Nostalrius To Release Source Code Following BlizzCon's Lack Of A World Of Warcraft Legacy Server Announcement
After reneging on its promise to release the Nostalrius source code to the community following communication with Blizzard, the Nostalrius team has done a complete 180, deciding that, once again, releasing the source code is the best plan of action. The source code release will be done in waves. Nostalrius will first give the code to the Elysium private server, where some of its core volunteers are already working. Once Elysium is up and running with Nostalrius' code, Nostalrius will then hand off the burden of creating the documentation necessary for an open source release to Elysium. Once the documentation has been created, both the documentation and source code will be released to the public.
The idea is that this will somehow "reunite the community." The problem that I see with that is that Elysium will likely never be "the new Nostalrius." The moment has passed and, as Sean has mentioned on the podcast, Legion placated many. It's going quite well and that has undoubtedly cut into "Elysium 2.0's" core playerbase. Moreover, the moment the source code goes out, dozens of servers are going to pop up, looking to capture even a fraction of the audience that Nostalrius once had. In fact, I believe that, in doing this, they will cause the community to splinter even more, creating a market similar to that of Ultima Online shards or Tibia private servers where the one percent have a modest audience of 500 to 1000 concurrent users while the rest struggle to reach 100.
Furthermore, does this not put a target on Elysium's back? Won't Blizzard be watching the server, which would then be running the same backend as a server that they've already cease and desisted, to see if it hits the critical mass necessary to take legal action? And what of the source code? What action will they take against the party that releases it?
But perhaps the most important point is that the entire thing seems petulant. In commenting on it at all, stating that they had no intention of talking about Legacy servers at BlizzCon, Blizzard employees have collectively said more than they ever have in the past. It's a large step up from the now-infamous response of "you think you do, but you don't." In the—admittedly unlikely—event that the company is planning something, but perhaps wasn't ready to discuss it at BlizzCon, there is no scenario in which this could help that along. What Nostalrius essentially said is "hey, you didn't respond fast enough and how dare you not respond to our offers to help you with your in-house corporate project on a volunteer basis!"
While releasing the source code was perhaps their best option from the get-go, and I have admittedly been team "release the source code" in the past, the manner in which they are going about it feels like no more than a desperate attempt to stay relevant. In "failing" to provide the community with an official Legacy server, Nostalrius will go down in history as the group that provided them with the means necessary to keep vanilla World of Warcraft alive, and in the best shape it has been in in years, for years to come. They desperately want to mean something to the vanilla World of Warcraft community and their impatience and overzealous expectations of what will happen make that perhaps a bit too clear.
