An Open Letter From <GRIZZLY>

[Aklol]

*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>

[Eso]

The <GRIZZLY> Nostalrius story, written by Kylie, GM of <GRIZZLY> is as follows:

Disclaimer: Let me tell you something very important and informative before you go forward reading this post; If you hate <GRIZZLY> for something we've either done to you personally, or you have forced yourself to believe in your mind because you heard it from a friend, or you really genuinely think we're all cheating hacking scum, feel free to disregard the contents of this message. It will not change your mind, nor is it meant to do so.

This is a tale of caution for any guild with high expectations here.

<GRIZZLY> is a kind of strange thing for private server guilds. We don't really exist in any real sort of way officially anywhere until we coalesce onto one server or another, whereupon we go in hot. We recruit what we need to fill the holes from whatever things we left, and then we hit it hard. When Nostalrius was brought to my attention, it hit all of the main things that we look in a private server project.

1. Was there supposed to be competition for us?

- Absolutely. <NOPE>, <Ridin Dirty>, <Molten Core Swimteam>, <Massivus Backhandeth>, <Dreamstate> were going to be there. Some of us had had interactions with some of these guilds before. We knew that this was going to be fun.

2. How was the scripting?

- From the outside looking in it was phenomenal. <Blacklisted> and others had tested it and there were videos available displaying the quality and thoroughness. Again, this was from the outside looking in.

3. Was there going to be progression?

- The timeline existed, and there were promises that it was going to be stuck to. Couldn't argue with that, we felt like Scriptcraft 1 & 2, which were other projects that we became President on was too fast.

4. Muh PvP

- A ton of our members love their PvP. Ranks were going to be unlocked shortly and so they'd have something to do. With all of these factors combined, the only thing that looked like would be a struggle to us was the insistence on 1x leveling 1-60, but whatever, we could deal. Everything else looked pretty great, we were happy to make that sacrifice to play on the biggest stage and hopefully take home a W. For better or worse, that's all we've ever cared about. We've done the "journey" enough times that there isn't much fun in it anymore, but for this group there is an excitement in hammering down MC in greens before anyone else can touch it. Fast forward to server launch: Everything is going well, we're fighting Alliance while we level, camping Rottix because he one time tried to attack Zach in Ashenvale, etc, and we pulled ahead because our overall autismo levels are all over the charts. We hit probably 10 of the first 12 60s on horde and made sure one was a tank (Haru). We pounded up his gear with one group, while the rest helped the lower people level. We very quickly in this fashion had 40+ people to raid. Truth be told we weren't ready, but we had people grind hydraxian faction for their last few levels so we figured hey, let's give MC a shot because we had watched streams during the day of a few European alliance guilds/pugs trying it.

Long story short, we fucking smashed it harder than Ak would smash T. Swift if given half the opportunity. In greens. Not because it was wholly broken, but because we stacked ranged DPS and saved every single consumable leveling up and had played together so many times with the same tanks, healers, dps.

By summoning the people we had grind Hydraxian rep back and forth to the instance and not actually dousing runes until we had all the hands for the quest. But our problems began here. They had literally taken the Aqual Quintessence quest out of the game. On a stock MaNGOS core, the quest exists. This means that someone literally took out that portion of the quest chain for 0 reason at all. We learned the hard way that there were no North American GMs on the server at the time we raided that had the ability to do anything that night.

The following morning we were (after lengthy explanation) rewarded by Clank with some quintessences (yay!). That night we went in and made the infamous Ragnaros video, which to this day has been downvoted to oblivion. When Acid posted it with my guild members' nerd voices, we didn't realize how much effort people would go to explain that Ragnaros didn't work. The one son was not the biggest deal, but Ragnaros was instagibbing the ranged dps.

