In The News: Blizzard Shuts Down Nostalrius

Now there's a piece of news I didn't expect to see in my newsfeed this morning: Blizzard is getting Nostalrius shut down. Of course they have every right to do so and I do think that everyone who makes the decision to roll on a private server has to be prepared for that kind of thing to happen sooner or later, but it's still kind of surprising to see it happen at this precise moment and to Nostalrius in particular, mostly because unlike other private server projects that don't hide the fact that they enjoy making money off their work by integrating cash shops into the game and the like, Nost prided itself in being a non-profit work of love.

On the other hand, in some ways I'm not surprised at all. Nostalrius was increasingly becoming bad PR for Blizzard. When you've previously claimed that nobody really wants Vanilla servers, a single one of such servers boasting 800,000 accounts and 150,000 active players looks kind of awkward. That's the population of an entire niche MMO right there, on a single private server! Plus, Nostalrius players were absolute zealots. They were everywhere and they were passionate. If I had a penny for every YouTube comment I've seen that urged people to start playing on Nostalrius... I would have a not insignificant amount of money. They were genuine too, not just advertising for the sake of it. I remember the commenter who said that in five days of playing on Nostalrius he had made more friends than he's made in retail WoW in the past five years, or the one who compared all the achievements of his level hundred character to his poor Vanilla alt, whose bags were always full and who couldn't afford a mount, and who elaborated on why he loved the latter so much more.

"Nostalrius" had become shorthand for "playing classic WoW on a private server". The other day I even saw someone link to an article in a print magazine that referenced it. A YouTuber I follow and who played on Nostalrius commented that before his Twitch stream got shut down the other day, his Nost stream had risen to fourth place among the most popular World of Warcraft streams. Basically, Nostalrius and its community were really good at promoting their cause - in fact, they were too good at it. I don't think Blizzard decided to issue them with a shutdown notice because of financial concerns. They know that those players won't love them for it. But Nostalrius was making a point of making live WoW look bad and the mainstream was starting to take notice. I can see why they couldn't let that stand.

For all the forum wars and "my server is better than yours" sniping I've seen over time (even in my own comment section!), I genuinely feel for all the Nostalrius players who lost their home today. We are united in our love for the game that once was and is no more. Here's hoping that they may find a new home, whether it's on Kronos, a different private realm or in a different game altogether.

The Nost team, ever so optimistic and proving themselves to be fans to the end, actually started a petition for official classic server support to submit to Mike Morhaine. I'm fairly certain that it will be completely ignored. Blizzard pride themselves in their polish and in their expertise when it comes to what's (supposedly) fun and what isn't. Lending any sort of credence to the idea of classic servers would mean admitting that - just maybe - not everything they've done with World of Warcraft over the past ten years was a good idea and that actually, they did make it worse in some respects. That would be unacceptable. Those of us who loved previous iterations of the game and have felt lost in the last few expansions are just like a clingy ex to Blizzard that can't let go, long after the company has got over us and moved on to new pastures/customers.

An Eastern Plaguelands Adventure

As I was getting close to hitting level 60, I decided that it was time to find some grindy quests to fill out those last couple of bars. There was plenty of content left to do but I already had my eyes set on the start of Tirion Fordring's quest chain, which requires you to depopulate half the Eastern Plaguelands. I hadn't actually thought about Tirion's background as a sad hermit living off maggot stew in a long time. Hemet Nesingwary has nothing on this guy's bloodlust in Vanilla.

My first attempt to get going actually got aborted before I'd even made it to the Plaguelands, as I got a whisper while on the gryphon whether I wanted to tank Sunken Temple. I had realised last time that I'd forgotten to pick up my class quest (because to be honest I'd forgotten that everyone got one of these for Sunken Temple to begin with, so I hadn't been on the lookout), so I needed another run anyway and was happy to oblige. All I can say is that it was another successful and entertaining run.

As a result of this, my second attempt at tackling Tirion's quests saw me armed with a shiny new axe. I started my play session by spending several minutes whacking away at a carrion grub, trying to get my one-handed axe skill at least into the double digits.

As I moved out of Tirion's little corner of the Plaguelands, I saw that someone else had already cleared out the area and eventually ran into a rogue who was obviously on the same mission as me. She instantly threw me a group invite.

In that second before I accepted, a lot of thoughts raced through my head, not as fully formed words, but as concepts. Modern MMOs have generally made me not want to group up for kill quests, because usually they only require you to kill something like six mobs anyway and if I'm already on the fourth one there is little point in accepting a group invite when I'll be up and away again thirty seconds later. Also, I had kind of come out here specifically to grind on my own. But that quest counter required me to kill seventy mobs or so, without being specced for dps. I accepted.

