Don’t Expect to Hear About World of Warcraft Legacy Servers at BlizzCon 2016

Ever since fan-run servers Nostalrius caught the attention of Blizzard, it led to many gamers discussing the possibility of having separate World of Warcraft servers setup just to play the vanilla version of the game. Unfortunately it seems that Blizzard won’t have an answer for us until after BlizzCon 2016.

Posting in the World of Warcraft forums, Blizzard’s J. Allen Brack and the rest of the World of Warcraft development team wrote,

“We’ve seen some talk among the community that you might be expecting to hear some news on legacy servers at BlizzCon, and we just wanted to take a moment to let you know that while we’re still discussing the possibility, we won’t have any updates to share on that until after the show.”

Brack claims that the team has been busy with Legion and the upcoming Karazhan patch which is due for a release tomorrow, so if you wanted more updates on legacy servers you’ll have to stay tuned. It’s hard to tell from this message if we will be greeted with good or bad news, but Blizzard did previously warn that setting up and maintaining separate servers might be more complex and cost more resources than they would like.

Sure, Blizzard could cater to the legacy community, but at the end of the day they are still a company that needs to make money and unless there is a huge demand for legacy servers, it does not make financial sense for them to invest in something that might not net them any returns. In any case BlizzCon will be kicking off next month so check back with us then for more updates.

On other World of Warcraft news, the game will be taking its servers down for four hours tomorrow for maintenance and the application of the new 7.1 patch, bringing the return to a classic raid instance as a mythic dungeon, PvP changes, new pets and even an invasion of dinosaur falcons.

Players can expect to be offline from 7 a.m. PT / 10 a.m. ET until around 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET, give or take as the servers are updated. The Battle.net interface should have already started preloading the patch, so once the servers are back up, players will be able to jump right back in.

As far as the patch contents, players will be returning a Karazhan in Deadwind Pass, a popular World of Warcraft raid dungeon in the Burning Crusade. It has since been dormant, visited only by players looking for transmog gear or seeking to solo a particularly irksome boss as payback for bad raid memories. Now it will be a mythic 5-man dungeon for 110-level characters, with eight bosses and quite a few changes from what raiders might remember. Several bosses will be familiar, but the Opera has three new settings, and to new bosses will conclude the dungeon.

Other additions include a new Suramar storyline that will fully unlock over the next nine weeks, eventually leading to the new Nighthold raid and a new mount; a quest line to unlock some new World Quests to stem the efforts of Helya in Stormheim; an invasion along the Broken Isles by a bunch of new Falcosaur creatures that could drop a new mount, as well as regeants for new cooking and first aid recipes; new pets and epic pet battles, and new PvP boosts to artifact power.

The Legion expansion, released at the end of August, has reinvigorated the franchise a bit, with reviews saying that the expansion is one of the freshest World of Wracraft has seen since Wrath of the Lich King..