Breakfast Topic: Should Blizzard release a Vanilla server?

Remember the utter chaos of the Tarren Mills/Southshore open PvP war? The broken off-specs of the hybrid classes? The teeming newbie yards battling for that spider sole spawn? While it wasn’t perfect at the beginning there was a certain charm to the early game.

While many long-time MMOs have been launching servers hosting classic versions of their game, Blizzard has yet to do so. Community Manager Lore (who does not officially speak for Blizzard on this subject) has tweeted that he thinks players would find the current game much more appealing and that the cost of spinning off a classic server wouldn’t justify the costs. I disagree on both fronts.

Having played EverQuest since the vanilla version of that game 16 years ago I was more than happy to pay a monthly sub fee (something I do for no game other than WoW) to play on their new classic server. And I wasn’t the only one. Though the server was designed to hold twice the capacity of any of their other servers, the queue times to log in are upwards of two hours during primetime and second server had to be launched to accommodate the demand.

With WoW subs slipping, bringing back old timers who have drifted away with the promise of the original game may be just the thing to boost Blizzard’s bottom line. And, yes, the Vanilla version of WoW is crude compared to today’s game, but, trust me, nothing is more broken and unbalanced than original EverQuest and nostalgia is still emptying the pockets of long time fans of the franchise.

Would you resub to play on a server that hosted only a Vanilla version of WoW?