Following the tumultuous legal ride that was the vanilla World of Warcraft “Nostalrius” servers and their subsequent renaming and relaunching, we’ve learned another fan-server focusing on the MMORPG’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade, is coming under fire.
Server operator Gummy and his team at Felmyst have received a cease & desist letter from Blizzard Entertainment, who naturally don’t want fans using code to emulate portions of an online game that is still being updated and supported (TBC is currently the only region to be untouched since its launch).
The C&D came mere weeks after the emulated server opened up to the public, with an open beta. Fan-servers like this pop up to capture the feeling of progression, gear, and end-game content players experienced at the time said content was live on the real servers.
“It makes me happy, and programming makes me happy,” Gummy said. “Of course, I am sad that things didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped but I don’t think I’d change any of the decisions I made […] This project gave the last four years of my life a sense of purpose that I thoroughly enjoyed.”
The original World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern has been vocal on why legacy servers just make sense, and sounded off regarding this as well. “Blizzard spends more on legal fees shutting down severs than it would cost to put up their own vanilla WoW server,” Kern said on Twitter.
Previously, Blizzard said they were “closely following” the situation with Nostalrius, and haven’t turned down the idea – yet. This came after Kern actually met with current staff on the MMORPG and discussed the possibility of legacy servers, following a wildly popular fan-petition.
World of Warcraft’s latest expansion, Legion, released worldwide in August of last year. The Burning Crusade remains one of my favorite expansions to the MMORPG to date – if you still play or have played the game what is your favorite expansion? Sound off in the comments below!