Wow Private Server History and Future, can Blizzard learn from them? 

What I would really want is a finished Vanilla WoW in the spiri of Vanilla. There are so many unfinished zones, questlines and unused places that I would already be more than happy if we just got this stuff included in Vanilla WoW. TBC and WOTLK were fun, but they feel very detached from Vanilla WoW and not like true expansions.

Fun fact that not many seem to know, Nostalrius was actually around way back in 2009, it was up and running (in beta state) but with a fairly low population. Their goal was to provide the best vanilla server and for the time, they had tons of stuff scripted that you wouldn't see on other servers. Nostalrius was a french server, competing with Nostalgeek, a semi-custom vanilla server (wich is still online and has been without interuption for 13 years). Nostalrius couldn't get players on their server, just like The Rebirth, they were ahead of their time and the demand wasn't there just yet. The Nostalrius team tried a bunch of things to try to get more players but nothing really worked, as they only targeted the french community, wich was really small at the time anyway. They also tried the Nostalgeek recipe of giving away lvl 55 chars to entice people to join the server not long before shutting down. Basically, Nostalrius never got enough players to make it playable enough so they decided to shut down, polish all their scripts, do proper marketing and build up tons of hype for their server before the actual launch. They eventually came back under their new name "Nostalrius Begins", wich is the server most know today. It was quite shocking to see ~4k4 people online on launch, at a time where 2k was considered to be a ton of people for a vanilla server.

One of the things Blizzard is missing is the social structure. Private servers have volunteer staff and GM's who communicate and adjust the game based on community needs. The community effectively owns the game.

I think private servers are the future, nowadays the server quality can be really high as opposed to retail servers which are really shit. I just wish vanilla crowd could learn from warmane and make a long term server with different realms for all types of players with different rates and some way for the management to make money and be able to maintain the servers

"Time is a flat circle," we say as we boot up vanilla wow for the 1 millionth time. Good vid, always love a history lesson!

Solid video, commenting for the algorithm

Thanks for this video buddy :) Shout out to my old WoWScape/Scapegaming friends. -GM Maky.

Great video and insight. It’s really sad we can’t get the experience we want from blizzard and likely never will. Here’s to hoping that changes if not a project creates what the player base really wants!

Thank you for mentioning that private servers existed even before WoW was officially launched (even if you did not dig deep enough into that), because I can't help but cringe every time some nost baby comes around acting like they are some kind of private server veteran and claiming private servers only exist so people can play vanilla. In the good old days private servers actually focused on being up to date with the current retail patch/expansion and nobody really cared or felt nostalgic about vanilla until we reached WOTLK or Cata and people realized the game is going in the wrong direction.

Love the video! Appreciate the effort you put into this. Keep the good content coming , looking forward to each upload

Amazing video man! Really enjoyed it

One thing you did not mention is that players didn't want to play x1 servers back in the day because much of the content was broken. Emeral Dream is a good example - we didn't have all content available but even the content that was open, had massive number of bugs and lot of things just didn't work at all. Which is why Nostalrius worked - while it had some bugs, those did get fixed and most of the content worked, at least at an acceptable level.

Great video, frankly. Only 2 things to counter: 1) WK being shady, I haven’t seen hard evidence, frankly. Selling gold as a previous player years before becoming a developer, and doing so as a broke teenager shouldn’t be held against him. 2) blizzard classic isn’t for us old school folks, it’s for retail players’ alts. They could care less for us true vanilla players; we’re icing on the cake.

I loved this video, thanks for making it. It's probably one, if not the most informative video about the whole pservers scene so far. I'll show it to people who still think pservers are just mistakes and flawed experiences, but they allowed them to have Classic Wow. I started on Nost then went throught the whole Elysium realms transition (Nostalrius PVP=>Anathema, Nostalrius PvE=>Darrowshire), then Lightbringer => Light's hope And yes, went also through the whole Shenna's "bag meme", up to the Light's Hope devs (Whitekidney etc...) selling to players R14 cloned characters of other players. TL;DR Nostalrius was and is the only non-corrupted pserver, this is a given fact, it won't be changed... so be aware of it all of you players hyped for that new and "fresh" snowy vanilla realm coming in 2023...

Nost never had 10k at launch it was somthing above 4k, I remember these days very well because when I hit lvl 30 the server population had doubled to about 8k and the server kept on growing like crazy.

Sick video dude 🤩

Ahh Feenix. It was terrible and I absolutely loved it.

Great video! I think Blizzard should turn Classic servers into a side project with a smaller dev group that listens to their fan base. Eventually it'll become more popular like OSRS

We have era and its alive. Good enough for me.

