My thoughts on Nostalrius’ Post Mortem

Was just reading the Nostalrius dev team AMA on reddit and came across their ‘post mortem’ - an 80+ page PDF in which they published fascinating insights into their journey from nobodies into the world’s most infamous non-profit vanilla private server community.

Believe it or not for someone so passionate about Classic I never actually played on a private server until Jpy introduced me to Light’s Hope. So for some of you this may be old news but to me it has made me take a step back and appreciate the amount of work these guys put in and the huge contribution they made towards pushing for the retail title we are all now looking forward to as a reality.

So, I thought I’d share a few segments which I found particularly interesting and see what your thoughts are. They start off with the ‘history’ of pservers:
Everything began with the GotWoW platform created in 2003 during the World of Warcraft Alpha version. This platform made of around 2,000 active members was used to develop tools and servers around 3 years before World of Warcraft was released. The platform got shutdown in 2004 creating a lot of disorganization among server developers, working on project like WoWD, WoW Daemon or OpenWoW.

Nuts to think that people were already hard at work creating pservers before the game was even in beta.
Keeping the game as it was before make things way more difficult, creates challenge through which true communities and friendships emerge, making all players a band of brothers in a difficult adventure, building strong shared memories.

This is in the context of the atmosphere at the time of remixing and creating new ‘fun’ features - these were decided against by Nost. I love this quote - what could better describe why Classic wow is so endearing, even to a modern audience today?
The conclusion we’ve reached today is that a huge number of players want a genuine retail experience without any custom features.

I’ve seen a number of posts on other platforms besides BC with a lot of very enthusiastic posts dreaming up ideas for ‘improving’, ‘iterating’ and ‘rethinking’ classic server features and even future releases taking the classic concept into completely unrecognisable directions. I am not against the creativity of these posts so much as I am against the idea that people think they can make classic better somehow by adding new features. Perhaps Classic’s release will bring on a new generation of pserver developers realising these ideas?
The decision not to enforce a population limit was quite an undertaking for us which in- volved adding dynamic creatures, ore and herb re-spawns, zone phasing and clustering technology was also under development. The players loved these features as it made the entire server feel more alive. It was beneficial for the GMs to have most of the player base being on one server as it kept everything in one place.

Forget about sharding, which we all know deep down will be necessary in starter zones as has been announced officially for a smooth launch. Forget about that for a second anyway - what this makes me think about is how many realms are actually going to be available. IMO the fewer the better - the larger the pop caps the more history, competiton and feeling of ‘aliveness’ in each server will be possible.

I played a single server MMO for a long time (eve) and cannot stress how much this made it feel like a ‘world’. To paraphrase someone on reddit who I think nailed this on the head well (he was talking about sharding coincidentally but think about if from a different perspective): ‘it would be like playing in A world of warcraft, not THE world of warcraft’. So the less servers there are on Classic, the more character and cohesion there will be on each server. The more servers available there will be less opportunity for famous gankers, guilds and rivalries to make a name in history!

I’ll stop there as I’m only 17 pages in and there’s a lot more stuff I’d like to discuss. But yeah something to chew on in the meantime :) Also holy shit I’m nearly level 40!!