🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 12 Apr 2016 10:43:31 +0100, Catriona R wrote:
>  On Tue, 12 Apr 2016 09:29:11 -0000 (UTC), Lewis
> <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> wrote:
> 
> >In message <d0a705ed-3c6d-4667...@googlegroups.com> 
> >  Shinnokxz <shin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> And that's that with Nostalrius. Too bad.
> >
> >> Though it appears the vanilla server community and outcry has reached
> >> levels it's never been before. Sooner or later Blizzard is going to
> >> have to breach the subject and offer something up.
> >
> >No they will not.
> >
> >> The shutdown was typical Blizzard show, but really pissed on the
> >> people looking for a reason to even bother with WoW anymore. I suspect
> >> when Legion is released and subscribers have reached an all time low
> >> post-xpac release, then Blizzard will consider giving it a whirl.
> >
> >No. That is never going to happen.
> 
>  That's a pretty confident assertion, I don't think anyone can say
>  "never" with Blizzard.

While that is true...

>  Times change, and right now they're throwing away money by not offering a
>  service which would have interested a LOT of people

... but I am not convinced that operating vanilla servers would be
economically viable for them. I don't know the inner workings of Blizzard
but being a software developer I can tell you that at any company I have
ever worked at, it would have taken quite a lot of effort to revive a
software version of 10 years before. Apart from that effort, it would also
mean running the servers (and while a lot of that is certainly automated,
there is sure to be some human work required as well) and some kind of
support infrastructure.

And 15k (or even 150k) players sounds like a lot, that would justify a
handful of servers and I doubt that the economies of scale would work for
that low a number.

So even considering people would be willing to pay a full subscription to
play on vanilla servers, I am not sure it would pay.


Even so, it might be a very good move PR wise to offer vanilla servers
themselves, but considering how Blizzard is run these days, I doubt they
would be willing to lose money to satisfy a small part of their player base.

So I my take on the situation is pretty much the same as Lewis': I don't see
them offering vanilla servers (though I am hedging my bets by being less
certain about it :-)

I suspect they just shut down the private servers for two reasons:
- those servers were violating their IP (even if it was an old version of
  their IP)
- they might have feared that they were losing paying customers fed up with
  current content to those private servers (and I think they probably were;
  I just don't think those customers will come back as paying customers now
  that the private servers are gone)

Cheers
Urbin
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