Hey folks, didn't see a thread for this (perhaps it is not allowed?) but I wanted to see if any of you guys played on Nostalrius. It is a month old Vanilla server WoW that is brimming full of players and activity. Population is over 6,000...just on one server.
Perhaps you might have seen it on Twitch before Blizzard banned Nostalrius streamers.
Well, if you are missing the old days of vanilla WoW, you should really check it out. The experience has been personally amazing. The community is great and the world is so alive. The server is very blizzlike and the devs seem to know what they are doing. It is arguably the most popular server atm, and it can even be hard to quest. There is simply way too many people. Which has been great because it has led to some awesome world pvp and dungeon running has been a blast.
It seriously feels like I went back 10 years...the server feels like the real thing. It's tough! But very rewarding!
I will post some links you can check out. It is worth looking into if you are a WoW fan and loved the difficulty of Vanilla WoW, no dungeon finder, constant world PvP, progressive content releases, completely blizzlike, zero pay to win, 40 MAN RAIDS!, etc.
Btw, I play on Alliance and I am currently GM of one of the largest guild (EU+NA), so PM me if you want to play together! Perhaps we can get a list of players going? I am going to blog this just in case talking about WoW private servers in the 'Other Games' thread is illegal. If you are an admin of TL, please let me know if I am breaking rules.
I have no affiliation to Nostalrius, just a happy player on this new server!
wow I played in a private server a long time ago because I couldn't afford to pay for WoW (currency exchange issues) and it was nothing like this. There were very few people and some people paid to win, there were countless bugs, a lot of features were missing and the server was unstable... but I still enjoyed it a lot.
This is amazing. If only I had this back in the day. Nowadays I don't have time or much interest in spending so much time playing WoW anymore.
How do they get the money to support a project like this?
Stop pushing drugs on us! I have a life now, I can't go back the way I was 10 years ago. Sounds friggin awesome though, my dad asks all the time if there is a vanilla server and my best friend has been mmo jumping since wow fell from grace.
So this is going to slew off topic a bit. The title of the video should give you an idea of where I'm going, though the video itself is definitely on the topic of Nostalrius - The now famously closed WoW private server of vanilla goodness which Golgotha found and made this blog to talk about.
You've read this before of course. Blizzard did this and blizzard did that and they're bad people and I want my childhood back and blah blah tits blah blah. In my defence I enjoy Hearthstone, I still watch SC2 and really enjoyed the SSL finals just gone, I think Diablo 3 has become a worthy sequel and I was broadly in favour of nearly all the changes that Blizzard made to WoW up until I quit mid-cataclysm and after that I'm all oblivious ignorance. Blizzard are great. They're great. They make good games... but...
But... I'm having a... Boiling Frog Moment. Back when the stove went on the water seemed fine, everything was copacetic. But it's been getting hotter and hotter and now my little green ass is on fire and holy crap! The water's boiling!
When I look back, and it's a long way back to look now, what I remember is this:
Blizzard took games that other people made and did the same thing but much *much* better. There was polish and there was BLIZZARD POLISH. Their games were late sure but they were shined TO THE BONE. Somehow Blizzard would find the hidden switches that lurked under the surface of game design and flick-flick-flick out pops Diablo, Rock and Roll Racing, Warcraft, Warcraft 2, starcraft. These were game genres other people had created - rogue-a-likes, shooty racers, RTSs - Blizzard took the best of these genres and worked on them with Great teams of Great nerds. Great nerds who loved the same games you did just as much as you did. The results were sublime.
The development of Warcraft 3 is a very instructive example of this. It began as a game that was part 3rd person RPG and part RTS, it wasn't working so they broke it in half. The RTS bit with some mild RPG elements became Warcraft 3 - a game that created an industry. The other bit became World of Warcraft - the game which, like Sony's PlayStation, was so huge it entered the language; the public didn't say "MMO", they said "Warcraft". They gave novelty a good shot, it wasn't working, so they made a hard choice and decided to do what they were best at: Take formats they knew and loved and improved them until they shined.
I've always known them as that company, still think of them as that company without really examining it... But just now, just in this Nostalrius moment, I can jump forward nearly 20 years and see what happened.
Bizzard has become a company that makes choices to maximise it's perceived value to it's publicly traded parent company.
And that's great, that fine, that's not even a bad thing.
What's bad is how incredibly safe and pathetically uninspiring those choices have turned out to be.
The biggest risk they've taken in recent years is a throw away project using a famously tiny development budget to create a virtual card game. Can you play the percentages more than that? "If we succeed it's a licence to print money, if we fail, it was really cheap." Just to be clear: I think the game is great, it's just a very safe play.
The shutdown of Nostalrius smells of exactly the same lack of courage. "Should we try to engage these folks and possibly get into a bit of a legal/PR mess because it could be worth it, look how much they LOVE OUR GAME!! ... Oooooooooor should we just let our lawyers crush them like bugs?"
I'm tempted to engage SC2 here, but I won't. I think my ideas are pretty left field (Starting with me being annoyed they didn't program the game so replays were drag and drop in a web-browser/mini-client without need of a game at all - see I thought they were making sport 2.0 or something, Blizzardifying the freaking Olympics. More fool me.) so i'll just end up throwing this more off track. But I do see, even when it comes to the minutia of patching or expanding SC2, the same attitude here too.
The attitude that means they'll never break a game in half, deliver genius 18 months late, or give SC2 mappers and modders the tools and access needed to do great things.
The attitude that that means that if there's an option on the table which Blizzard knows the outcome of they'll chose it EVERY SINGLE TIME over a risk taken because they love the game and, god damn it, it might just work.
The attitude that you can avoid risk and survive as a creative entity.
So yea, you've seen it before: BLIZZARD SUCKS!
But I don't hate them. I won't say I'll never spend money on another one of their games, I won't say they make garbage, I won't say they are bad people or try to conjure a hate figure from the behemoth to blame. I'm too old for it. I know that their newer titles are just too much of a time investment for me no matter how good they are, I know I'll still be watching SC2 for years to come and I know that huge organisations, like the one Blizzard has become, have thousands of employees working dozens of problems in multiple departments.
I know they still do great stuff. I know there will be people in there bursting their hearts to make great games. I know that we all have a tendency to look back and remember things as better than they were.
I've just had a slap to the head named "Nostalrius is dead" and I'm suddenly wondering just how much longer Blizzard will survive as anything other than a brand name to sell units with. Hell, I'm wondering if that's what they are already...
I avoided mentioning both HotS and Overwatch as I felt the post was long enough and I've not played either of them.
But wasn't Overwatch formerly TITAN the mega project that was going to be an MMO but at some point that got canned so the team were asked "What can you make cheap with the work you've done already?".
If I've got that right then the desperate desire to make up for lost revenue would go part way to explaining the bizarre decision not to make it free to play.
I think Blizzard is the only the same in name now. The company that churned out masterpiece after masterpiece, polished to perfection, as you say, is gone. Likewise Starcraft 2 is similar to Broodwar only superficially. Not to say Blizzard and SC2 are bad compared to the competition, but using the old names has a false feel to me.
EPT
