Jalepenos wrote:This is 100% meaningless conjecture. Why not talk about when the meteor is going to strike the planet and how it's futile to go to school or work because of it?
It's a fair question and a bit ridiculous to dismiss it out of hand. (Why are people are so defensive and dismissive on these forums...sigh)
One can look at the history of WoW/MMO private servers and feel pretty confident that Blizzard won't take action, and even if they did, it'd be far from a guarantee that they'd be successful in shutting it down. There's a lot of grey area when operating a private server for donations, I don't think there's clear enough precedent to say either way what would happen.
As someone with some work experience in copyright law, because Nostalrius doesn't actually distribute the copyrighted material (we all individually download the copryrighted work, the 1.12 client), that gives them quite a bit of leeway. Legally, I'm not quite sure what case Blizzard would actually make against them. I wouldn't be surprised if they did muster up a legitimate case, but it's not totally obvious how they would go about it.
In the end, I'd put the odds very low. In fact, more likely is that blizzard opens up legacy servers of their own at some point, though they vehemently claim to be against it. I think the risk has outweighed the rewards for them for quite a while, but with the incredible success of Nost, I think the calculus has changed for them.
With 7k peak concurrent users, say there are, conservatively, 100k Nost accounts, 50k of them "serious" players who will be active for more than a few months. Throw in Kronos and all of the other wow private servers (another 100k unique players?), then subtract the players who playing purely because they are free and also the players who currently have an active wow accounts...there's obviously a lot of hand waving, but it's at least on the order of $10-20 million per year they are leaving on the table. Throw in the fact that they could charge all kinds of extra fees for playing legacy to make it really worth their while, say for example you have to create a brand new account (extra one-time $30 or something), and it starts to look extremely stupid that Blizzard AREN'T doing it.
Anyway, I predict that within 18 months blizzard announces legacy. Nost/Kronos proved that there is legit demand, and considering the implementation cost for blizzard is hilariously low, they'd be stupid not to. The only reason I can even muster for not doing it is disruption of the retail game, and I'm fairly sure that's literally the only thing holding them back at this point.
Posted: Fri May 29, 2015 7:52 pm