The following email addresses are on the Blizzard site and seem appropriate;
Vanessa Vanasin, PR Manager for WoW, [email protected]
Joshua Wittge, Public Relations Coordinator, [email protected]
Drew Symonds, Public Relations Coordinator, [email protected]
Remember - just email ONCE to each address (people may be on holiday, so it needs to be all of them). There's a standard letter at the end of this post, if you want to use it and think what it says is right, and use a standard subject ("Nostralius Shutdown") so they can be easily set aside; it's not about getting them all read, it's about the number of emails. We're not here to DDoS their email - with the same subject, they should be able to run a filter and keep using email normally, but still see how many people are emailing.
The following official WoW pages exist;
https://www.facebook.com/Warcraft
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbLj9Q ... _647QckGtg
https://twitter.com/Warcraft (this may be read-only, though)
I think it'd be good to raise support tickets for this too, but to do so you need to create a battle.net account.
You can sign up here (it'll auto-redirect based on IP to US or EU);
http://us.battle.net/account/creation/tos.html
If you have a battle.net account, make a new one - Blizzard I'm sure will not be happy with you for posting about this on the forum or raising a ticket and I certainly wouldn't consider it impossible for one of their reactions to be retributory action taken against account holders who have opened a ticket or posted on the forum about this matter.
It's probably best to use a disposable email address, from mailinator.com (go look at that site - any name @ that domain is a valid email address which you can instantly use - totally public, no sign up, etc - just go to the site, enter the name used and there you go).
Once you've signed up to battle.net (be careful to remember the answer to the "secret question" because you'll need it to make a ticket), you can create a support ticket, the URL below is for "account / not listed here".
https://eu.battle.net/support/en/help/p ... 187/ticket
If you make a support ticket, use the above URL so the tickets can be seen but easily set aside (the number of them is what counts - not that they are individually read); there are people with real support tickets who still need to be helped, and we're not here to screw them over - remember, they're not Blizzard and we are not here to induce collateral damage.
Bliz with their usual skill and cunning have a character limit on the tickets, but they don't tell you what the character limit is (*eye roll*), but it's longer than the standard letter below. To use the standard letter, you'll need to paste it into a text file and attach it to the ticket. If you do this, set the body of the ticket to be "Nostralius Shutdown - see attachment.", so it can be seen but then easily set aside.
There's a LONG forum thread here, about classic servers;
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic ... 1?page=172
But you cannot post to it without downloading WoW and making an in-game character, so it's not much use.
I have no idea which legal firm in France issued the C&D letter - I think we should email them, too.
Find below a standard letter which could be used, if you also think what it says is right. It's been spell-checked, so you can just hit send
"Dear Blizzard,
World of Warcraft has changed profoundly since it's inception, over ten years ago. For this reason a significant community has come to exist which will no longer play retail WoW - rather, they seek to play the original, early version of the game. Calls from this community for Blizzard to provide servers with the original, early version of the game have consistently and repeatedly been refused - indeed, Blizzard has claimed to be *unable* to provide such a service, by reason of lacking the original software to do so. The community then has reverse engineered the Blizzard WoW servers and so by its own efforts re-created the original, early version of WoW, and then provided servers which offer this early version of the game. Blizzard has consistently and repeatedly shut down such servers, using in the USA DMCA provisions to great effect, and overseas, with less effect, using whatever other methods are available. In the last few days, a particularly successful and popular server, Nostalrius, which was hosted in France and has been running for about a year, paid for in part by the community but mainly by the developers who have created it, has been shut down by legal action. This server on a typical busy hour saw up to 15,000 concurrent players, with a player base in the many hundreds of thousands (by comparison, retail WoW claims about six million accounts). The vast majority of these players would if the option were available to them happily pay the monthly retail fee to play this game, as they did when the original version of the game was provided by Blizzard - and, similarly, the vast majority of these players long ago left and will *never*, under any circumstances *whatsoever*, play on the current retail version of WoW, for it is profoundly disliked.
Blizzard have declined to provide servers with the original version of the game, have never offered to sell a license in exchange for this service, and relentlessly shut down these servers when they appear. Blizzard are loosing an income stream, and these players each time a server it shut down lose an on-line community, where they have invested a great deal of time, and are having to shift to a new server - for Blizzard here are only engaged in an endless game of whack-a-mole. This is a lose-lose situation, which could be a win-win, if Blizzard will offer licenses for and only for the original, early version of the game, at current monthly retail prices, to third parties.
Moreover, it should be understood by Blizzard that there is currently a window of opportunity to realise this income stream. The continual shutting down of original servers is forcing developer efforts into finding ways to circumvent this problem, and sooner or later, ways will be found - consider that many of the player base are now in their 30s or 40s and a significant number are experienced, professional software engineers; this is how the server re-engineering effort was in the first place possible. If legal means are continuously used to shut servers down until such means are no longer effective, the community is unlikely at that point to respond positively to a licensing offer. Nobody wants this - it's a lot of time, trouble and effort, and it is ethically right that Blizzard have the monthly fee which comes from the game - but given that Blizzard are not permitting that as an option, it is the emergent behaviour and so eventual outcome from the current situation."