You can see them dead in the screenshots in the thread provided by Zach, because 1.12 GRID doesn't work particularly well (the addon that the aspect-less hunter was using) in showing dead players especially if they're out of range. You can in fact however see my priest die 3 times alongside Crowbar the shaman diving into melee to take a hit so a ranged dps can stay up. This leads me to my next point;

There was no loot on that Ragnaros. Which is fine. 100% okay, they didn't expect us to kill it so fast. Whatever. We got our demonist legs and bonereaver's edge from a GM in a few days, they hooked us up. However, we did find out the next week that they had implemented loot and "fixed" the boss.

This fix involved also "fixing" the death touch, so that an alliance guild was able to go in and kill the boss with 0 tanks/melee and he just spun around and did nothing. This is still disputed by some people, but feel free to look at the spirit of redemption with the moon on its head in the <GRIZZLY> video and listen to the audio of the tanks. This fixing also included making Garr's adds not explode at 50% when the Legendary neck (which I received, thanks Nost!) dropped on this server, the week after, the boss went back to normal (for Nost) when the loot table was restored to no longer include the neck. This may be conjecture, but it seems to me that any time a loot table was added/changed the corresponding boss was also fucked.

In the end, Garr changed almost a half dozen times, there were other minor issues with MC, but all in all everything was okay. The population was rising, and everything was going well for us. Then came Onyxias' loot. On the first go-round, where we got the server first, we waited nine weeks to receive loot after talking to GMs/Admins. Which isn't a huge deal unless you consider other guilds receiving it hours afterwards on their first kill. But maybe they just forgot about us? Who cares? (We really didn't). After that, we received an Onyxia head on our second kill. We were threatened that if we used it we would all be banned. It was eventually deleted. Again, still water under the bridge.

Here is probably not where the entire direction of the server changed, but where I got my first suspicion that it would:

Almost a month after promised, we received Azuregos. It was a buggy clusterfuck that was eventually killed after several hours of alliance and horde resetting it. But pretty great because muh population, like 1000 people fought there for the result of a rogue that wasn't in a raid group killing it. (still in my guild though which is kinda neat but not the point) It had become about the population, not the players.

Ever since the post about "Vanilla Wow's most populated realm" or whatever, the entire focus of development had taken a hard turn toward the people who were enjoying the "journey". Which is not wrong by any means, but those of us who had pounded up felt like we had used (not yet wasted) an incredible amount of effort on something that in the end had meant almost nothing. The attrition process due to boredom had begun. We were no longer going to be playing with our friends. Unfortunately, as we tested Kazzak weeks after Azuregos we realized that we were then pushing the timeline back even further.

Each week became another week where we waited for more content to be announced/released. Now, I'm talking about actual months, not years of our life, and I understand if you think we're being dramatic, but in the end we came here with a promise of a certain timeline, and being that we have other obligations/things to do, those obligations look mighty tempting for your time instead of a WoW private server when you know you're going to do nothing but MC for months.

After Kazzak Testing, which had lingering bugs, AV testing was active!

And boy was it a fucking shitfest. The first day we were able to queue into several games of 5v5 matches where we could test some things, which were duly compiled into a report, but we figured hey they wanted the raid guilds so we could test the content, so we tested what we could (Shoutout to Imbaheals for helping me Mind Control Korrak to Belinda, cutie). And went in after we had been assured AV had been taken out of "Debug mode" with our full raid the next evening after we had done Onyxia to test with a full raid.

We spawned 40 AVs with 1 person in each. Oh my. Eventually a week or so later it was fixed, so we did a round of testing with <Exiled> who was kind enough to let us beat them into the dirt and test victory conditions and the remainder of the pve crap that we couldn't test and compile on without an enemy raid. We knew about the archers, the amount of spawns at graveyards, and a lot of other things.

In the end, none of these things were fixed, and if they were fixed, they were made incredibly worse in some cases, such as the respawns and the archers; the archers didn't used to do anything, now they global everyone in range .

We had had a full guild meeting with 55 attendees the Friday prior to AV dropping to double down our commitment to seeing this Nostradomous thing through.

AV came out the next morning and utterly shattered that. It laid bare to us everything that has been wrong with this place, and had been wrong since a former GM came to us in the 5th week of the server: There are no longer enough competent developers working on Nostalrius. We've since heard other reports from guilds like Massivus (RIP Massibros) that they had info on other developers being removed or that have left the project entirely.

