I spoke with a Blizzard Rep on the phone.

[Remember_Nostalrius]

Blizzard has said many times they already did a financial study about opening legacy servers including ALL the parameters you are thinking and probably many ones you are not. If they said "This will not serves us in terms of rentability" you can trust them, they did this study with more proficiency than players's thoughts and when we see how much Blizzard loves money it's enough to guess they did it very seriously. Unfortunately we have no chance to see such servers one day

And for the phone call you had, blizzard's employees simply receive by their hierarchy the directive to tell every people who call what they want to hear. Their goal is to minimize the people's reaction about what is happening until all of this starts to fade.

Okay, let me relate you another anecdote. While working on Windows 8, Microsoft paid close attention to the metrics of how people used the operating system, and by studying those metrics, came to the inescapable conclusion that the Start menu, long an icon of the OS, was no longer necessary and could be removed completely.

The rest was history, as Windows 8 was received perhaps even more coldly than Vista was, and despite the best attempts of a friendly press to play interference for them it flopped completely, resulting in them doing a 360 in Windows 10 and adding the Start Menu in again, while offering the upgrade for free.

The moral of the story is that metrics and focus groups are shit and if your company is out of touch with the end user, like Blizzard is with us, they're going to make colossally stupid and costly missteps.

[umandez]

Blizzard has said many times they already did a financial study about opening legacy servers including ALL the parameters you are thinking and probably many ones you are not. If they said "This will not serves us in terms of rentability" you can trust them, they did this study with more proficiency than players's thoughts and when we see how much Blizzard loves money it's enough to guess they did it very seriously. Unfortunately we have no chance to see such servers one day

And for the phone call you had, blizzard's employees simply receive by their hierarchy the directive to tell every people who call what they want to hear. Their goal is to minimize the people's reaction about what is happening until all of this starts to fade.

Okay, let me relate you another anecdote. While working on Windows 8, Microsoft paid close attention to the metrics of how people used the operating system, and by studying those metrics, came to the inescapable conclusion that the Start menu, long an icon of the OS, was no longer necessary and could be removed completely.

The rest was history, as Windows 8 was received perhaps even more coldly than Vista was, and despite the best attempts of a friendly press to play interference for them it flopped completely, resulting in them doing a 360 in Windows 10 and adding the Start Menu in again, while offering the upgrade for free.

The moral of the story is that metrics and focus groups are shit and if your company is out of touch with the end user, like Blizzard is with us, they're going to make colossally stupid and costly missteps.

+1 Well said and entirely true.

[Snouk]

@Remember_Nostalrius : Finally, you might be right. Your MS exemple wasn't wrong but no need to go this far : Blizzard had already made terrible mistakes during the last expansions of his MMO that cost them a lot of customers and I admit I didn't think of that firstly. Maybe they could review their PoV now with new parameters. but I'll not be too optimistic, it's Blizzard.

[Reserverue]

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1751857331?page=197

This is official and everyone is free to talk here they will not ban or scratch your post

They just closed that thread it seems.

It reached 201 Pages, I think that thread topped out

[Dardyksa]

It reached 201 Pages, I think that thread topped out

On French retail forums a post about Legacy Servers (with Nostalrius inside )
"Je paierais volontiers 12.99€/mois pour jouer sur WoW Vanilla"
(i'd gladly pay 12.99€/month to play on a WOW Vanilla server)
... is currently 26 pages long which is a lot for french forums !!
... and it's rated +60, not only haters inside

[Reserverue]

It reached 201 Pages, I think that thread topped out

On French retail forums a post about Legacy Servers (with Nostalrius inside )
"Je paierais volontiers 12.99€/mois pour jouer sur WoW Vanilla"
(i'd gladly pay 12.99€/month to play on a WOW Vanilla server)
... is currently 26 pages long which is a lot for french forums !!
... and it's rated +60, not only haters inside

omg! The msg is getting through!! On official turf!!!

[MasterQuaster]

Don't be too optimistic about it guys!!! Blizzard is a multi million company with 4.000+ employees. Decisions take very, very long time in such a big company. And normaly in such big companies, decisions were once made will not be changed very quick! So don't expect them to announce a Vanilla Server at the Blizzcon!

Blizzard said it more than once, there will NEVER be Vanilla servers again. A 4.000+ employees company will not change this opinion that quickly! I predict it will be a long fight for us Vanilla fans!

Just because they say they are hearing us, that doesn't mean that they will change anything about their policy! So don't be too optimistic.

[Winterflaw]

Basically either Blizzard pul their heads out of their asses and either offer Vanilla (and don't balls it up - given what they've done with retail, are we really sure we *want* Blizzard running Vanilla?) OR we, as the community, figure out how to run Vanilla servers on a long term basis - in a way Blizzard cannot attack.

If Blizzard pony up, great - well, aside from my deep misgivings about having their current WoW team have ANYTHING to do with Vanilla. So, change that to - if Blizzard license Vanilla to Nost, then great.

But we basically have to assume it won't happen - it's nice if it does, but we're talking Blizzard here. Large company, heads in asses, tons of internal politics, execs who actually come out and *say* "you think you want it but you don't". None of this gives us any hope at all there will actually be a solution from Blizzard - the only reason we have hope is because of all the negative PR; but even it that does have an effect, we'd still only be really okay if Blizzard *licensed* Vanilla, rather than running it themselves.

So basically it's on with the original line of attack - get Vanilla going ourselves, and make it immune to Blizzard. I think we should also pay the sub money into an account somewhere (so Bliz don't get confused and imagine a sub with them is because we like retail Wow) and have that transfered to Bliz each month, so they get their cut. Have to be careful with that though, because I could imagine Bliz might take legal action against that account and have it shut down, and who knows if they'd press charges against the owner? I can well imagine the law seeing this as proceeds of stolen goods - the problem with law is that it makes no sense to normal people, so you can't imagine it'll be reasonable in any way you would imagine to predict.

[Pixiestixie]

Profitable ? Nostalrius was hosted for 1000$ max a month, with all devs realms and tools and websites included.
1% of the active accounts with a fee of 1 dollar would cover all the expenses. They could even take 1 additional dedicated server to mitigate the lag during peeks. The 99% left would be profit with a volunteered staff like Nost.

And I don't think it will fade away. All WoW forums I go on have threads about it, Youtubers are talking about it because some of them played it, the petition is at 63k signatures (30k 3 days ago), and hundreds of videos of Nost last ever week are showing up on social medias.

You know what? If private individuals can do it for $1,000 a month it points to another one of Blizzard's flaws: Learn to do it, cheaper.

Apparently Blizzard doesn't know how to pear down their operations to make them cost-effective enough to run a server members of the public can run for a grand a month. They should really let the Nost devs teach them how to run their own game.

[Imbaslap]

the only troublesome thing I see blizzard having is account security and keeping the service secure (merging it with their battle.net system and shills).

as for legacy servers being outdated and lost code. that is a lie. Nost proved it can be done and keep up with the current demand with software/hardware demands.

if you checked the 2015 legion blizzcon questionnaire video, the dev said it would be too much work to go back and do everything again. I think its mostly about merging into the battle.net system or creating something for it working with the old clients and such. either way, they don't want to do more work.

imagine going from a cruise ship down to a wooden raft.. somehow you need to make the raft compatible with the cruise ship. (software wise)

personally I think its due to battle.net and how all their games are merged into it. that would require some development work for sure. (if they do make an official legacy server). the only thing I can think of is licensing a legacy server out. allowing 1 to run independently but for a price with no responsibility legally from the parent company.

who knows.. maybe mr. MM will listen and actually do something productive for the fanbase..