One year ago, Nostalrius Begins was officially released to the world after years of investment from dozens of people. During the last six months prior to the release, a huge effort from our side was done as the team worked their fingers to the bone, leading to the project you discovered on 28th of February 2015.
Our PvP server opened with 4K players and rose to 5K the very next day, making it unique among the private server community: the highest populated server ever created.
This whole year has been a challenge, the team having to rethink the entire staff organization to adapt ourselves to your numbers and needs. Changing our systems over and over in order to handle the constant rise of the population.
But the most significant improvement we made was human as we discovered different kinds of cultures, unique ways of playing and exchanging stories and information between staff members (from our project or from others) and players from all over the world.
We would particularly like to thank the people outside the staff who are helping the community out, like the Unofficial Russian Facebook page now having nearly 6K followers, the Unofficial Reddit page with more than 3K subscribers, various Youtube & Twitch streamers dedicated to Legacy servers, Web journalists and many others.
Working as a volunteer in our staff is also very stressful and difficult, resulting in a high turnover rate - as a consequence we have sadly lost members of the staff during this year. These members were dedicated to help you, our players, at all costs, sometimes putting family, friends and other personal activities aside or even becoming sick due to overworking. Please acknowledge and salute these volunteers and the actual staff members as they really *really* deserve it.
Today, after one year since the opening, Nostalrius never stops growing, having reached 13.1K concurrent users three weeks ago at peak time and now regularly having more than 12K concurrent players daily since last week. We are still at first place among any and all servers available. Development is actually working full time once again, handling this new peak of population. In one year, number of active accounts grew from 20,000 to more than 130.000 at the moment - no-one ever thought we could go this far.
Infographic of the PVP realm after 1 year.
In the meantime, we would like to thank you, the players, for the tremendous success that Nostalrius has become world wide. This led to the creation of the PVE server, created nearly six months ago. On the PVE realm we have also seen a huge influx of players: against all expectations it succeeded in bringing more population than a retail server had back in the day AND also has a growing population, rising from 2.6K to the current 3.5K - congratulations!
Infographic of the PVE realm after 6 months.
The community, you, have proved to the world that it is indeed possible to enjoy a 10 year old game with more than twelve thousand players online. That playing Vanilla is not just a dream, nostalgia for the past, but reality and that it is still very exciting! And from our side we proved that it is possible to handle the biggest legacy server every built without earning anything financially.
So what is next? Well, as you already saw:
*Vanilla PTR is releasing AQ content
*Vanilla PVP & PVE realms continue to receive constant bug fixes & releases
*TBC PTR will be launched in the future
*Erm... other surprises
We need you now more than ever to continue on this road of success - your success, the developers, the IsVV team, PTR testers, in the Communication team and in other ways. Feel free to contact us now!
Kind regards and a happy new year to this successful project,
Nostalrius
