In April, the legacy gaming server Nostalrius went offline when Blizzard decided to take legal actions and lawyer up against the Nostalrius Begins developing team, a team of 30 volunteers, passionate about “vanilla” World of Warcraft. If you don’t know, Vanilla refers to the capacity players have to enjoy older content in a server. In this case, the developing team, for the previously mentioned server, gave gamers the benefit of playing and trying older World of Warcraft content which is no longer available in current Blizzard-hosted servers, or they’re simply not the same anymore.

Nostalrius Begins have done their best to cooperate with Blizzard, urging the community to speak up about this issue. They even managed to amass 273,290 petition signatures. Back in April, the Former Team Lead of World of Warcraft, Mark Kern, spoke on their behalf  with a public video message in support of the World of Warcraft gaming community. It was addressed to the current Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime in an attempt to convey the importance of this mission.

Even though a meeting was set up with the Blizzard team not long after, the dispute hovered at a standstill. Taking matters into their own hands, the developing team for the vanilla server decided to release the whole thing under a new name called Project Elysium (formerly the Valkyrie Project). Indeed, Elysium has been around for some time now. However, it has been decided that the two will coexist and fans will be able to enjoy Nostalrius again.

The official release date will be December 17th, 2016 … only a couple weeks away. However, it can be said that Blizzard may not welcome this with open arms. I mean, there has not been a decision agreed upon from Blizzard’s behalf since April. Who knows, they might even be okay with it. Or, there may be a discussion or two.

What do you think, World of Warcraft players? Did you play on the Nostalrius server? Are you excited for Elysium to debut? Did you support the Nostalrius Begins group? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below! And, be sure to follow us on our Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch! We would love to hear from you!