Crispy™ Vanilla WoW emulation

[GarfunkeL]

I'm making a new thread since the old one is cluttered with outdated information.

As of 23rd November 2016, the situation is as outlined below.

Vanilla WoW servers available right now:

Twinstars (CZ business making money out of people) runs Kronos 1 and Kronos 2. Both are 1x rates though K1 had a 7x event in the past. K1 currently has raid content open up to and including AQ40. K2 is at BWL and ZG. Kronos is low-to-med population, has lot of bugs, raids are terribly undertuned, classes have many issues - list goes on. Talking about other servers in public chat channels will get you muted and possibly banned as well. K1 will have Naxxramas open next spring but wing-by-wing. Considering that their BWL, ZG and AQ40 releases have been abysmal, don't hold your breath for Naxx to be anything good.

RetroWoW - instant 60 fun server. Good for fucking around on max level battleground and trying out different classes and specs before committing to them on a 1x realm. P2W. Buggy as well, don't think you can finetune builds here.

Feenix - absolute shit, avoid. Vanilla Gaming - absolute shit, avoid.´

Magic WoW - RP-PVE realm. Still technically in beta - accounts will not be wiped at the end of the beta. Very low population. Had completely fucked up pathing at one point, supposed to be fixed now but I haven't personally tested since I can't remember my account name and can't be arsed to create a new one.

Rebirth - One of the oldest realms, still has lot of bugs in it. Very low population.

Other servers do exist but aren't really worth mentioning. If you really, really, really have to play right now, choose from the list above.

None of the above matters, however, because in the near future, two big projects will launch and they will suck all other realms dry.

Nostalrius is returning, having merged with the Elysium/Valkyrie. The new name is Elysium Project and it will use Nostalrius core. During December and January, they will launch three realms in a staggered fashion:
1. Nostalrius PvP, which will have all the old characters from Nost, plus old characters from old Elysium. This realm will be on patch 1.8
2. Elysium PvP, a fresh server with no transfers allowed. This realm will be on patch 1.2
3. Nostalrius PvE, which will have the old character from Nost PvE realm. This realm will be on patch 1.5

If you don't know, Nostalrius was the most successful vanilla server in the history of WoW emulation, with hundreds of thousands of players. After receiving a C&D letter from Blizzard, they complied. The popular theory is that the Nost team did that in order to leverage their popularity and the public outrage into pushing Blizzard into providing legit legacy servers. Since that didn't happen, they now gave the core and the database to Elysium and many (if not all) Nost staff members joined the Elysium team.

The second big project on the horizon is Crestfall, which will start their closed beta test on Dec 26th and roll into open beta during late winter/early spring. Eventually they will launch with both a PvP and a PvE realms. Their big claim is that unlike other server projects, they are not relying on the Mangos emulator but have built their own. Thus, the common Mangos bugs/issues that plague other servers will not be present on their realm. However, they will naturally have all sorts of new issues. The CF team is quite transparent about their development work, which is building hype for them.

Whether CF can actually cash in all those promises they've made, remains to be seen. It is possible that it'll all turn out to be vaporware. Hopefully not. Having two successful projects, both without any p2w features, would be fantastic for players.

I've been following the vanilla scene for two years now so I'll try to answer any questions. You can also venture into Reddit.

 

[catfood]

1. Nostalrius PvP, which will have all the old characters from Nost, plus old characters from old Elysium. This realm will be on patch 1.8

Massive if they manage to do this. I had a level 56 druid and a level 42 priest on the old Nost server. I was so pissed that I couldn't get either of them to 60, but hey that's what happens when you're a dirty casual like I am.

 

[Metro]

Nost/Elysium/whatever will just be shut down again.

 

[Xor]

I played on Feenix for a while (yes, it is absolute shit) and deleted my WoW install off both my computers in a fit of anger after being ganked by 4 horde just before I could finish a 15 minute escort quest. And then a week later they announced Nost was coming back. I feel like I have to play again since I had 2 60s on their PVE server, along with a 40 or so hunter.

