Another World of Warcraft emulator bites the dust this week. Year-old “Progressive Vanilla” WoW emu Nostalrius announced on its official website that pursuant to a recent legal complaint from Blizzard, it will be shutting down its server, rendering 800,000 accounts and 150,000 active players homeless. The official site says,
“Yesterday, we received a letter of formal notice from US and french lawyers, acting on behalf of Blizzard Entertainment, preparing to stand trial against our hosting company OVH and ourselves in less than a week now. This means the de facto end of Nostalrius under its current form.”
The server admins say they will shut down the server on April 10th, and while they have no specific “plan for the future,” they do say they will make available the source code to other players to help them set up their own emu. They’ve also started a petition to ask that Blizzard’s Mike Morhaime allow their server in the absence of official legacy servers. “It won’t bring Nostalrius back,” they write, “but it is a way to express ourselves as a community.”
Given how notorious and persistent Blizzard is about shutting down illegal emus for its live games, we suspect that’s true.
