,first I want to thank you for all your efforts and for everything you did for Nostalrius Begins and I hope that Nostalrius Begins will at the end turn into Nostalrius Continues
. I will be as short as I can, I just have some friendly suggestions for you when you speak with Blizzard. We all know , beside other things, that Nostalrius was so successful and so popular because it was FREE to play and many players played Nostalrius not just because it was vanilla but because you could you play it for free. Great number of players (actually almost everyone I know) think that if Blizzard decides to release their own offical vanilla servers (after your meetings with Blizzard) that it would be very unfair and unacceptable to pay monthly subscription fee for these vanilla wow servers, for the game and content which is old over 10 years! Then, don't forget that for vanilla servers there is no need to add and to develop additional content patches because vanilla wow is a finished game , there is nothing new to be added. Plus, monthly subscription fee would turn away many players from playing classic wow and that will influence greatly on vanilla wow population. So, question arises, if there is no monthly subscription fee for vanilla wow servers, then how can Blizzard have any income out of them? First, monthly subscription is duying and very rare solution for MMORPG genre (I know only WoW as an example for it and there were some other MMORPG titles that had it too but eventually they removed it) so there are other ways and here I am presenting them in order from less realstic to more and more realstic:1) You need to have or buy (if you don't have it) only basic Classic World of Warcraft game, without monthly fee, to play on offical vanilla servers with option to donate, I know it sounds funny to donate to Blizzard but I think Blizzard owes a lot to its players which are mostly veterans and Blizzard is in debt to its players because Blizzard was ignoring our wishes and desires for years, and those wishes and desires are vanilla realms.
But, of course, if you want to play the latest expansion, you will need to buy that latest expansion and to start to pay your monthly fee in order to play it.
If suggestion number 1) is not acceptable for Blizzard there is other option -
2) You need to have or buy (if you don't have it) only basic Classic World of Warcraft game, without monthly fee, to play on offical vanilla servers with options to buy some cosmetic things (+ donations) , same as Guild Wars 2.
But again, if you want to play the latest expansion, you will need to buy that latest expansion and to start to pay your monthly fee in order to play it.
If suggestion number 1) and 2) are not acceptable for Blizzard there is another option 3) You need to buy every last expansion in order to play on offical vanilla servers (so not just basic Classic World of Warcraft game but every expansion), again without monthly fee (for example when Legion comes out, you need to buy Legion expansion to play on vanilla realms but you don't need to pay monthly fee. In that way Blizzard can be ensured that their idea that "MMORPG should constantly evolve" will be satisfied because no matter which version of WoW you are playing, everyone will need to buy latest expansion and there will be no fear that players will not buy newest expansion. And, for example when you are bored with vanilla realms and you want to play latest expansion, you need to start to pay your monthly fee in order to play it)
These are my suggestions about how monthly subscription fee should be avoided and there are probably some other ways too but the main thing is that Nostalrius should strictly defend that main stance to not have monthly fee for classic servers.
Two more things, first Blizzard should really consider, when and if they release their official classic realms, to give us option to continue to play from the point when Nostalrus was shut down because there were many players who had, for example pvp rank 10+ or tier 1/2 sets, in other words there were many players who already invested great time in their characters, and second, all these classic realms should be capped to lvl 60 and they should stay there, so they must not be converted to TBC after some time but Blizzard should release separate TBC realms when time comes where you will be able to copy your characters from classic realms, so the same idea that Nostalrius had for their progression servers.
Good luck Nostalrius
