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Despite an active player base of more than 150,000 people, Blizzard forced the final shut down of the Nostalrius, fan-run, vanilla World of Warcraft server this weekend. To mourn this loss and send it off in grand style, several thousand people came together in the hours before the server died, forming lines, gatherings and groups, as the world disappeared for good.
At more than a decade old, World of Warcraft is very different today than it was when it began. But that's not something everyone likes, which is why close to a million people spent time playing in Nostalrius, a server that ran version 1.12. That was the last major patch before Blizzard launched the first WoW expansion, Burning Crusade, in 2007 (as per Kotaku). [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s2lq7QXDQo']
But that's not something Blizzard was happy with and with a server that popular, it's no surprise that it was well aware of it. We heard the news last week that the publishing giant was forcing its closure, despite a fan petition with more than 40,000 signatures.
So to pay their respects to the fallen server, players gathered in their thousands in giant gatherings of orcs, trolls, humans and every other race under the sun, to bid farewell. Several videos were captured of the game's final hours and minutes and not only is the scale of the collective impressive, the lamentations as they all say goodbye are genuinely sad. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu-JMqNTn-M']
The hope from many is that Blizzard will come around and perhaps even run its own legacy servers one day. Some studios already do. Square runs a handful for old servers for Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 characters and Jagex offers ‘Legacy Modes' within Runescape.
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KitGuru Says: Do you think Blizzard should offer Legacy servers to its players? Balance might be a difficult, but perhaps players wouldn't be too bothered, since they'd be willingly playing an older version.
