Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

This is the seventh part of my write-up. You can read the other parts here.

Part 7 – Classic and Legion

Classic was a separate game created to emulate early WoW. Legion was the sixth expansion for retail WoW, coming after Warlords of Draenor but preceding Battle for Azeroth. Since Legion was relatively uncontroversial, I didn’t want to dedicate a whole post to discussing it, so I have added it to the end of this one.

“You don’t want to do that. You think you do, but you don’t.”

Those words, delivered by WoW executive producer J. Allen Brack, became immediately symbolic of the relationship Blizzard had with its community. The customer was not always right. In fact, the customer was a fucking idiot who needed to sit back, shut up, and keep paying. At least, that’s how it was seen. In the years since, Brack’s statement has only grown more infamous, more telling, and more painful for the company. It resurfaces whenever Blizzard shoots itself in the foot – an increasingly common occurrence these days.

It came in response to a question asked at the 2013 Blizzcon Q&A – had they ever considered creating legacy servers so that players could revisit old expansions? The answer wasn’t just ‘no’, it was a disgusted, emphatic, overwhelming ‘no’. It was a ‘no’ that said the developers were affronted that they had even been asked.

It wasn’t the first time, either. They had been refusing the idea for years. In February 2008 a community manager said, “We were at one time internally discussing the possibility fairly seriously, but the long term interest in continued play on them couldn’t justify the extremely large amount of development and support resources it would take to implement and maintain them. We’d effectively be developing and supporting two different games."

Again in November 2009, they said no.

"We have answered these requests quite a few times now saying that we have no plans to open such realms, and this is still the case today. We have no plans to open classic realms or limited expansion content realms.”

And again in August 2010, Tom Chilton responded to requests with this,

"Currently, my answer would be probably not. The reason I say that is because any massively multiplayer game that has pretty much ever existed and has ever done any expansions has always gotten the nostalgia of, ‘Oh God, wouldn’t it be great if we could have classic servers!’ and more than anything else that generally proves to be nostalgia. In most cases - in almost all cases - the way it ends up playing out is that the game wasn’t as good back then as people remember it being and then when those servers become available, they go play there for a little bit and quickly remember that it wasn’t quite as good as what they remembered in their minds and they don’t play there anymore and you set up all these servers and you dedicated all this hardware to it and it really doesn’t get much use. So, for me, the historical lesson is that it’s not a very good idea to do"

Perhaps he was right. But the demand was clearly there. And since Blizzard failed to provide, players did the job themselves.

Enter the private server.

These were alternative copies of wow, hosted by a third party. Many private servers were simply replicas of the retail game, offering the same content for free. Others specialised, providing powers and mod commands, the ability to skip straight to max level, to gain items that might normally take weeks or months to get, or visit secret areas which were usually inaccessible.

Since private servers did not update along with the main game, they acted as a kind of time capsule. A private server created during Wrath of the Lich King would stay there long after new expansions had come and gone. Modern World of Warcraft bore almost no resemblance to its earliest form, not in its philosophy, its aesthetic, its gameplay, or most importantly, it’s community. As players became increasingly dissatisfied with WoW’s new direction, and began to hunger for return to the older instalments, these servers gained a new relevance. In some cases, private servers could be listed among the most popular MMORPGs in the world – quite the achievement for something technically illegal.

One of the most successful was Nostalrius, a server preserving Patch 1.12 – the sacred final patch before WoW’s first expansion. It was true to life in every possible way. Recreating the experience of vanilla WoW was easier said than done - not many servers had been able to crack it, but Nostalrius was one.

”Nostalrius is a living museum: a near-perfect record of a place, design choices and play styles that don’t exist anymore.”

What’s more, it was a totally non-profit endeavour. Its creators never asked for any kind of re-numeration, though they could have. They ran the server at a loss. Over its short lifetime (it was up for little more than a year) Nostalrius grew at a faster rate than Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, or Elder Scrolls Online.

“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,” the team wrote in their AMA (LINKS TO REDDIT).

But it was not to last.

