Maitoz, and then Monkeynews for a week because they used an addon that existed during Vanilla WoW to queue their respective groups’ players up at the same time. A simple google search, or hell, even the mind of someone who actually played during Vanilla could tell you that this existed.

This is the spiciest part: Guilds who tested for hours on the PTR for Alterac Valley were publicly shamed and blamed for every AV problem on the forums by the staff. Are you fucking kidding me? Man up to your mistake.

That was it for us. We had to kill all the hard work we put towards this server because of the bullshit mentioned above. I spent nearly every minute I had between my full load of college courses and my full time job working on this guild and this server. It all went down the drain.

Thanks a lot, Nostalrius.

Ak
Officer, <GRIZZLY>

wow

[yyy]

Is this guild famous or something? Never heard if them

they are famous for making a big drama on every possible private server

[Roddan]

Is this guild famous or something? Never heard if them

they are famous for making a big drama on every possible private server

GRIZZLY think everything has to be scripted at 100% but it just can't be a bug-free server. I bet GRIZZLY wouldn't do it better themself

[Dreez]

What is all that drama about?

Do you actually expect a server without any kind of bugs a few months after the release while this for sure isn't the dev's full time job?

Still the least bugged server with the biggest population ever.
Just a reminder: retail had bugs as well and it took them longer to fix them

If you make that much drama about nothing, noone will miss you for sure

[Xarizma]

Read every post, in the end of the day your just complaining about something you never paid for, you all set your own expectations and set yourself up for failure, its a private server you can never expect the world which is pretty much what you guys all hoped for dedicating all your time in this. It was a bad idea to try and be worlds first in a private server to begin with, there is no glory, no one here even knows who the fuck you are or cares. Could have chosen any other reliable game to compete rather than a dead beat 14 year old game. No new info we know all the problems the server has, just abuncha bitching, to be honest im glad some people are leaving less population = less cancer

[lolwutticus]

Few questions for you:
1. By what metric are you the best guild on the server?
2. What happened with your name when you first got here? My understanding of it is that your name was already taken so you threw a neckbeard tantrum and cried until the GMs freed it up for you. Is this true?
3. Why should anyone care about this?