A number of World of Warcraft fans were disappointed when Blizzard Entertainment forced the shutdown of Nostalrius, an unofficial “Vanilla” WoW server, and now the studio has come forward with an explanation for its actions.

‘Why not just let Nostalrius continue the way it was?” J. Allen Brack, executive producer of World of Warcraft, said in a forum post. “The honest answer is, failure to protect against intellectual property infringement would damage Blizzard’s rights. This applies to anything that uses WoW’s IP, including unofficial servers. And while we’ve looked into the possibility – there is not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server.”

According to Brack, Blizzard has considered offering its own old school WoW servers, but he explained that it would not be an easy task to pull off.

“We explored options for developing classic servers and none could be executed without great difficulty,” Brack said. “If we could push a button and all of this would be created, we would. However, there are tremendous operational challenges to integrating classic servers, not to mention the ongoing support of multiple live versions for every aspect of WoW.”

Rather than offering servers that recreate the early days of WoW, Brack said that one possible route Blizzard may take would be to offer “pristine” servers, which would remove all leveling bonuses, such as heirloom gear, as well as character transfers, character boosts, and even the group finder.

Effectively, this would make everything in the game take longer, but it would not revert all of the many changes that have been made to classes and abilities in WoW over the years.

“We aren’t sure whether this version of a clean slate is something that would appeal to the community,” Brack admitted, “and it’s still an open topic of discussion.”

On the subject of Nosalrius, Brack seemed to suggest that there might be a slim hope that the server might not be entirely dead.

“One other note – we’ve recently been in contact with some of the folks who operated Nostalrius. They obviously care deeply about the game, and we look forward to more conversations with them in the coming weeks.”

Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment (c)