On the 10th of April 2016, Blizzard issued the Nostalrius administrators with a cease and desist letter. At that time, the server had 800,000 registered accounts, 150,000 of which were active. The creators had no choice. During its final days, users flooded onto the server. Those crowds, a seething mass of furious indignation and loss, reached a scale that hadn’t been seen in retail WoW for years. It was covered across gaming media.

Some players fired off /cry emotes, others mounted their most impressive horses, or spammed the chat with calls to protest, or made a last ditch attempt to advertise their guilds, and a few simply wished a fond farewell to the server they had come to call home. On the Horde side, hundreds of players marched the hour-long journey from Orgrimmar to Thunder Bluff, before leaping to their deaths from its highest peak. “ATTACK BLIZZARD SERVERS!! TAKE THEM DOWN!!”, one player screamed as he fell.

”THANK YOU NOSTALRIUS FOR THE GREAT MEMORIES THANK YOU AND GOODBYE! <3”

Time ran out, and the game reset to the login screen, where the black portal sat glittering in the background. ‘Disconnected from server’, said a popup message in yellow text. The buttons no longer worked. Nostalrius was dead.

And its community exploded.

All of Blizzard’s social media accounts were overwhelmed by angry messages, begging them to find some morsel of mercy and, in some cases, threatening them if they didn’t. Major gaming figures weighed in. The scandal broke into every forum, every subreddit, and every server. No private server had ever been the topic of such passionate discourse. But the Nostalrius scandal had come to represent more than a server, it was a martyr in the fight for the right of the consumer to preserve games. Vanilla WoW was not the first game to disappear because its owners no longer wanted to support it. Someday, all online games would face the same fate.

Across the video game industry, a conversation arose. Was modern World of Warcraft the same game it used to be, or something else completely? If Blizzard were not going to provide vanilla servers, did they have the ethical right to stop players from making them, just because they owned the IP? Was this new attempt to clamp down on private servers a desperate bid to reclaim players who had left the retail game? That last question provoked a backlash of its own.

”This is not stealing profits from your game”, declared Jontron. “These people weren’t even subbed. In fact, most of these people just don’t like your current game, so they’re trying to go back and play your old one.”

A petition was created on Change.org to resurrect Nostalrius following its closure. Ex-World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern pledged that if it gained more than 200,000 signatures, he would print all five thousand pages and deliver them to Blizzard President Mike Morhaime personally. It reached 279,000.

In June of that year, something remarkable happened. The team behind Nostalrius was invited to a meeting at Blizzard, where they met Morhaime and Brack, as well as Tom Chilton, Ion Hazzikostas, and Marco Koegler – all the men who held power over the future of Warcraft. For corporate executives to meet with people who had effectively stolen their game was unheard of. They didn’t even put them under a non-disclosure agreement – which Blizzard usually required for all visitors.

”People at key positions inside Blizzard attended the meeting. They were also all very interested, curious, attentive, and asked a lot of questions about all of the topics we mentioned.

We did everything we could to make this presentation & discussion as professional as possible, which was something that clearly was a pleasant unexpected surprise for the whole Blizzard team, Mike Morhaime included.”

It was planned to last two hours, but went on for five. It was summarised on the Nostalrius forum.

”One of the game developers said at a point that WoW belongs to gaming history and agreed that it should be playable again, at least for the sake of game preservation, and he would definitely enjoy playing again.”

The most important thing to come out of this meeting was a confirmation from Blizzard – they wanted legacy servers, but it would be a tremendous undertaking. At the end of the meeting, Blizzard promised to keep in touch.

But they didn’t. In fact, Brack wrote a letter prior to Blizzcon 2016 insisting that legacy servers would not be discussed at the event.

”We had invested our hearts and souls into this meeting, and we got some really good feedback while we were there. But after we left, we heard nothing from Blizzard for months - even after continuing to reach out. And so what were we supposed to do at that point? Were we supposed to just let the legacy server die? Is the dream dead? Well we took things into our own hands, and that’s when the Elysium project happened. We released the server code for the entire Nostalrius project to the Elysium team, Including the player databases for both of our servers.”

