Dear community,

We feel as you all must. We have read Nostalrius’ announcement, and it is with a heavy heart, conflicted by disappointment and feelings of betrayal that we issue this statement.

As you may already know, the original goal of our project is to unite the players who truly love "Vanilla WoW". There are many others that dismiss this game, and our passion for it, as something that has outlived itself. Our community knows this is not true, and we know our voices aren't unnoticed. So long as there is this chance, we will continue to persevere and hope that one day, our efforts will be rewarded. We want to thank everyone who supports the Elysium Project within the gaming community. All the success we have achieved is the result of our mutual efforts and our shared love for this incredible game.

Nevertheless, the Nostalrius administration has decided that the server relaunch has only put off the creation of official Legacy servers and is asking us to drop the data they provided us. While we disagree with their conclusion, we respect their decision and out of that respect, we will take the following actions:

Nostalrius characters will be removed on Sunday during a maintenance

We will not publish the source code nor Nostalrius data.

We will transition back to using our first core, Anathema.


This third and last action will take time to perform. We estimate the work to last over a month to in order to maintain the stability and the overall quality level that you have experienced thus far. Our goal is that when the transition happens, you will notice only *improvements*, not a lapse in performance. Working with the Nostalrius core has increased our development team’s expertise and we are confident we can bring our previous core not only up to par, but even surpass the Nostalrius core. Stress tests will occur to test the core in live conditions throughout the transition. You will be informed days prior to such events to know which realm will be affected.

Additionally, please note that characters on the new realms will not be affected at all.

Insight

We are using this opportunity to communicate the first numbers of the project:
52% of Nostalrius active accounts transferred over 16 days(token generator uptime)
155% increase of active accounts compared to Nostalrius.
50% of total accounts were active in the last 7 days
17,000 players simultaneously online on re-launch
30,000 players trying to join Elysium PvP [EDIT FRIDAY/REMOVE?]
38,000 players simultaneously online over 4 realms [EDIT FRIDAY]
62 volunteers
Numbers speak for themselves: the community is growing as Legacy WoW keeps generating more and more interest. We believe that our movement should remain loud and we will do what is in our power to preserve it. We believe that our players must have a home. We will keep providing this community until Blizzard announces official Legacy World of Warcraft content and provide a tangible timeline for their release.

WoW Community

Part of the World of Warcraft community as a whole (not just private servers) feel that we are pirates and have shady practices. However, no matter what filter they attempt to put over their perception of us, we only have one motivation: To restore and grow passion to a game that we love, and that many thought to be gone forever. We want to abide by the game’s creators by any means we are able in order to show good will, which is why we are taking these steps. However, despite this stance, shutting down is not an option until real action is taken on their part to create Legacy servers.

The environment within the game is wonderful, and is one of the key points to why we are so passionate about it. Fun, polite, social, and yet we find a completely different environment on social media. Some members of the community take it upon themselves to slander other organizations who are trying to reach the same goal as us. They also attack Blizzard, the very entity that we wish to be embraced by in the creation of Legacy servers. So we ask you to be the “bigger man”. Show the world that we are a community and support each other. Nothing will be accomplished through show of strength or base insults. Discuss and explain your interests in ways that upbuild instead of tear down. While criticism is good, it is constructive criticism that is the key to success. The community is big enough for us to coexist but it would be better to exist united. We hope moderators of such discussions, (whether it be social media, a guild, or another server project) and enthusiasts will take this message at heart.

This is the community we need to be.

We hope you all will not see this as a blow to our progress, but as an opportunity to show the world our resilience. While our predecessor has been fatally wounded, we gain a second wind.

We will not let you down.