Not only that, but the focus is no longer on raiders at all. The people who wanted to play Nostalrius to progress have been entirely left by the wayside. <NOPE> knows this, <Massivus Backhandeth> knew this, and I know in their hearts the other guilds know it too as they attrition 2-3 members per week waiting on a new raid tier. Couple this with the fact whatever devs that couldn't fix basic bugs that were easily fixed on other 60 servers that have a working AV, and you have a recipe for guild disaster.

After realizing all of this, the post came out, blaming us. They blamed the players who tested their content and tried to suggest that it was wrong for the content being completely and irretrievably fucking broken. It has killed any motivation to ever test a single thing these people put together ever again. They punished the testers of AV for their own utter incompetence. They were literally blaming the guilds who tested because a few martyrs such as Maitoz, Monkeynews, and Gilnash were queueing Alterac Valley with 40 people, some using a mod, some just counting down and clicking, and ruining the experiences of AV for poor poor pubs just trying to make it through the world. Let me reiterate: They were literally banned for queueing a battleground together. Macro or not, they could literally all just click the button, get 30 of their 40 into one instance, and roll it equally as hard. I don't care how controversial you think this opinion is, you are wrong, and we are right. If they counted down, they would get 30 in and dirt on your shit pug just as they would with 40.

It all sunk in that this is about "Muh Population". The majority of the people here want to drag everyone else down to their level of competence, which isn't very high. They scream about everything us or any other guild above them does, as if it's something incredibly game-breaking and ridiculous and if they had had that ONE TIP, they would suddenly have cleared the content 11 weeks earlier. And the GMs and whatever devs are available have perpetuated this to a disgusting level.

This was the breaking point. We (<GRIZZLY>) had not even participated in this, but I saw the writing on the wall. We as a guild realized what is happening, and it wasn't (and isn't) good for us. And it's not good for you if you're a guild that values progression and competitive gameplay. So I ended it here, I will see you cuties all again on Corecraft or wherever we end up next.

<3 Keyl
GM <GRIZZLY>

P.S. I didn't even mention the GM fuckery that occurs here regarding the favorites that are played. Examples of this range from Zetox's classic port on stream into MC because we were camping him too much (poor baby) to alliance guilds getting warnings for spawning mobs while our people get to enjoy their ban should they try it, or the time that Rottix had Lupos respawned for him on stream by a GM because another player killed it before he could tame it. Which is all horrific bullshit.

[Smite]

I think one of the biggest problems plaguing the server is the absolutely abhorrent staff. The GM team is generally awful to deal with and just plain without knowledge regarding vanilla World of Warcraft, or how to deal with the server's playerbase. The administration isn't quite as bad as the lower level peon GMs, but they're also generally awful at dealing with their playerbase and their, often major, issues in a consistent and timely manner. The biggest issue, however, regarding the staff is their apparent total lack of developers. Throughout the months since the release of Nost, scores of class breaking bugs that were reported from the beginning went without a fix. There also seems to be an issue with development priority. While these gamebreaking class bugs continued being a problem, stupid little bullshit bugs that didn't really affect anything (100% working Pyrewood Village anyone?) were proudly fixed. Boss mechanics were not functioning correctly, and content releases came well after their promised date, likely from the lack of developers. The debacle that was Alterac Valley absolutely proves that either they have no developers, their developers are wholly incompetent, or their administration did not allow their developers to do their jobs and fix the content that was reported to be broken when guilds tested it. One or more of these three things has to be true, and any one of them is damning. There is absolutely no reason to have any faith at all that Blackwing Lair will not be as big of a mess as AV, or worse. The staff has failed their playerbase to the utmost.

[Eso]

Reserved

[Eso]

Reserved

[nervous]

In before the droves of "ITS A FREE SERVERRRRR" kiddies getting mad at #elite neckbeard virgin raiders.

