Fans have now propelled the Nostalrius petition asking Blizzard to reconsider World of Warcraft vanilla servers to over 200,000 signatures, which means that former WoW team lead Mark Kern is following through on his promises by
1) Printing the petition. All 5000 pages of it.
2) Writing an open letter to [Blizzard CEO] Mike [Morhaime], and sharing it with the community.
3) Shooting a video of the open letter and uploading it to @SodaPoppinTv’s channel
4) E-mailing the whole thing to Mike on Friday and making the letter/video public on Friday as well.
5) Following up on Monday with a call to Mike on his cell and office.
Kern has been no stranger to notoriety in the MMO space since his departure from Blizzard. As founder and CEO of Red 5 Studios, he went on the record suggesting then-modern WoW was a stale formula and had made MMOs too easy. “Sometimes I look at WoW and think ‘what have we done?’ I think I know. I think we killed a genre,” he famously said in 2013. His own game, Firefall, was at one time a hopeful contender for transcending the “circle of suck,” but he himself was forcibly removed from the company following layoffs and the suspension of PvP in the game; former employees called out his behavior as CEO “erratic” and mocked his infamous e-sports bus project. He founded a new studio for a VR MMO in 2014.
Kern is no stranger to petitions and causes, either.
The real question is what Morhaime does next.
