"World of Warcraft" has been among the leaders when it comes to MMORPG (i.e. massively multiplayer online role-playing game) since its release in 2004. Avid fans have suggested that Blizzard could perhaps work along with the devs behind the private server, Nostalrius, to bring out the so-called Legacy servers. But unfortunately, it seems to be a shot at the moon.
According to Gamer Professionals, the dudes behind Nostalrius attended a meeting at the Blizzard Headquarters situated in Irvine, California. They were met with the "World of Warcraft" devs, with the game's director Tom Clinton and Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime attending the assembly.
The said meeting took over five hours. Shortly after, Viper, who is one of the developers behind Nostalrius, posted in the server's official forums what appears to be a summary of what had been discussed.
Viper admits that he and his team came up with the detailed report, meeting presentation, a number of slides and survey results, among others. These, in one way or another, were significant in influencing the result of the meeting. However, it just did not end the way they wanted it to as "World of Warcraft" legacy servers are not just feasible, at least for the time being.
Kotaku reports that Blizzard conveyed their reason behind the decision, though it was Viper who broke the sad news to the community. He claims that Blizzard has the exact source code for Vanilla "World of Warcraft" and whatnot. It should be noted, though, that code version control systems are a thing in the past. After all, it has since been an industry standard for quite some time now.
However, for them to come up with a server as well as the client, they need to have "a complex build system." In reality, it is not just about generating the "Server.exe" (let alone the "World of Warcraft). There are a bunch of things to be considered -- from data to maps to models, among others.
Simply put, prior to re-launching the so-called "World of Warcraft" vanilla realms, all of these have to be gathered. And by doing so, they will be able to build the required processes along with the code. Unfortunately, not all of these are available under the current version control system -- they will have to be recreated first.
