According To The Nostalrius Team, Blizzard "[WANTS] To Have Legacy WoW Servers"

Nostalrius' meeting with Blizzard has come and gone. After spending some time preparing to do so, the team behind the popular World of Warcraft private server announced the details of the meeting earlier today. One quote stands out among the rest: "After this meeting, we can affirm that these guys WANT to have legacy WoW servers, that is for sure."

However, the announcement explains that are a few things getting in the way. Parts of both the client and server from that era are missing. It is explained as follows.

However, in order to generate the server (and the client), a complex build system is being used. It is not just about generating the “WoW.exe” and “Server.exe” files. The build process takes data, models, maps, etc. created by Blizzard and also generates client and server specific files. The client only has the information it needs and the server only has the information that it needs.

This means that before re-launching vanilla realms, all of the data needed for the build processes has to be gathered in one place with the code. Not all of this information was under a version control system. In the end, whichever of these parts were lost at any point, they will have to be recreated: this is likely to take a lot of resources through a long development process.

It was also noted that "Blizzard also needs to provide a very polished game that will be available to their millions of players, something existing unofficial legacy servers cannot provide."

Regardless, the Nostalrius team seems to believe there is hope yet. As the announcement puts it: "this meeting isn’t an end point for us, more like a milestone."