It's interesting to hear there's a project based on an original core, although I'm dubious they can pull it off.

And here's hoping Blizzard aren't massive dicks and shut Nost down again.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Nost/Elysium/whatever will just be shut down again.

Why are you in prison?

 

[Metro]

Nost/Elysium/whatever will just be shut down again.

Why are you in prison?

I ignored a Blizzard C&D letter.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Nostalrius PvP and PvE realms are launching on December 17th. The fresh start realm, Elysium PvP, will come at some point later, possibly 3-4 weeks after.

 

[Martyrized Dinosaur]

Have they said anything on a Burning Crusade upgrade? The only thing keeping me from investing time in this is the fear that it all becomes obsolete when they roll a new server with BC on it (the best Xpac ever imo)

 

[GarfunkeL]

Elysium: "Possibly at some point in the future once Naxx is completed"
Crestfall: "That possibility is built into the core we are constructing"

All current TBC servers are crap, by the way.

 

[zeitgeist]

 

[Wulfstand]

The million dollar question is actually why would you bother wasting your time (like I have) on their server altogether. Bad coding, (way) worse latency, minute-long lag spikes that make you believe the server is have a stroke, minutes at a time waiting in a line for respawning mobs like cave men jumping one on top of another for a piece of that rat, not to mention all the herbs being already camped by botters/farmers (of various nationalities, you get the idea).

Putting insult to injury, you also have the server run by a bunch of moronic, PC, 'you can fuck my wife too' retards.

I'd rather stick to retail any day until Crestfall gets released. What I wouldn't give for a bit of schadenfreude, to be able to find out that the GMs were/are actively behind many of the gold-selling that plagued the site.

 

[dibens]

Bad coding.

What irritates me the most about private servers is the lack of collaboration between the teams in order to share the fixes and improvements on the code. Every server starts with the same bugged mess, fix what they can/deem important and then go on bragging about how theirs is THE TRUEST VANILLA EXPERIENCE! Literally every server I've played so far had good coding in parts where other servers hadn't and vice versa.

It is my understanding that Elysium will use Nost code, but will try to add fixes that the other team had done, and that's already a step in the right direction. One example of this I'm particularly interested in is the paladin skills which were considerably more Vanilla-like in Valkyrie.

Regardless of what might happen, Nost had created a huge buzz in the WoW community over the past year and the relaunch and subsequent fresh server will see huge numbers. There have been Vanilla related channels and video guides cropping up on Youtube like mushrooms after rain recently, and that's always a sign for hype still being alive and well.

EDIT: BBC having articles on it doesn't help lessen the attention either http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38250351

 

[Martyrized Dinosaur]

I'd rather stick to retail any day until Crestfall gets released. What I wouldn't give for a bit of schadenfreude, to be able to find out that the GMs were/are actively behind many of the gold-selling that plagued the site.

What makes you think Crestfall will be any different? All WoW private servers seem a bit dodgy.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Bad coding

Best on any vanilla server in existence, though not perfect of course.

(way) worse latency,

Best latency for EU players. Way better than Kronos.

minute-long lag spikes that make you believe the server is have a stroke

Never happened. Obviously when the pop went past 10k, server delay became reality but no such lag spikes.

minutes at a time waiting in a line for respawning mobs like cave men jumping one on top of another for a piece of that rat

I guess you didn't play after they implemented the dynamic respawn system.

not to mention all the herbs being already camped by botters/farmers (of various nationalities, you get the idea).

Lolwat. Only Black Lotus was difficult to acquire and it certainly wasn't camped, probably because the spawn locations weren't always the same. My guild herbalists had no problem getting enough BL for the whole guild as we prepared for AQ40.

Putting insult to injury, you also have the server run by a bunch of moronic, PC, 'you can fuck my wife too' retards.

