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Long story short, there was this huge vanilla World of Warcraft private server named Nostalrius, which ran the game as it was before the first expansion was released in January 2007. Being so huge, Blizzard eventually caught wind of this and forced them to shut down earlier this month, spawning a petition calling for Blizzard to support legacy servers in some forum which to date has garnered nearly 250,000 signatures. Blizzard's response is that they had no choice but to shut down the server and others like it, because ignoring them would harm their ability to defend their intellectual property in the future.

However, things would appear to not be so clear-cut, because Blizzard has now invited the Nostralrius team to their campus for discussions in a few weeks. The speculation (and perhaps hope of some) is that Blizzard will either grant the team a license to continue their private server, or that they will change their previous stance against hosting retail legacy servers of their own.

So what's your take? All games, especially MMOs, change over time as companies add new content and features to keep people from getting bored and dropping out of the game. Especially for older games, should companies give their players the ability to play older versions of their games for those wanting the nostalgia? Would players actually pay to play on such a server (remember, private servers are usually free to play, and companies like Blizzard are out to make money)? What would be the best way to make something like this work assuming that was what everyone wanted?

Eh, I dunno if it'd be pay-to-play: OSRS is a thing and free to use I believe.

I was about to say something similar. Back during my Runescape-playing days, a few months after they changed their combat systems, a ton of private servers started popping up over the internet (a few of which I am guilty of playing myself). Most of those private servers also happened to allow access to members-only items and areas while also continuing the old combat system. Not surprisingly, many of these servers were shut down by Jagex, Runescape's parent corporation, although I think one in particular was bought out and kept alive under Jagex control (though I'm not sure which one).

By popular demand, Jagex brought back "Old-School Runescape" (the OSRS to which Weiss is referring) on a separate server two or three years ago. I had thought, however, that you had to pay for membership in order to access OSRS, although it is free past that point. That is, members can access both OSRS and the full version of the new Runescape for the same price. I'll have to check.

That's kind of odd...if Runescape could offer this, why would Blizzard say that it was too difficult to do for WoW?

We explored options for developing classic servers and none could be executed without great difficulty. If we could push a button and all of this would be created, we would. However, there are tremendous operational challenges to integrating classic servers, not to mention the ongoing support of multiple live versions for every aspect of WoW.

Personally, I lost interest in World of Warcraft after the Cataclysm expansion...at that point, it felt to me like they had gone through all the content they had originally planned on doing, but the game was still making money so they had to think up new expansions to keep bringing in the money. I was dismayed that they did away with so much older content just to replace it with newer content...I thought a smarter solution would have been to have players go through the old content, and then play the new content at a higher level, so they could see what the result of their initial adventures of a zone were. Subsequent expansions failed to bring back my interest.

So I would like to see legacy servers...I think they have a role to play, but I'm not sure I would pay to play one, considering that I oppose models where you buy the game and still have to pay monthly subscription fees to play it as well.