We had barely grouped up when four Horde came riding by. I tried to run but didn't stand a chance. My new companion vanished and immediately apologised for leaving me hanging, but I agreed that there wouldn't have been any point in her attacking, what with there being four of them. Once I'd recovered my body, we began scouring the area for mobs more seriously. The rogue turned out to be a skinner and a herbalist, diligently hoovering up the leftovers of all dead hounds and bats, and frequently dashing off into the nearby hills to pick flowers. She got really excited about some of them and I couldn't blame her - she even found a black lotus. She apologised for seemingly having such a short attention span but I could completely relate, seeing how my own main in retail used to be a herbalist and my main in SWTOR is also a bioanalyst (the fancy sci-fi version of a flower picker, and I still get shouted at for not keeping up with the group in that game - some things never change).

I apologised for my lack of damage contribution and explained that I was levelling my weapon skill (never mind the whole prot/holy thing) but she didn't seem to mind and was just delighted by my buffs and constant cleansing of the various nasty debuffs that plaguelands critters have a habit of leaving on you - seriously, some of those can be nearly crippling depending on your class and have durations of up to half an hour.

I soon commented that questing as a duo was oddly relaxing and she said that this was because it was so safe, and it's absolutely true. Vanilla WoW managed to strike that golden balance of making it possible and feasible to quest on your own at all times, but since pulling adds could be highly painful, grouping up was a great way of reducing stress, not to even mention the added strength in numbers on a PvP server.

Later, when the follow-up mission to the mega-grind sent us to the Undercroft to retrieve Taelan's toy hammer, clicking the mound of earth there spawned four mobs at once, plus a couple of nearby zombies decided to join in as well. The rogue was initially alarmed, but I laid down a consecration and controlled the lot of them while she burned them one by one, eventually resorting to a Lay on Hands when I got low on both health and mana. She laughed and commented that this was a classic pally move. It reminded me of how much I previously enjoyed teaming up with damage dealers - as a paladin with a prot/holy spec I'm pretty good at staying alive through all kinds of shenanigans, but killing things can be painfully slow. Having someone to help with that while keeping any situation under control by tanking and healing is just the perfect combination.

When we had finished up the EPL part of the quest chain and I needed to log off because it was late, I was quite pleased with the evening's progress. It just continues to fascinate me how easily and naturally grouping up occurs in the Vanilla WoW environment even now, and that despite of the questing being perfectly solo-friendly.

Does a private server count as "Playing WoW"?

Just a quick question for my readers today. Do you think that playing Vanilla WoW on a private server counts as "playing WoW"?

What I mean is this: If someone else asks you "Do you play WoW?", do you say yes or no? Or do you launch into a lengthy explanation?

It's just something that I've been thinking about, since in the past couple of weeks there were several occasions where this happened to me and I automatically made it very clear that I wasn't playing WoW anymore and hadn't done so in a long time. Yet strictly speaking that's not true, because I've been playing Vanilla WoW on Kronos for months (if very casually)!

It just seems to me that Vanilla WoW on a private server is such a different and niche activity compared to Blizzard's World of Warcraft as people currently know it that to talk about it as if they were one and the same would be even more misleading.

LFG Sunken Temple

My interest in playing on Kronos is currently faltering again, which is a real shame considering that I'm only three dings away from sixty. However, I've once again hit the "grouping wall", which is not a hard-coded obstacle to progression but certainly a psychological one. I think I may have mentioned it before, but I can't remember for sure now.

It's that point when your quest log is full of group quests that prevent you from enjoying playing on your own because you can only pick up one or two new solo quests at a time, which really sucks when you know that there are more things than that to do in the area you are in. On the other hand you really, really want to do that group content, so you don't want to abandon those group quests either... which means that you log in, idle in Ironforge for a bit while keeping an eye on the world channel, and then log out again when no opportunity arises quickly enough.

The culprit that's causing my current dilemma is Sunken Temple. I have five quests for it, and it's one of my favourite Vanilla instances, so I really want to do it. However, at level 57 I'm quickly approaching the point where I'm going to outlevel it, so I want to get it done sooner rather than later and not detour to higher-level places like BRD too early.

Two weeks ago, an LFG call for it went out shortly before I had to log off, meaning that I couldn't join because of time constraints.

One week ago, I saw a group that was looking for a tank but wanted a "fast run", skipping many of the bosses in the process, which wouldn't have helped with getting any of my quests done. The irony was that said group spent at least an hour spamming "LF1M, need tank" in /world and I don't know if they ever found one. Could have been killing some bosses already in that time if the group leader hadn't been so opposed to it.

This week, there was another group looking for a tank and a dps, but I was told that they didn't want a pally tank. Sadface.

