A couple of weeks ago, Blizzard sent their lawyers after a rogue World of Warcraft server that continued to run the vanilla version of the game. It seemed pretty standard as World of Warcraft belongs to Blizzard, and a rogue server also represents a bunch of gamers who aren’t paying for a subscription, which could also translate into lost potential revenue.
However it seems that the community belonging to the server weren’t too thrilled by the shutdown and have since launched a petition to get Blizzard to change their mind. In fact former World of Warcraft developer Mark Kern threw his support behind the petition, saying that he would bring it to Blizzard himself if they got enough signatures.
According to Kern, he said if the petition got at least 200,000 signatures, he would be bringing it to Blizzard’s Mike Morhaime, and now it looks like he will have to. According to the latest numbers, the petition to keep the vanilla server alive has since crossed the 200,000 mark and is standing at 205,694 at this time of writing.
Now there’s no guarantee that Blizzard will have a change of heart since allowing this rogue server to continue running could set an unwanted precedent for the future, but if anything it does represent that there are many players who are interested in keeping the servers alive. We suppose the best case scenario is that Blizzard could come to some kind of compromise, but we probably wouldn’t hold our breaths.
Filed in . Read more about Blizzard, Legal and World of Warcraft.