The Nostalrius team isn’t the only one heading to Irvine to meet with Blizzard: The ex-WoW, ex-Firefall developer Mark Kern says he’s locked in a meeting as well.
“I’ll be having my legacy server meeting with Blizzard CEO, Mike Morhaime, next week on Thursday,” he posted yesterday. “Blizzard has also agreed to accept delivery of the printed petition. […] While we are not guaranteed a vanilla or legacy server by Blizzard, it’s a very good sign that they have agreed to meet and at least talk about it.”
Nostalrius was an illegal classic-ruleset World of Warcraft emulator with an active playerbase of a self-reported 150,000 players; it was taken offline by its own administrators in April following a legal threat from copyright holder Blizzard. A concomitant petition asking Blizzard to cooperate with Nostalrius and support vanilla servers has swelled now to over 250,000 signatures.
Former World of Warcraft team lead Kern, probably best known to MMO players for his bold proclamations and forcible removal from the Firefall studio Red 5, became involved in the Nostalrius saga when he agreed to hand-deliver the petition and shot a video of himself reading an open letter to Morhaime asking the studio to support or provide classic servers for the game.
As recently as last week, Blizzard was still reiterating that its position on classic servers has not changed. To a Twitch stream overrun with spammers shrieking “LEGACY,” Blizzard’s Ion Hazzikostas explained that his team is focused on how to fix the “degeneracy” of broken parts of the early game rather than on recreating a game from the past.
