What will happen if Blizzard does not create Legacy servers?

[Mryul]

Nostalrius was this huge with no advertisement outside of word of mouth, and only much later on from streamers talking about it.

Now the entire internet knows about it. All the talk and content about Vanilla WoW has made so many more people interested than ever before. If Blizzard decides not to launch these servers I'm quite honestly very interested in seeing the results of such a war declaration, as they burn their own money. Do they not understand we have nothing to lose but only everything to gain?

Blizzard obviously was not ready for the backlash of shutting down Nostalrius. I can only imagine the damage from not providing these servers themselves now. They might be a titan of a company, but the taller you are the harder you fall.

[Lothbrok]

Well said my friend. That's what will happen. WAR!

[Docholy]

The cat is out of the bag. Burned out, bored, disenfranchised retail players are going to private servers as we speak. The old player base that is eager to join a legacy server is probably going to learn about this too, leading to more demand. More servers will pop up in Russia and Blizzard is just going to have to deal.

The sad part is WOW is, like all other games, going to die (now or later) and when it does Blizzard will scramble to make legacy servers. But the future cost will be greater than what it would cost today.

[Dr. Doom]

What will happen is they'll save some costs in the short term, cut themselves from a long term market, and just have even less of a reason to bother with World of Warcraft.

[Hydra9268]

On a more serious note. I think in the history of mistakes Blizzard has made, what they did to Nostalrius has to be the worst. How much money is good PR worth to Blizzard? This year alone they have 2 games launching plus a film coming out. Instead of focusing on that they have to deal with nearly a million, possibly more, upset fans plus bad press. Let's say, for the sake argument, it costs $400k to polish Vanilla and integrate it into Bnet2. That's MUCH less money than the residual side effects of good PR! Nevermind the fact that 2-3 million would resub to WOW, likely preorder Legion, preorder Overwatch, buy Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and DLCs for HOTS and HS. Basically most of the top twitch channels pledge to stream vanilla WOW to an audience of 14,000,000 viewers! Blizzard, is Legacy not worth a return on your measly $400,000 investment?

[Vaulken]

What will happen is they'll save some costs in the short term, cut themselves from a long term market, and just have even less of a reason to bother with World of Warcraft.

They underestimate what WoW means to their core players

[Dr. Doom]

What will happen is they'll save some costs in the short term, cut themselves from a long term market, and just have even less of a reason to bother with World of Warcraft.

They underestimate what WoW means to their core players

Absolutely.
The thing is, corporations aren't made in a socially mindful way. They don't truly care about the well-being of the common folk, nor do they care about bigger social concerns. They 'live' (in as a much as corporation is a person) purely to optimise procedures and maximise profit.

Does Blizzard care about the general well-being of gamers? Not in the least. They only care about their satisfaction, in as much as that satisfaction guarantees more revenue.

Does Blizzard care about creative concerns regarding historic preservation? No, not at all.
They don't care if World of Warcraft Classic disappears from the face of the Earth, and nobody from future generations is able to ever play it again. By refusing to either host legacy servers, while simultaneously refusing to release the code as part of abandon-ware, and while actively hounding up emulation initiatives, they're telling the world this: If you didn't play World of Warcraft between 2004 and 2006, you're screwed and can never experience that specific piece of human art.

It's actually sickening, and a whole new phenomenon hitherto unknown in the world.
- In the past, whenever a painter got a commission to create a portrait, a landscape or a still life painting, even if his work had initially been created for a commercial purpose, it was possible by future generations to preserve it, and give it to the rest of the world.
- Same if a composer was tasked with creating a melody, whether a simple opus for piano or a full opera.
- Same with theater play writers or any writer for that matter.
- Same with television writers or producers and their series, who at first created their product to sell it to a network but afterwards ended up being preserved for the future (that's how I can watch 1960s soap operas if I so wish it).
- Same with software developers all over the course of the XX Century. This is how the nice man that is Steve 'Slug' Russell donated his 1962 pioneer videogame, Spacewars, to the Computer History museum, where people of all ages can go and play the game.

For some reason the companies behind MMOs have attributed themselves the right to deny the rest of human-kind pieces of creative history for no reason other than not seeing a way to make a buck out of it. And I find the fact that laws and governments of the world actually enable them instead of punishing them severely, to be a really tragic event and a crystal clear sign that we have little or no civic culture left.

And the worst part is: It's very likely that the programmers who wrote the code for Blizzard (or think about how SOE wants to release the code for SWG yet LucasArts threatens them and doesn't let them), or for any other MMO company really, would actually be very willing to donate their code to the public once their product fulfilled its commercial lifetime. I believe Mark Kern's involvement with the legacy movement stems precisely from this. Spending months of your life working to create a product you're proud of, and wishing that it survives and still amuses people in the future, even if it's no longer the flashy and shiny new item in the market.

But given the way corporate laws allows for their employers to strip them of their rights as creators, by having them sign contract clauses that force developers to relinquish their rights to any of their creations, they can't, and are instead force to watch how games that once made hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people joyful during their free time, can only rust away in a forgotten archive hard drive, with a very real risk of the code being destroyed if the company ever has a systemic failure, or even if they just upgrade all the hardware and forget to transport the archive data.


So, to return to the point of the thread and to elaborate on my previous post:

If Blizzard doesn't release their own legacy servers, does not release the code for a defunct game like Classic WoW, and continues to harass people who are trying to emulate to provide the service, they'll just present themselves for what they are: A corporation that doesn't care one bit about their social role, and that pays no heed at all to artistic history or documenting past milestones for future generations (dismissing both the programmers that gave away years of their life in creation, as well as consumers that gave away years of their life playing).

But other than that, nothing will happen. US legislation, along with most other Western countries, enables this sadistic behaviour and punishes people that oppose it. Consumers are too comfortable and too forgetful. Nobody will march and protest at Blizzard Entertainment's HQ, nor riot, nor burn their offices, to demand a real change, they will just continue being angry from behind their screens. And civic values being gone from this world, means that few people will try to move a finger to preserve this product for the future.

Jason Scott, the creator of Internet Web Archive, and one of the few people that does care about this problem already commented on this last year:
http://www.polygon.com/2015/3/6/8158649 ... et-archive

I have little to add to what he says there. If anyone, whether programmer/creator or consumer/user wishes to preserve gaming history in this era, you are forced to break into, and hack the company's mainframe in order to steal the code and release it to the public. There is no other way.

[slippytoad]

we will be victorious

[Vaulken]

What I meant was Blizzard doesn't see their past work as timeless but just stepping stones that resonated with people at the time of their creation. They think they can take a shit and people will pay for it, since people gobbled up so much of it for so long they completely forgot what set them apart and made them great.

Or the arrogance/elitism was always there and the power/money just lifted the mask.

[SikSan]

I have little to add to what he says there. If anyone, whether programmer/creator or consumer/user wishes to preserve gaming history in this era, you are forced to break into, and hack the company's mainframe in order to steal the code and release it to the public. There is no other way.

Yep, some companies intentionally don't save the past game builds in fear someone will steal it and spin up a private server. SoE's EQII for example.

WoW players are lucky. Less popular great games just disappeared to oblivion.