I played on Nostalrius. Loved it. I had gone on hiatus because of school, but literally a week after I came back to it, I heard the news. It was terrible. It felt like a community was lost. There literally was nothing more awesome than just logging in and seeing so many players just playing for the love of the game. People were friendly, we grouped up often, I met wonderful people, had my fair share of world PvP and ganking, etc. It was everything I could've hoped for. It really is a shame that Blizz decided to break apart something so pure.
(1) They should put up legacy servers at some point. Will it make a profit? Yes! Will I play it? Yes! Will I play it more than retail? Yes!
The last part is probably what they are afraid of. Blizzard could make buttloads re-releasing old content as a progression server. It has worked amazingly, and it really shows how well early WoW stands the test of time. But is it good for the future of WoW? Sadly no. People will become even more release-based. People will switch servers/expansions based on when content is being released. People won't be giving Legion/other xpacs the attention Blizz wants them to give it. But tbh, that is their own fault. If they can't make it appealing, well then that sucks for them. I'd honestly be curious to see what would happen if they brought up official legacy servers. Obviously they would be packed at the beginning, but would they stay packed? A lot of people think it will simply fall flat on its face. But Nostalrius showed that isn't necessarily true.
WoW is honestly one of the most interesting games to analyze. Why do people like legacy servers? Why is it so compelling? There isn't a clear answer. At first I thought it was just rose-colored goggles, but after playing on realms again for vanilla/TBC/wrath, I realized it wasn't. Those games were just damn good. And they fit together well--not perfectly, but they fit decently enough and had so many great things going for it. Somewhere down the line, the game just began to expand expand expand and they followed formulas down to the wire--"how can I make this more convenient? How will players react to this change? What is the safest choice for this feature?" As time moved on, the game changed. The values changed. The way WoW was played changed. But Nostalrius shows that it isn't just the players growing old. It was a culmination of things that came about in the expansions.
A lot of people underestimate the design of vanilla-WotLK. Yes, things were dumb. You had to spend money out of your butt to pay for abilities, you had to grind a lot to get quest items, you spent 80% of your time walking, abilities/classes were unbalanced--but all of this was consciously decided. Just because they were inconvenient doesn't mean they don't play an important role in the experience. I believe that is why legacy servers would succeed. And I think Blizzard would learn a lot from it. They really made a lot of irreversible decisions in their xpacs that took away from the atmosphere. And the #1 thing that people complain about when legacy servers come up is the "lack of community on retail". So why is there a lack of community? Did people just get bored? Are people getting older? Sure, some can be attributed to that, but if you're a game designer that is just chickening out. There is a bonafide reason, and servers like Nostalrius just go to show it.
Even if they don't come up with legacy servers, I hope they at least consider a WoW 2 or a different MMO altogether. I know a lot of people are against it, but it honestly has so much potential. I still love the WoW releases and I enjoy the new content, but I can't enjoy it for the same reasons I used to. Retail feels like a private server, and private servers feel like the retail I was used to. What a weird time this is.
(2) No, I don't think they should've shut it down. This is honestly the first time they tried to shut down something that wasn't trying to make a profit off their work. Blizzard could've just stayed passive. So what if Nostalrius was getting hundreds of thousands of players? If anything, it was at least exposing people to WoW again. And knocking one down accomplishes nothing besides pissing people off. Most of the players have gone to Kronos (there is even a guild named "Nostalrius Refugees"), and while they did separate the community, they also wrecked their own PR.
Eh, I could talk about this for tens and tens of pages. There are a million things I could say that I love about WoW and about how I hate where its gone. There are also plenty of things that I can praise present WoW for. But at the end of the day, all I can say is the community vibe has decreased (at least for the general playerbase) and the games have felt less and less whole. Something is missing, but idk whether it is possible to fix at this point. I'm still excited for Legion and I really hope it'll change my mind (seriously), but idk. I usually was optimistic towards Blizz, but things like this really make me second guess that.
