Blizzard CEO Discusses Vanilla WoW Server Options

It's been less than two months since Blizzard announced that they would be taking legal action against the popular Vanilla World of Warcraft server, Nostalrius. Private MMO servers have been shut down plenty of times, and they usually close down with little fanfare. However, this case is very different, and just yesterday, Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime sat down to discuss it with a former WoW developer.

So what made this server so special? Well, during the time that it was online, roughly 800,000 people signed up and played on it. When it was shutdown, there were 150,000 currently active players. That's a lot of players for a private server that was only up for roughly a year. With so many people passionate about playing on a Vanilla WoW server, Blizzard's legal actions were met by a lot of upset people.

A petition was created and signed by more than 250,000 people, which prompted former WoW developer Mark Kern to step in and see if he couldn't mediate the conversation with Blizzard on the topic of Vanilla servers. Yesterday, the first meeting between Mark Kern and Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime happened.

Copies of the petition hanging out at Blizzard HQ

While it was more of a preliminary discussion than anything, there were a few interesting tidbits that did come from it. While Blizzard stated that there are a lot of challenges to bringing back Vanilla servers, the company still has all of the source code from back then, so they have the tools to make it happen.

It seems that the team at Blizzard has actually been paying a great deal of attention to all of the news and outcries from fans, regarding both Nostalrius, and Vanilla servers. Kern stated that when he brought everything to the table that fans wanted said, Morhaime and the Blizzard team already knew about it, just because they've been listening.

For now, the company can't make any promises about Vanilla servers, but they are willing to listen. They've scheduled a meeting with the Nostalrius team for next month, where they will hopefully discuss the direction that they want to go, and possibly come to come kind of compromise regarding what many fans want, which is to relive the classic days of World of Warcraft.

If you want to read all of Mark Kern's comments on the meeting, you can read them all on Twitter, over the course of about 30 tweets.