Blizzard explains why he closed the WoW server that allowed you to play without expansions

At the start of the Blizzard month he has angered many players for having forced the closure of a "fan-run servers" called Nostalrius which had the particularity to bring to life the experience of World of Warcraft devoid of the five expansion units so far. Now it provides an official explanation for that decision, arguing that Nostalrius could compromise the integrity of its MMORPG.

"Honestly, give up on protecting intellectual property against attempts to harm the violation of Blizzard rights", he has written J. Allen Brack, executive producer of World of Warcraft, on the game's forums. "This is true of anything you use the IP WoW, including unofficial servers. We already insured you can not take a legal path to protect our IP and provide an operating license to a pirate servers".

Closing Nostalrius comes on the eve of the Legion debut, the sixth expansion of World of Warcraft that will become live on 30 August. Blizzard hopes to flesh out the fanbase WoW on that occasion: he touched a high of 12 million subscribers, but last November recorded a sharp contraction of up to 5.5 million users.

But the case of Nostalrius notes that many players prefer a simpler version and primordial World of Warcraft, considering that the MMORPG has changed a lot over the years as a result of all these expansions and that in several aspects has been simplified. Blizzard has stated he does not want to create your own "" back of the server.

"In the past we evaluated the installation of Classic gaming server, but all options available to us are difficult to implement," says Brack. "If it were a matter of pressing a button, we would. However, there are huge operational difficulties for the integration of traditional servers and maintain compatibility with the live update".

At the same time one can not but note that Blizzard have no economic incentives to close the expansion server. The latter, in fact, are sold at full price, and if players do not they bought would become very difficult to finance the future development of World of Warcraft.