Elysium was a new project intended to take over from Nostalrius. A short while later, Nostalrius itself was re-created, but not for long. It shutdown and withdrew its code from Elysium under pressure from Blizzard. Elysium struggled on for a short while alone, until it was broken up from within by internal strife and embezzlement.

All seemed lost.

“I want to talk about ice cream.”

It was Blizzcon 2017. New adventures had been announced for Hearthstone, new maps for Overwatch, and StarCraft 2 was going free to play. The next World of Warcraft expansion was about to be revealed, and there was no doubt that ‘Battle for Azeroth’ would overshadow everything else at the convention. That was until J. Allen Brack stood on stage and started discussing food.

”Before we get to the big news, I want to take a minute. And I want to talk about ice cream. Ice cream is great. Ice cream is one of my favourite desserts. Personally, I love chocolate, and I love cookies and cream. Cookies and cream is actually my all-time favourite dessert. But I understand that for some of you, your favourite flavour… is vanilla.”

A trailer played, reversing through all of the expansions in order, before returning to the famous opening shot from when World of Warcraft first came out. The reaction was colossal.

”It brings tears to my eyes thinking of sitting down with my son and wife to show them WoW Classic.”

[…]

”Thank you blizzard for giving me the game i fell in love with back”

[…]

”THE ABSOLUTE MADMAN BLIZZARD ACTUALLY DID IT. STRAIGHT FROM THE GUY WHO GAVE US, “YOU THINK YOU DO BUT YOU DON’T”.”

[…]

”No game has had me tear up before, that changed when I saw the announcement. And after rewatching this 40 times, I still get the same feeling.”

It wasn’t just a trailer, it was a landmark shift in Blizzard’s philosophy toward its games and its community.

With a quick two-minute trailer, Blizzard backpedaled on years of dismissal to finally offer fans an official, unblemished version of the world’s most popular MMO as it existed in 2004. This is something they said they’d never do.

To this day, the trailer is the second most upvoted post on /r/wow (LINKS TO REDDIT).

”Amazing. I can now ruin my 30’s in the exact same way as I ruined my teens.”

[…]

”This is not good for my career prospects”

[…]

”I’m legit crying right now. SO FUCKING PUMPED!”

[…]

”It took me a few seconds to get the ice cream bit, but when I got it my jaw fucking dropped.”

It’s really difficult for me to convey quite how shocked the community was. This wasn’t like any other announcement. It was spectacular to watch it all unfold.

There were a lot of questions asked in the following days.

Would this be covered by a normal WoW subscription, or separate service entirely? What version of Vanilla would be chosen? It had spanned two years and twelve patches, after all, each different in its own way. Which bugs, glitches and performance issues would be included for authenticity, and which would be left out?

No one at Blizzard knew the answers to most of these questions. The project was still in its early stages.

“We’re going to hire people specifically for this job, and we’re going to staff it with people who are interested in bringing back Classic WoW in the best, most authentic way,” Brack says. “And that’s how we’ll be successful.”

Even with the whole team focused on it, several years would pass before Classic went live. Blizzard has always loved deadlines – especially the whooshing noise they made as they went by. There were those who started asking why it was taking so long.

If you’ve been around the World of Warcraft ecosphere for a while, Blizzard’s tentativeness might come as a surprise. There is no shortage of emulated vanilla servers on the internet. The official subreddit for the scene points to 15 of them, and there are dozens more holding crystallized copies of Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, or Cataclysm—wherever you happened to leave your happiness.

The reason was this: Blizzard didn’t want to just throw up an emulated Vanilla server. They wanted to fully integrate Classic into the modern game. Brack explained more in an interview with PCGamer,

“We think we have a way to run the Classic servers on the modern technical infrastructure. The infrastructure is how we spin up instances and continents, how the database works. It’s those core fundamental pieces, and running two MMOs of that size is a daunting problem. But now we think we have a way to have the old WoW version work on the modern infrastructure and feel really good.”

Why did they bother? Well if they took the easy route, they faced a number of potential issues down the line. These servers were unstable, buggy and incredibly insecure to hacking. Anyone who had touched a private server could tell you so. The work required was immense.

