With the recent announcement and imminent shutdown of Nostalrius' services on April 10th 2016 the community has been bombarded with opportunistic "announcements". These opportunists claim they'll provide Nostalrius-like services, or claim they already are somehow, to anyone willing to come to their website and checkout their server. Let me attempt to argue, for the communities sake, why you should not be listening to these people and why it's dangerous to jump-ship or get excited at every post linking to some new domain with some thrown together website.
First, let me give you a little background about me. I've been in the World of Warcraft private server community on and off since 2008 when I was too poor and too young to afford a retail subscription. I've seen my share of steaming piles in the private server community, which is the majority of servers, and I've dabbed a bit in the p2w space which generally includes corruption, mismanagement and poor quality realms. Thankfully, we hit a renaissance period of emulation the pinnacle of which being Nostalrius. Anyway, many of you know Nostralrius was a diamond in the rough and truly a testament to what can be achieved when competent software developers come together with good intentions to produce something amazing. I personally understand how difficult something like that is, being a software developer myself, and have watched with interest as Nostalrius released information about their development and processes. They are the exception in the community and because of this, and many other reasons I'll go through in a moment, you should heed my warning to be careful and not join any old server that tells you they'll be running Nostalrius.
Why you shouldn't trust new unofficial Nostalrius servers:
- The general competency of the developers in the private server scene is significantly less than the developers at Nostalrius. Trust me, Nostalrius have software engineers better than myself. However that's not the case for a good chunk of other private servers and anyone decent is already running their own mild success somewhere else.
- New developers, maintainers or administrators are unlikely to have the necessary experience to manage a project of this significance. This project is not small and there are considerable MOG (Massive Online Game) changes made, such as the interest management system (Nostalrius called it map-reduce at the sub-map level), are not simple and you shouldn't expect someone unfamiliar with the project to jump right in.
- Nostalrius' development process is significantly more complex than other servers. Nostalrius, from what I can gather, has adopted a minimal CI model where at least regression and unit testing is automated. I'm not familiar with their entire process but this differs considerably from the simple processes of other servers and is likely not to be adopted by average developers who pick up the project.
- If a development group was capable of delivering Nostalrius quality services they'd have already been doing so; the majority of what you're about to see is lesser developers taking advantage of you in your 'time of need' and taking advantage of the Nostalrius' development team's hard-work.
- It is unlikely the people who first pick up the project will have as pure of intentions as Nostalrius does. You can expect groups to setup to steal username/password data from people logging in, groups adding cashshops and paid services and a whole host of other anti-Nostalrius services.
- Everyone's server will seem to be as functional as Nostalrius' and only until updating, maintenance, changes and etc are required will you be able to fully judge the competency of the developers or the future of any realm that pops up.
- Until the source has been publicly provided, and as far as I know it has not been, you are likely to be lied to, conned and scammed as opportunists attempt to recruit you into their non-existent servers which can potentially begin to pool a large number of Nostalrius players on a server, yet to be released, that will potentially fail to deliver the same quality experience. The issue is the uneducated may stick around and you'll end up with the old problem of "Population but not quality"; wait for official source release and/or official endorsements.
So, just be careful out there guys. Everyone is going to be trying to get you in their van and offer you free candy and just generally take advantage of this tragedy. Managing Nostalrius is not easy and that is the reason why they were the highest quality server to have ever been made available. Don't just listen to the first mediocre smuck who pulls over on the side of the road and offers you a ride. Be skeptical.
- Glader
Edit: I've started a subreddit in an attempt to disseminate important news when it happens. Not sure if the forums will stay up. I plan to link to the Nost Github when they push their source up, link to any officially endorsed Nostalrius projects (do not link yours) and etc. Don't expect too much from it but I'm making it pro-actively because I don't trust /r/wowservers to point people in the official direction https://www.reddit.com/r/NostalriusNews/
yea
