{"id":4247,"date":"2017-11-03T20:11:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-03T20:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/308978"},"modified":"2017-11-03T20:11:00","modified_gmt":"2017-11-03T20:11:00","slug":"blizzard-has-its-own-classic-world-of-warcraft-server-in-the-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2017\/11\/03\/blizzard-has-its-own-classic-world-of-warcraft-server-in-the-works\/","title":{"rendered":"Blizzard has its own classic World of Warcraft server in the works"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Alongside the announcement of a new <em>World of Warcraft<\/em> expansion at Blizzcon today, Blizzard Entertainment revealed that it will be launching its own classic <em>World of Warcraft<\/em> server at some point in the future.<\/p>\n<p>A &#8216;vanilla&#8217; version of <em>World of Warcraft<\/em> is something that longtime players of the game have been requesting for years. A classic server would offer those players a way to experience the game as it was in 2004, before expansions and updates permanently altered both the landscape and content of the game itself.<\/p>\n<p>There have been numerous fan attempts to create such a server in the past, many of which have been met with threats of legal action from Blizzard since such running such a project requires, among other things, unauthorized use of Blizzard&#8217;s IP and reverse-engineered source code.<\/p>\n<p>One of the more infamous attempts at doing so was the private vanilla\u00a0server <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/270165\/Blizzard_shutters_popular_private_WoW_server_with_threat_of_legal_action.php\">Nostalrius, which shut down in 2016<\/a> after Blizzard threatened to take them to court over copyright infringement. At the time, Nostalrius representatives said that over 150,000 actively played on the unofficial classic server.<\/p>\n<p>The latest effort to do so was the fan-project Elysium (which was born out of that shuttered Nostalrius fan server), but that\u00a0project itself shut down in mid-October following its own internal management complications.<\/p>\n<p>Other online games like <em>RuneScape<\/em> have already taken to maintaining an official classic server for nostalgic fans. In that case, <em>RuneScape<\/em> developer Jagex says that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/287877\/Why_Jagex_maintains_two_legacy_versions_of_RuneScape.php\">maintaining both classic and modern versions<\/a> of the game is something that helps it meet the desires of its community.<\/p>\n<p>Blizzard has not announced when the server will go live, saying only that it is currently in development.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alongside the announcement of a new World of Warcraft expansion at Blizzcon today, Blizzard Entertainment revealed that it will be launching its own classic World of Warcraft server at some point in the future. A &#8216;vanilla&#8217; version of World of Warcraft is something that longtime players of the game have been requesting for years. A [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4248,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4247\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}