”First, they DO have the source code for Vanilla WoW. Code version control systems are not something new, as it has been a standard in the industry for a long time. With these systems, they can retrieve the code at any given previous backup date.

However, in order to generate the server (and the client), a complex build system is being used. It is not just about generating the “WoW.exe” and “Server.exe” files. The build process takes data, models, maps, etc. created by Blizzard and also generates client and server specific files. The client only has the information it needs and the server only has the information that it needs.

This means that before re-launching vanilla realms, all of the data needed for the build processes has to be gathered in one place with the code. Not all of this information was under a version control system. In the end, whichever of these parts were lost at any point, they will have to be recreated: this is likely to take a lot of resources through a long development process.

In addition to the technical aspects of releasing a legacy server Blizzard also needs to provide a very polished game that will be available to their millions of players, something existing unofficial legacy servers cannot provide.”

A lot was still up in the air. Blizzard were clear, however, that it would be as authentic as possible. They sneered down their noses at the quality-of-life changes which had, according to fans, ruined the game. Guns and bows would need ammo, pets needed to be fed, and they even laboured to recreate the annoyances caused by early 2000s dial-up internet, like spell batching, which processed user inputs in clusters rather than instantly. But some changes remained, like the in-game clock (which wasn’t originally added until Wrath).

Dungeon Finder? Of course not.

Cross-realm grouping? Never.

Flying? Come on.

Achievements? Nope.

Unified Auction Houses? No Way.

”ITS FUCKING HAPPENING!”

On Tuesday 14th March 2019, the fandom awoke. News. Fresh news. Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, thousands of nerds stopped on the spot, and scampered back to their mothers’ basements like they’d just won a golden ticket to the chocolate factory. They finally knew (LINKS TO REDDIT) when Classic would go live.

”I just have to stay alive for 3 more months.”

Another user wrote, “THAT’S THE WEEK OF MY HONEYMOON - WEDDING’S CANCELLED”, and he was reassured that if his fiancé was ‘the one’, she would understand. She did not.

”This is what I imagine a former junkie feels like when they’re offered an Oxy.”

Rather than start at 1.12, Blizzard decided to resurrect Vanilla from its first moment. It would begin with Onyxia and Molten Core - the two first raids to be added originally. From there, the patches of Vanilla would be added over the course of a year and a half, so that players could relive Classic as authentically as possible – and so they wouldn’t get bored and unsubscribe.

The days ticked slowly by, and the hype grew to astronomical levels.

”Fuck it’s so close, SO GOD DAMN CLOSE

I’ve dreamt of this since I first got into private servers and I never thought they’d do it but the mad lads did it

Honestly half the fun right now is being part of they hype wave, it’s like sitting at a starting line revving your engine”

[…]

”Shit, it’s like being back in 2004 all over again, waiting for release. But the hype is deeper, I have so many memories I can’t wait to re-live.”

[…]

”Never in my life have I been this excited to play a game.

AZEROTH, I’M COMING HOME BABY! JUST 11 MORE DAYS, 10 HOURS, 12 MINUTES AND 30 SECONDS!!”

Then all of a sudden, the day had arrived. On 26th August 2019, the Classic servers opened, and immediately collapsed due to high demand. But once players got past the hours-long queues, they rushed into the Azeroth of their childhoods. To many, it was everything they had dreamed of. They dived in with youthful abandon. Over a million concurrent viewers tuned in just to watch it on Twitch.

”WoW was essentially struck with a nuclear blast of nostalgia that sent the franchise back into the stratosphere, appropriately enough, for the first time since 2004.

Sixteen years after the game’s original release, WoW permeates the many spheres of online culture once more. What’s most impressive, though, is how the game has stayed resurgent. While the nostalgia surrounding Classic WoW was a driving force for the resurrection of the franchise in August 2019, that nostalgia has morphed into a sustainable platform for WoW.”

During an earnings call a few months later, J Allen Brack revealed the extent of Classic’s success.

“Given the content updates for modern WoW, and the cadence that we have for Classic, we exited our year with a subscriber base that was double what it was at the end of Q2.”

