I fear that, for Blizzard, the battle over whether to release official vanilla servers is a losing one. There was a time where it could live in ignorance and pretend that there wasn't an audience for vanilla servers, but the Nostalrius private server changed that—bringing legacy servers to the front of nearly every World Of Warcraft Expansion Legion EU CD-Key players mind. With Nostalrius returning on December 17, there will be another huge surge of players choosing to relive the glory days of World of Warcraft rather than play Legion.

 

Part of the popularity of servers like Nostalrius is undoubtedly because they are free, but you don't have to look very far to see a large demand to relive the glory days of WoW. After the Cataclysm expansion forever changed the face of Azeroth, World of Warcraft essentially became a different game than the one I first fell in love with.

Video games are universally terrible at preserving their own history, but Blizzard has an important opportunity to do just that. With official legacy servers, we would not only get a chance to remember where World of Warcraft came from, but to see how far it's come.