Apparently some folks are taking the relaunch of the Nostalrius servers very badly: Team Elysium, the group behind the newest World of Warcraft emulator, say that on launch day, it was suffering a total of six simultaneous DDOS attacks. Indeed, the website is still intermittently wandering offline as we write this a day later.
Dear community, we are working to address the lag and login servers. However, please be aware, we are undergoing 6 concurrent DDoS attacks.
— Elysium Project (@elysium_dev) December 18, 2016
That wasn’t the only problem; the team also reported a rollback relating to incorrect items, PvP server issues that delayed its launch, and lag and login issues compounded by an apparently intentional banwave. The seeming popularity of the server likely explains a lot of the problems, as the Elysium says it’s seen just shy of 80,000 accounts created, more than half of which are from the original Nostalrius:
Day 4 Account Transfer/Creation Stats:
from Nostalrius — 43928
from Elysium — 1994
Total Accounts — 79376— Elysium Project (@elysium_dev) December 16, 2016
For their launch weekend trouble, those players were sitting in queues of up to 5000 players.
To recap here: The original Nostalrius emulator was shut down following a cease-and-desist letter from Blizzard, which has maintained its legal opposition to what it considers illegal emulators using its franchise IP. The administrators of that emulator attempted to use the sunset as leverage in convincing Blizzard to open vanilla or legacy servers of its own, but when Blizzard didn’t announce anything at BlizzCon — likely because it has its hands full with Legion — the Nostalrius admins followed through on a threat to “honor [Blizzard’s] core values” by giving its emulator code to the Ukraine-based Elysium in order to restart a PvE and PvP Nostalrius emu under its banner, which is precisely what happened last weekend.