Stories immediately flooded out of the game. Screenshots showed players queuing up in their hundreds to kill mobs in busy areas. One player sent another a box full of mangoes following a conversation in a random battleground. A famous Guild sponsored a race (LINKS TO REDDIT) to be the world’s first max level character, only for a completely separate unrelated player to beat them to the punch. In one bizarre case, hackers discovered a way to leap between copies of the world, in order to get a PvP advantage. I would write about the political intrigue and guild drama surrounding the opening of Ahn’Qiraj, but someone has already done a good job of it (LINKS TO REDDIT).

The long and short of it is this: Classic was a resounding success. It re-vitalised the game and even prompted people to look at retail wow in a more positive light. That was a return to player driven adventures, bizarre encounters, and collective action. For the first time in many years, Warcraft was a community defined by its optimism, not it’s nihilism. And all this did wonders for Blizzards reputation at a time when they desperately needed some good PR.

”People were loving this recreation of the great massively multiplayer game’s early days and lamenting what WOW had become in the 14 years since. Someone celebrated freedom from the tyranny of item levels. Someone mentioned the hushed sound design, noting that they could hear every footstep and clink of their chainmail. Someone else remembered how the community was so much friendlier back then, in so much less of a rush.”

”git gud scrub”

For some, Classic was a rude awakening.

WoW had been slowly replaced over the years like the ship of Theseus, piece by piece, patch by patch, until nothing remained of its original form. Those who noticed the change were often unable to pinpoint what exactly was happening, or why. But Classic peeled back all the layers to reveal the bones of Warcraft, and it suddenly became clear.

It wasn’t just that the game was buggy or janky or tedious – though it was all of those things. It was a product of a its time, built in the days of Ultima and Everquest, and that showed in its philosophy. What should be rewarded? What should be punished? How should players overcome challenges? What makes a game fun? Is it more liberating to have a thousand things to do, or nothing at all?

Blizzard answered these questions differently in 2004. Nothing came easily. The time and effort required simply to hit max level were crushing. And for every player the game captured in a cruel cycle of addiction, another bounced right off it.

Perhaps more than anything, Vanilla WoW had been designed for new players. That might sound contradictory, but stick with me. Vanilla had been a new game. Most of its players had never seen anything like it, and it was made with that in mind. While every new expansion brought along more and more features to help newbies find their feet, they gradually abandoned them as the target demographic. Rather than inspiring wonder, they opted for spectacle. The point was not to capitalise on Vanilla, but to depart from it.

The best example is when Cataclysm remade the two continents from Vanilla. Each zone became a sequel to its previous (lost forever) self. A new player wouldn’t understand the references or story threads, but that was okay. New players weren’t who Blizzard wanted to impress.

Vanilla had been awkward, unintuitive, confusing, unforgiving, and full of bizarre experimental edges, but it was only after Blizzard ironed out those wrinkles that players realised how much they lent the game its character.

“It’s bad, but it’s also really good? I mean, it’s still a lot of fun, but it’s also pretty garbage. It’s garbage, but it’s still a classic.”

[…]

”There can be no argument at all that quest design and storytelling were better in early WoW. They could be quite poor. There’s an awful lot of mechanical drudgery, with endless culling of wildlife and troublesome local populations, low drop rates and high kill counts padding out the levels with makework. You can find grace notes, of course, like an amusing spat between rival goblin factions, but these could often end up fighting the game systems or poor design.”

It has always been difficult to pin down what made Vanilla great. Topics like design philosophy and historical context are complicated and difficult to explain.

”I logged into current WoW, and just looked at the character screen, wondering: How it was possible to start with such a great game, and end up here like this?”

A lot of people in the Classic community boiled it down to difficulty. Its leaders encouraged an almost cult-like obsession with ‘the grind’, because things had been better back in the day, before the game went soft. They thought suffering and inconvenience were part of what made WoW great.

”If there’s no sense of challenge, there’s no sense of reward (LINKS TO REDDIT)

In retail, challenge is only an optional way to see content, so there’s much less incentive to actually do the challenging content”

Not everyone was unreasonable, and plenty of Classic fans (LINKS TO REDDIT) mocked those who took it all too seriously. But some were, and unfortunately they clung to the spotlight. To them, you weren’t a ‘true fan’ until you accepted Vanilla into your heart. And if you weren’t a true fan, you were the enemy.

