Just one short week ago we announced the definitive shutdown of Nostalrius’ gaming servers. Everything happened pretty fast, but now that we have our feet on the ground we wanted to take a step back so that we could share our future plans with all of you.
![Image](http://i.imgur.com/oIVaN9z.jpg)
Last week marked the end of the Nostalrius journey. We were all disappointed, sad, depressed; however, most importantly, we also understood that our community cares deeply about what we all created here together. Some players were angry at Blizzard for shutting Nostalrius down, insulted and threatened them. We can understand this reaction, but this is not the right way to confront the issue. The staff was glad to see most of the former players take the right decision, which is to tell your friends about what happened and explain what Nostalrius was, and what our community stood for. Our values, our passion, our game.
Thanks to our community’s constructive response, we are now very close to reaching 100k signatures on our petition addressed to Blizzard's CEO Mike Morhaime.
When we first got started on Nostalrius Begins, we did not expect more than 500 online players, and as we all know that was a huge under-estimate. Now when we created this petition, we wanted to reach thousands of signatures, but once again you guys shocked us and the petition gained tens of thousands of signatures for this cause.
Leading newspapers, youtubers, streamers, and commentators covered the situation. It went beyond anything we could have ever dreamed for.
We already underestimated the number of players willing to be a part of legacy servers three too many times, so now we are truly humbled at the support. We want to thank everyone, from the bottom of our hearts.
We also want to make it clear that this petition is here for everyone concerned with video game preservation, history, and notably World of Warcraft.
As of yet, we still have not received any answer or acknowledgment from Blizzard. We want our community to feel free to express your concerns on the World of Warcraft official media and forums, but always remain polite and constructive. Show the best that our community has to offer!
Regarding the future release of Nostalrius related data; we confirmed that we will *not* be officially endorsing any private server. We have the idea and sense that Nostalrius can no longer live if Blizzard does not accept it. Nostalrius was a fan made project; therefore, hiding it in offshore countries to continue against the original game creator would be a transgression of our principles, of the reasons why Nostalrius existed in the first place.
With that said, as far as we are concerned, this amazing journey would not have been possible without the contribution of the open source World of Warcraft community, especially those who were behind MaNGOS. We believe that we significantly improved their code base, with several interesting algorithms (for example the ongoing work on clustering). For now, our source code may be release 30th of April (educational purposes only) in the hope that it will be useful, and that it may help developers understand how a big project like ours was handled from the inside. As we are not willing to help people that do bad things within World of Warcraft, all of the specific cheating / botting / gold seller / ... protection or detection systems we developed and polished during all this time will not be available on this public release. This date may be changed depending on the input provided by the overall feedback of legacy servers.
Regarding player related data, we settled on a strong algorithm to ensure data privacy for everyone. According to European laws, and foremost to our policy of privacy and personal data protection, you will have to explicitly choose to have your personal information included on the public data release if you wish so. More information regarding this part will be available next week, for both players and server makers willing to restore Nostalrius characters.
To conclude this first post-shutdown announce, we would like to offer you our playlist featuring player made videos all from after the final shutdown announcement.
Thank you for your support, we will never forget this journey with you.
Whatever happens, respect each other’s values, what we stood for, and we will never be forgotten.
Together, and with the support of the gaming community as a whole, we have the power to make significant changes. Stay tuned for more news soon.
Best regards,
Nostalrius Begins.
I know you will show restraint when exercising your great power.
Terenas Menethil II