Gamingenthusiast.net Article On Nostalrius
Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2016 12:36 pmQUOTE
On April 10, 2016, an unsanctioned and fan-run vanilla World of Warcraft server called ‘Nostalrius’ was shut down under threat of litigation from Blizzard Entertainment.
From Blizzard’s perspective, the France-based server represented a case of copyright infringement, but for fans it was a chance to play a once-great game that simply wasn’t available anywhere else. And it was popular. Polygon reports that the server had over 150,000 active accounts at the time of the shutdown, many of whom went online in the final minutes of the game to give it one final farewell.
For those who don’t know, “vanilla” World of Warcraft refers to the original version of the game before the major expansions, which began with The Burning Crusade in 2007, a little more than two years after World of Warcraft’s initial launch. It’s a version of the game that, for all practical purposes, doesn’t exist anymore.
The many expansions to World of Warcraft have changed the game so fundamentally that those who only played the original version would barely recognize it today. Everything from the way dungeons and raids work to the many character attributes have been overhauled, and for many people, these changes have not been for the better. These people want the game as it was when it took the world by storm and rose to become the biggest MMO in video gaming history.
And it wasn’t a small number of people who wanted to enjoy World of Warcraft as it once was. Nostalrius hosted about 800,000 accounts over its lifetime. While World of Warcraft currently boasts around 5.5-million subscribers, and had over 10-million at its peak, 800,000 is nothing to sneeze at. It demonstrates quite a bit of interest in playing a game that exists for most only as a memory. But Blizzard has made the decision, as is their right, to prevent that memory from being made real again
Blizzard’s actions represent a real problem for those who want to preserve games as they were. Online gaming changes through patches and expansions, causing the game to evolve in ways that alter its fundamental identity, at least as far as many players are concerned. These games differ in an important way from other media, like books, movies, or record albums. Those can easily be archived, put in libraries, and made available for public consumption forever.
You can still read The Canterbury Tales just as it was when it was first published in the fifteenth century, or listen to Mozart’s music as it was written more than two centuries ago. Even most single-player games can often be thrown onto a disk and enjoyed as they were for years. But games that can exist only when hosted on servers are much harder to keep as they were. You have to play the version of the game the rights-holder wants you play now. It’s as if the author of a book kept revising the text after you purchased it, and will sue you if you try to read the book as it once was.
UNQUOTE
Read more below:
http://www.gamingenthusiast.net/article ... ine-games/
On April 10, 2016, an unsanctioned and fan-run vanilla World of Warcraft server called ‘Nostalrius’ was shut down under threat of litigation from Blizzard Entertainment.
From Blizzard’s perspective, the France-based server represented a case of copyright infringement, but for fans it was a chance to play a once-great game that simply wasn’t available anywhere else. And it was popular. Polygon reports that the server had over 150,000 active accounts at the time of the shutdown, many of whom went online in the final minutes of the game to give it one final farewell.
For those who don’t know, “vanilla” World of Warcraft refers to the original version of the game before the major expansions, which began with The Burning Crusade in 2007, a little more than two years after World of Warcraft’s initial launch. It’s a version of the game that, for all practical purposes, doesn’t exist anymore.
The many expansions to World of Warcraft have changed the game so fundamentally that those who only played the original version would barely recognize it today. Everything from the way dungeons and raids work to the many character attributes have been overhauled, and for many people, these changes have not been for the better. These people want the game as it was when it took the world by storm and rose to become the biggest MMO in video gaming history.
And it wasn’t a small number of people who wanted to enjoy World of Warcraft as it once was. Nostalrius hosted about 800,000 accounts over its lifetime. While World of Warcraft currently boasts around 5.5-million subscribers, and had over 10-million at its peak, 800,000 is nothing to sneeze at. It demonstrates quite a bit of interest in playing a game that exists for most only as a memory. But Blizzard has made the decision, as is their right, to prevent that memory from being made real again
Blizzard’s actions represent a real problem for those who want to preserve games as they were. Online gaming changes through patches and expansions, causing the game to evolve in ways that alter its fundamental identity, at least as far as many players are concerned. These games differ in an important way from other media, like books, movies, or record albums. Those can easily be archived, put in libraries, and made available for public consumption forever.
You can still read The Canterbury Tales just as it was when it was first published in the fifteenth century, or listen to Mozart’s music as it was written more than two centuries ago. Even most single-player games can often be thrown onto a disk and enjoyed as they were for years. But games that can exist only when hosted on servers are much harder to keep as they were. You have to play the version of the game the rights-holder wants you play now. It’s as if the author of a book kept revising the text after you purchased it, and will sue you if you try to read the book as it once was.
UNQUOTE
Read more below:
http://www.gamingenthusiast.net/article ... ine-games/
