HiGame

When Blizzard shut down the Nostalrius third-party World of Warcraft server, it triggered a wave of protest from thousands of players who had signed on to play the classic version of WoW, before any expansions had arrived to change the experience. In the wake of the fan outcry, Blizzard promised to meet with the Nostalrius developers and discuss the situation. According to the lead developer of Nostalrius, Viper, their meeting with Blizzard about the prospect of building classic servers for the game was productive and treated seriously by Blizzard itself. The list of people attending the meeting included:

• Mike Morhaime – CEO
• J. Allen Brack – Executive Producer for WoW
• Tom Chilton – Game Director for WoW
• Ion Hazzikostas – Assistant Game Director for WoW
• Marco Koegler – Technical Director for WoW
• Saralyn Smith – Global Director of Community Development
• Kester Robison – Manager of WoW Community Development
• Vanessa Vanasin – PR Manager for WoW
• Randy Jordan – Blizzard Community Manager

The discussion itself ran to more than five hours and touched on a variety of topics, including the history of WoW emulation, whether or not a volunteer team could continue to handle Nostalrius (or a Classic project of similar scope), and a technical report on the achievements and bugs of the Nostalrius project in particular. Here are the major highlights from that meeting.

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