I still like the old-fashioned way of looking for groups for its community-building aspects, but I won't deny that it makes life as a casual player much harder. I never had issues like this back in original Vanilla, because I had lots of free time, meaning that I was online for several hours a day, pretty much every day. (Not to mention that I was playing with friends, so forming a group was made easier by that as well.) When you're only on for a few hours each weekend though, being able to find a group for the content you actually need is very much a game of luck.

EDIT: It's worth mentioning that as soon as I posted this, I ran into a certain level 60 paladin who has commented on this blog before, and when I mentioned my plight with this instance, he immediately offered to run me through (with some pugged dps). Is there a word for the opposite of jinxing it (which is to say: complaining about how bad something is, and then the issue immediately goes away)?

War Effort Time!

Two days ago, the war effort to open the gates of Ahn'Qiraj went live on Kronos.

I have exactly two memories of this event on live servers.

First, there's me running around Ironforge as a lowbie night elf and encountering this apparent quest giver who wanted me to bring him some Rainbow Fin Albacore. I had some from trying out fishing, so I gave them to him. And it gave no XP! WTF! I don't think I donated anything else after that.

The war effort must have taken a few weeks to get sorted out, because I was in my mid-forties or so when I landed in Tanaris and there were giant Anubisaths all over the place, wrecking Gadgetzan! A friend reported seeing some in Feralas as well. We had no idea what was going on at the time but we did our best to help with fighting them off, as far as we were able to at that level anyway.

A friend also used to tell me how he was there for the opening of the gates on his server and how everything crashed.

Screenshot property of my friend Matje.

With how casually I'm playing on Kronos, I can't see myself making much of a contribution, but I'll try to keep an eye on how things develop. It would be cool if I could attend the opening of the gates, though it's unlikely that I'll be so lucky for it to happen during a time when I can actually be online.

It was interesting to see that some of the high-level targets, like 24,000 thorium bars, were already full up after only two days. From the looks of it it's going to be the low-level items, like the aforementioned Albacores, that will form the bottleneck to progress.

The Art of the Armorsmith

One of the amazing things about playing Vanilla WoW is being reminded of just how much more involved professions used to be. I mean, as far as I can tell, the system was still primitive compared to any MMO that actually cares about crafting, but compared to modern day WoW, Vanilla WoW's professions are a bloody goldmine of creativity.

Even the secondary professions required a minimum amount of work. I've written about having to trek across continents to buy the books to level my cooking, fishing and first aid past 150, and at 225 a quest awaited for each of them. Who here remembers when Triage was actually a requirement to level first aid? I remember that this was the quest that taught me that you could turn on friendly NPC names in the UI.

However, my biggest profession-related adventure on Kronos has been levelling blacksmithing. I made Isadora a blacksmith because that's what the original Isadora was, however the original Isadora never made it past level 22. I don't think I ever levelled blacksmithing to a high level on any of my alts, but even if I did it must have been very late in the game, by the time they had removed all the barriers as well as everything that made things interesting.

My only memory of encountering the madness that was the original blacksmithing grind is from when my (now ex-)boyfriend rolled a paladin in Burning Crusade and I helped him level his blacksmithing by spending hours upon hours grinding mithril and thorium on one of my miners. (The things you do for love...) But I didn't really know what he needed it for. I'm finally getting an idea.

It started innocently enough: At some point around level 40, I noticed that two dwarves at the great forge in Ironforge were giving me the option to specialise in either armour- or weaponsmithing. I decided to pick the former, which was probably not a good thing from a min-/maxing point of view but I always tend to think defensively when given a choice like this.

Then I immediately felt lost. It might be that I missed something, but I have a suspicion that this is where the Vanilla WoW simulation is imperfect and missing some clues, as I remember that the trainers in original WoW tended to have dynamic dialogue that would change to direct you towards the next trainer once your skill got too high (e.g. "I have noting more to teach you, [name], you should seek out [NPC name] in [zone].") All the armoursmithing guy on Kronos had to say to me after I had picked up his quest was "hello".

I decided to let the internets help me but went about it in a terribly haphazard manner, which would quickly come back to bite me in the butt. The armoursmithing quest wanted me to create some "ornate mithril" thingamabobs. So I googled "ornate mithril" in Kronos' own database and found that a dwarf in Stranglethorn, located just south of the entrance to Zul'Gurub, teaches several of those recipes as part of a quest. I remembered running into him back in the day without really knowing what he was good for.

So off I went... but the jungle dwarf didn't want to talk to me. I did some more research and realised that I had missed a breadcrumb quest from Stormwind. Back up I went to pick up the breadcrumb quest, then back down to STV. Now the dwarf would talk to me... and wanted me to bring him one hundred and twenty metal bars in exchange for three recipes (forty iron and eighty mithril bars). Needless to say... that took a while. I never set out on a single dedicated mining spree, but mostly tried to squeeze some more mining out of my questing experience by doing extra loops around areas where I had seen mining nodes spawn before. You also have to remember that ore nodes were much, much rarer in Vanilla than they became after the Cataclysm, plus they would spawn in wild mix across zones, so you couldn't just go to one place to farm one thing.

