The fight for a vanilla server of World of Warcraft is still an ongoing affair. The operators of Nostalrius have acknowledged that Blizzard just didn’t kick them in the balls by shutting down the server and leaving them out in the cold to suffer. In fact, Blizzard is still in talks with the group regarding some sort of collaboration involving the revival of a vanilla server.

Game Rant picked up comments from one of Nostalrius’ volunteers named Daemon, who stated…

“We are very excited to be able to help Blizzard understand the part of their community asking for legacy servers and many other related topics, in the hope that they will eventually make it possible to legally play previous game expansions.”

Even better is that Blizzard invited the crew out to Irvine, California to the official headquarters where they’re working out some kind of deal to get those old servers up and running for a newer generation of WoW players.

Nostalrius previously had 800,000 registered users and regularly had an active user base of 150,000 at any given time. In fact, with Blizzard bleeding around a million subscribers a year, it’s almost safe to say that the million that Blizzard lost from the main World of Warcraft, Nostalrius gained.

The private server was only in operation for a year and was part of an effort of five years worth of work from the volunteers to made it possible. Work on the server started back in 2010 and it finished in early 2015.

After being in operation for only a year, Blizzard stepped in to shut down the private server, citing that they had to protect the IP to avoid getting caught up in the web of wrestling with legalities. Suffice it to say, gamers who played diligently on Nostalrius were not pleased with the server being shut completely down.

The real issue was that hundreds of thousands of players just wanted to experience vanilla World of Warcraft again, and Nostalrius opened up that opportunity for them. Now it’s a matter of whether or not Blizzard will acquiesce and bring back a vanilla server or simply keep shutting down any of the vanilla private servers, much to the chagrin of their own audience.

Hopefully greed doesn’t completely win out and we see them doing the right thing.