Yes, rose-coloured glasses were involved, but you couldn’t say that to people in these circles. To suggest their feelings were the product of nostalgia meant implying they weren’t ‘real’. It was tantamount to an insult, and had been used by the fans and developers of modern WoW for years to dismiss calls for legacy servers.

”Nostalgia is, of course, an important part of the overall picture. WoW landed at a really formative time for a lot of people, a time when they were in high school or in college, had a lot of free time, and all their friends had a lot of free time, and their lives meshed well with the pace of the game, and the game became their shared social space. That is a potent element.”

[…]

When asked about the differences (LINKS TO REDDIT) between modern WoW and Vanilla, one user responded, “Vanilla didn’t have people crying about how much better Vanilla allegedly was.”

Discussions of difficulty in games have always evoked strong emotions, and WoW is no exception. This Puritan style of thinking was nothing new – fans of the Souls games had been treading these waters for years. But in the lead-up to Classic, it gained a toxic edge.

Vanilla became an almost mythological entity. Its strengths made it great, they said, but its weaknesses also made it great. Criticism wasn’t just wrong, it was seen by some as actively harmful, borderline blasphemous. But a lot of the people who bought into this idea had never actually been around during WoW’s early days, and so when the first servers came online, they saw behind the curtain.

”For many, this complete lack of direction was clearly overwhelming. The global chat was a chaotic mess of players asking where to find gnolls and bandits, with many picking a random direction from the quest hub and striking out to explore the region, hoping to get lucky and happen upon the right kind of enemy.”

For a lot of players, that was the moment they realised this promised land had never been that great to begin with. They found themselves apostates, cast out of a fandom which was far too busy touching heaven to even notice them leave.

”Wow Classic is god awful. (LINKS TO REDDIT) I played the game at various stages and i have no idea how Wow even survived when it launched in this state. People shit on retail when its magnitudes superior to classic no matter its faults. Classic doesnt even do the basic things well at all.”

[…]

”There is a strong and passionate fanbase of folks for whom this is the best thing ever, but I think a number of people don’t realize how many quality-of-life and mechanical changes have been made in the years since.

Blizzard may have strayed too far in some areas, but it’s hard not to see some of the tedium reintroduced to WoW with Classic.”

Some weren’t sure if they loved it or hated it.

”Blizzard could not have picked a better zone to stir nostalgia and then skewer it on the truth of how boring the game could be.”

But everyone acknowledged there was something here.

”World of Warcraft Classic is compelling in ways that modern WOW isn’t.”

[…]

”I think it’s true that Classic offers something for everyone that retail WoW cannot. They say it’s about the journey not the destination, and I definitely feel that’s the case with WoW.”

And veterans weren’t the only ones who loved it.

”I figure this is mostly for older gamers who have a rose-colored, nostalgic view of the game, but I’m a little curious, so I test it out.

Oh boy was I wrong.” (LINKS TO REDDIT)

It’s hard to have an impartial talk about Classic. The discourse has always been fraught. Classic actively fosters an in-group mentality, due to its emphasis on social dependency. You can’t get by as a lone wolf. You can’t dip a toe in the water and hope to remain competitive. Either you give everything to the game, or you get left behind.

”If you’ve only got a few hours a week to dedicate to an MMO, Classic may not be the game for you and you may be better off looking at modern Warcraft to fill that Azeroth-shaped hole.”

[…]

”You spent time together (LINKS TO REDDIT) and got to know each other. Maybe that still happens in small doses but it used to be the whole game.”

This aspect was so strong that for some players, Vanilla WoW was less a game and more a social network.

”WoW was so popular because it gave a sense of community (LINKS TO REDDIT) - something that wasn’t really available elsewhere. Social media wasn’t a thing, outside of MySpace(lol) and bare bones Facebook you needed a college email to sign up for. No Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Discord, etc. So after a long hard day at work/school, you chilled with your guildmates, who were doing the same.”