Thousands came on the night from Sunday to Monday World of Warcraft Players gather to say goodbye to Nostalrius, the fan-run server that ran a “vanilla” version of the iconic MMORPG until it was shut down at the behest of Blizzard had to be switched off.
Nostalrius used World of Warcraft v1.12, also known as the final version of the game before the expansion release Burning Crusade in 2006. From Onyxia Runs to Molten Core Raids for 40 people Nostalrius pretty much everything that players who were there in 2005 remember. The creators of Nostalrius According to the server, it had around 800,000 registered users and 150,000 active players. Many of these players took the opportunity to return to the game on Sunday to say a proper farewell.
In the hours leading up to the server’s final shutdown, fans formed huge lines and gathered en masse at locations across Azeroth. Here are a few videos from the last few minutes of the server:
Nostalrius‘ volunteer administrators answered questions from fans on Reddit last week and expressed their disappointment that Blizzard decided to have the server shut down.
“The heart behind all private servers, including Nostalrius, is to recreate a version of the game that many enjoyed and that Blizzard no longer provides,” wrote Testing Team Leader Nano. “Our hope is that Blizzard someday embraces the idea of legacy servers and that is the reason for our petition addressed to Michael Morhaime. The dream of our community has always been to have Blizzard open legacy servers. Through this petition, we show our willingness to share our experience, knowledge, data, really anything at all that would help Blizzard consider opening legacy servers.”
The petitionwith the Morhaime and Blizzard asked to reconsider their decision, currently has around 84,500 supporters.
“When I heard the news that Nostalrius was going to have to shutdown, I almost cried,” wrote Nano. “I’ve never experienced as rich of a community, both as a player with my guild and working within the Core team. I have friends from retail vanilla WoW still 12 years later and I believe in 12 years from now I will still have friends from Nostalrius.”
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