Do you think there is any middle ground that could lead to Classic growth? Or should Blizzard focus on the core audience and go back to the sweaty x1 experience, Rank 14 roots? I think progressive itemization is a big place Blizzard fell short. Imagine how much MORE content we'd have if the game had historical patches similar to the original game. The content droughts we get are because the game was never designed to go 5 months without an update. I don't blame Blizzard for trying to speed things up, they alone possess the most data on when people quit the game. The delicate dance is retaining serious players and trying to grow the casual base. 1) It's interesting that the FIRST private server accelerated XP rates. They did this for a reason, they believed leveling was boring or would lead to less players. 2) "Accurate" servers had less players back in 2012 - this is noteworthy 3) I am fascinated by Nostralius versus the initial Pservers, why was the hype so high for X1 accurate servers in 2015 compared to 2012 when the hype was low? And Nostralius seemed to have more players than CURRENT SOM. Was there actually more money behind Nostralius than SOM? That seems like an indictment of Blizzard's current use of funds. (hi Diablo Immortal and OW2)

Amazin’ video. I used to play on DarrowShire on Horde. It was very fun . Then I moved on to Hardcore WoW

Great video dura, maybe do more essay-style videos like "Why Deadmines was so iconic" etc.

private servers are actually as old as the game itself. I couldn't afford wow on release, so I played on a private server, and basically nothing worked. some big ones being casting instant spells while moving, autoshot, hunter pets, blink, mobs not respawning, being loot bugged and combat bugged constantly. And so many others.

Anyone remember the best druid on the 1.12 feenix server? R13 Daio from . I am him.

Feenix warsong had best endgame for its time. Woulnt grind 1x on it tho xD

Great video.

Vanilla private servers are made out of the love of the game. Classic wow is made out of shortsighted corporate profit and I don't have any hope they'll ever do it right.

Good video, but I think you could have done a better job deep diving into the reasons Nost was so successful and also the consiquences of a "finished" offical classic WoW exerpience for the private server scene. I think nost got really lucky with WoD: WoD marketing managed to build up extreme levels of mainstream WoW hype (and brought up alot of people back into the WoW scene) and at the same time feel flat on its face pretty much instantly. Combinded with the longest content drought to date at the time pre WoD it gave for the first time ever really a feeling in the MAINSTREAM player base that retail WoW will never be "good" again. And since back in 2015 there was still no serious MMO competition, nost filled that nieche perfectly. Also up to nost no vanilla server was "complete" in a somewhat reasonable level of quality outside of Warsong. So when nost came out retail was basically "dead" in terms of player expectations, alot of people got sucked back into the WoW scene through WoD marketing and most people haven'T had yet a "complete" and recent vanilla journey and there was no other serious competition. Now we got to current year: most people who were intrested in vanilla had a complete jounrey on classic WoW, and the memories of those are still pretty fresh in their minds. every new private server has to compete with nost memories or at the very least classic WoW memories. they have to compete with offical vanilla-like and other legacy WoW services from Blizzard compared to 2015, noone is really hyped for WoW anymore (the hype overall arround the brand WoW is pretty dead) and there are just other MMOs arround that have atleast a chance to compete with WoW while there will be ofc a core playerbase for vanilla pservers and SoM like services from Blizzard, it's a battle for a shrinking playerbase between alot of reasonable quality services. And with people still pretty fresh of their classic WoW journey, I don't see anything close to nost or even just classic WoW 2.0 (not SoM) anytime soon. Will something like that happen eventually? yeah. But the time isn't ripe yet, and any new server will be more a Emerald Dream 2.0 at best in terms of popularity. maybe in 3-5 years there will be another nost like event

i was playing private servers in 2005 but ur vid starts at 2010

Corecraft when? Kek

SoM has sever logical improvements over Classic imo, Blizzard released it much too soon because they are competing against their own Retail, Classic TBC, and even era servers - so the community is scattered. I wouldn't be so sure that plain 1.12 vanilla is what the pserver community is craving in 2022. There is a market for that, but to release a new Blizzlike 1.12 server is going to splinter the community even more.

you didnt include the best drama of all, hellground tbc

I still want instant 60 xD Too lazy to level =P

more like wow **VANILLA** private server history.

WoW is not so popular today classic or new expansions doesn't matter which one you pick. Majority of the running servers have little to none pop and only few unbalanced mega servers stay relatively healthy. It's old game man better games will come out eventually in the field of mmorpgs and if something really great appear wow will lose it's remaining population pretty fast.

decent video. classic/som was an abomination of vanilla gameplay, and blizz dropped the ball tremendously with bots, boosting, gdkps, and static itemization. they did the least amount of effort. som focused on endgame and skipping the leveling process, which is the opposite of what vanilla is about. its hard to trust blizz with anything when they were given a silver platter by the vanilla community. we all are homeless now and waiting. ty

no k3 love cmon bruh

They won't learn a thing. I hope I'm weong.

everdead