Spot for sale

EDIT:

SPOT SOLD TO THE SQUATTY POTTY, THE PREMIER RAIDER UTILITY STOOL. IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF YOUR STOOL WITH THIS STOOL

[Elftor]

no way im reading all that lol

[Lazermon]

I believe in nostalrius, and I still do. I wanted to keep playing here, and even though GRIZZLY has quit the server along with the majority of its members, I haven't.

This does not mean that I disagree with my fellow grizzlies or that I don't understand them. I believe that the staff of nostalrius means well, and that you really do want to provide the best vanilla experience. However, this does not make you immune to our criticism, what follows are the issues I've seen and continue to see.

The nostalrius staff treatment of players started off bad and continued bad. Taking action, punishing and warning has always been prioritized over communicating, and the GMs act as if they are following a strict ruleset that prevents them from doing anything logical. Completely reasonable requests such as pointing out that the aqual quintessences werent in the game was met by a stone wall of GMs saying ”we cant do that, you need to speak with people higher up”. Asking a gm to get loot back from a raid boss was multiple times met with refusal even though a screenshot of the kill and the proper raid id was provided.

It very early on reached a point where nobody in grizzly dared to do things that was possible to do in the game, because the staff would ban first and never ask. We had quests in the game that we wanted to do, but we didn't dare to do them, because they had bugs in them, and we feared we would get banned for doing them. This is to me completely absurd, why do you ban people for your own fuckups? You shouldn't ban the people, you should fix the issue. Maitoz, Monkeynews and Gilnash never got a chance to explain to the GMs that what they were doing was blizzlike, and this was our final confirmation that playing the game was to you sometimes a bannable offence. This became abundantly clear even to you, when the entire server started using anything they could to kill the final boss in AV, you were faced with either banning the entire lvl 50+ population on the server, or fix the damn bugs. For a moment there, we feared you were leaning towards just banning everyone.

My second and final gripe with nostalrius is your irrational bugfixing priorities. Items with incorrect stats (+ items that should be in the game), class bugs and raid content that had (and have) bugs in it does not seem to be your top priority (behind stability and security). Your video and pride of Pyrewood Village was the prime joke in the guild for a very long time. In the beginning we fought for it. We kept contacting you about items that should be in the game, without us reporting it to you, ragnaros and onyxia wouldnt have dropped a single offpiece. In the end, we lost our spark there. We expected bugs such as totems resisting, aoe not stacking on top of each other, bosses not properly reseting their hp, troll racial Berserking giving a flat 5% to spellcasting instead of the intended 10-30%, world boss respawn timers to all be fixed within days, but weeks came and went, months came and went, and while some bugs were eventually fixed, it was clear that you didn't really care much for the quality of your end-game content. Some people would say that this is a positive thing, a lot of people never reach this content, and they care about other things. We, however, say that you not prioritizing our raid content is a dealbreaker, and when getting something fixed here require the players to spend half of their day finding 10 year old information proving what they know is right, submitting said information to your bug tracker, and then pray that you give a flying fuck for 2 months, then the motivation just isn't there.

In the end, we mainly quit because of the fact that we joined the server with the impression that we would as im writing this be preparing to kill C'thun, not grind MC for another week. I don't blame you for not delivering your content in time, but I and many others do blame you for promising something you knew you couldn't keep.

[Kaytie]

Woah, long.

Thanks for the clarity on your Nost experience though!
This cleared up some impressions I have myself on your guild and I hope it will clear the minds of a few others in the community. I never really noticed how one-sided the impression on your guild was without the full story.

Best of luck in the future.
Bye, Grizzly!

[mike1097]

Textwall is Textwall.
Just read a bit. Just think about that the Devs worked hard on this server and they continue their work. You guys just played the game for fun and don't say you had no fun.
If so you play the wrong game or you're playing the game wrong.
Don't blame the devs for the buggs... it's free and it's great.

If you wanna leave do it... but no need for this textwall because 99% of the server don't care because we are playing this game for ourselves fun and not to competite with others in invisible fights.