Eventually I got there and accumulated enough iron and mithril. At last, three recipes for ornate mithril wotsits were mine! Except... this is where I realised that I had learned how to make the wrong ornate mithril doodads, not the ones for the gear slots actually required for the quest. D'oh!

More research was needed. Apparently, to learn how to make the right items I would have to talk to that night elf guy by the forge in Gadgetzan. I knew him well, because even as a non-blacksmith I couldn't help but notice his popularity back in the day. Nelf guy (also of Troll Temper fame) offered to teach me the three recipes I needed if I brought him some of the orante mithril thingies I could already make (phew, at least that wasn't a complete waste of time) as well as some "heavy mithril" stuff.

Now I had to research where that came from. As it turns out, it comes from a trainer! But not one I had been aware of. I had thought that armoursmithing was intrinsically connected to master blacksmithing, but this was not the case. A goblin in Booty Bay of all people is apparently one of the most accomplished blacksmiths in all of Azeroth and could teach me what I needed to know... if I increased my skill enough. More mining was needed because I needed more mats. (Most items required 10+ bars of anything to make, not to mention additional materials like leather or gems.)

Eventually my regular old blacksmithing was up high enough that I could learn how to make heavy mithril gear. Once I'd made that as well as the ornate mithril thingamajigs, I finally had all the knowledge needed to complete my armoursmithing quest. Only about fifteen levels or so after I'd originally required it.

After I was finally declared an armoursmith... the dwarf had a total of two recipes to teach me. What the hell?

Grasping at any kind of straws in regards to how to proceed, I remembered that I'd heard people talk about using the Imperial Plate armour set to level their blacksmithing at the higher levels (the same set that all the Stormwind guards wear). Once more I had to consult the database for information on how to learn it. First I had to increase my skill by a few more points, which meant more mining.

Then I had to revisit Tanaris, this time to talk to the dark iron dwarf next to nelf boy. Turns out he's willing to sell the recipes for every single piece of Imperial plate gear... for thorium bars, about two hundred of them. This is where I finally had a minor windfall though, because with all the time I had spent hunting for mithril, I had incidentally built up enough of a thorium stockpile that I could buy all his recipes at once.

Now I just need to acquire another couple hundred thorium bars to actually craft the damn things. It's kind of annoying, but also something of an achievement - in Vanilla, professions simply weren't for everyone.

The Fifties

My levelling has slowed down lately, and it's not just because fifty to sixty takes a while. There's a good reason and a bad reason.

Let's get the bad out of the way first. I just don't really like most of the Vanilla level 50+ zones. The Plaguelands are depressing, the Burning Steppes are dull, Silithus with its grating soundtrack and ongoing bug noises is just freaking annoying. I actually find myself wondering if WoW would have been as "sticky" for me if Burning Crusade hadn't come out relatively soon after I hit max level, sparing me from having to spend a significant amount of time with the level sixty endgame. If nothing else, I probably would have focused even more on rolling alts. This means that right now, I do a lot of flitting back and forth between zones and get tired of them really quickly. A couple of quests in Searing Gorge, then one in Azshara, then a few in Felwood, but nowhere really sticks (though I haven't done Un'Goro yet, at least that should be fun). It's not that there's a lack of content to level up, I'm just not keen enough on a lot of it.

On the plus side, part of why my levelling has slowed down is that I'm finding myself thinking a bit more about things other than max level. It may be slow, but I'm getting there, and while I have no plans to raid, there are still a lot of goals to achieve. First off, there are professions. My ongoing battle with armoursmithing will deserve a post of its own, but let's just say right now that levelling certain professions requires a serious investment of time and effort. I'll also need lots of money to get my epic mount, and of course pallies have their own special quest for that. So I'm finding that I'm less focused on gaining maximum XP during a play session and instead tend to get distracted by other concerns, such as making money or levelling fishing for a bit.

I even tried a bit of PvP. I saw people campaigning very heavily in the past for everyone of level 51 or above to queue up for Alterac Valley on AV weekend, so when it came around again and I was finally of a high enough level to join in, I gave it a go. I only played three matches, all of which were losses, and I felt pretty damn useless at my level... but it was still kind of fun simply because it was so chaotic, with all those actually powerful NPCs killing people left and right. I just tried to throw out a few heals before dying. I did get a couple of the PvP quests done in the process, and I had fun watching a hunter slowly kite Galvangar to death.

But that's part of the beauty of Vanilla, that it's so multi-faceted and that getting to max level is not the only thing on your mind.