I mean, do you seriously expect anyone to take your claims as anything close to truthful at this point, since everything else was bullshit and/or massive hyperbole.

I'd rather stick to retail any day until Crestfall gets released. What I wouldn't give for a bit of schadenfreude, to be able to find out that the GMs were/are actively behind many of the gold-selling that plagued the site.

Yeah, maybe CF will be next coming of Jesus. Or it's Corecraft 2.

zeitgeist they didn't have anti-cheat on during the stress tests either. Following the logic of that poster maker, that means that they will allow cheaters on the live realm as well.

 

[Wulfstand]

dibens Martyrized Dinosaur I agree, Nost did have a huge impact on the community, and yes I do acknowledge that Crestfall sounds too good to be true, that's why I said I'd rather wait for that, meaning I'd rather wait for something that actually looks promising, rather than being content with what we currently have (which is something that goes against what a vast number of people believe with regards to private servers, I know). What I wouldn't give for some actual 'Legacy' servers, especially something akin to Diablo's Ladder Boards, where each expansion would last a certain amount of time, according to the amount of content it had, like for example and as pure speculation WotLK would last a year, MoP 7 months, WoD 3 months, etc. and afterwards each server would move on to the next expansion and you wouldn't have time to feel the content drought. That shit would be, in my opinion, amazing.

Yes GarfunkeL I was hyperbolating yesterday, and I don't very much feel like doing the same/arguing today, especially since neither of us can acquire any palpable evidence to our claims. 'Yes it was that way/no it wasn't' doesn't feel very appealing to me right now.
I barely played (a couple of years before too, mind you) on private servers before Nost, and to be honest it shouldn't matter. I joined the server when it was a little over 5 months old, and have played on it heavily for a couple of months, and rarely during it's last 1-2 months.
At the beginning I remember distinctly days in a row when I'd log on sometime near 8 PM GMT+2 in order to do my Dead Mines quests, and how by the time I had managed to form a group and actually start doing shit inside the dungeon, the server would crash constantly, with rollbacks to boot. Now sure enough they eventually fixed that, and for a couple of weeks things went really smooth, and then the server started to grow exponentially.
The dynamic respawning was very hit and miss for me, as I would often die due to mobs respawning and hoarding my ass often. It didn't do jack for me personally when it came to herbs/ore, unless I would log in relatively early. 1-2 PM GMT+2 was already prime time in Asia, 6-7 PM in Europe.

I remember the devs were working on the player phasing technology for months, trying to fix the ridiculousness of having 12k people on a Vanilla WoW server, and they were still working on it when the server got shut down. Around that time, I was leveling an alt, and questing through zones such as Redridge was a nightmare.

The thing that I see most people neglecting is that the overpopulation problem spawned months. Even at 6k it wasn't sustainable. Of course, if you were already level capped you weren't as a affected by the lag spike as the leveling crowd, since a vast majority of level 60s (from what I saw, am not going to pretend like I'm an expert) were either raid-logging, Honor grinding in BGs, or pvp-camping other players in certain choke-points, such as the Dire Maul main entrance gate, or the Nesingwary Camp. People bitched and moaned about the devs accepting donation money to fund another server, and the response from one of the GMs (wouldn't be surprised if it was Pottu) was 'alright, but you'll have to find us a handful of GMs for the server as well'.

Don't feel like ranting on, especially since it's not something I'm all that passionate about. I got pretty butthurt by the image posted above but otherwise I don't much care for the WoW private server scene, especially after Corecraft just disappeared with all those years of work wasted for nothing. I'm not saying people shouldn't play on Vanilla private servers, just not on Nostalrius, not unless they get enough servers to fit the crowd.

 

[GarfunkeL]

They won't get enough servers to fit the crowd because the hype and interest around the topic at the moment is insane.

Funny enough, I don't remember such constant crashing and rollbacks. Both naturally happened, but were pretty rare and certainly did not hinder questing. Granted, I was 60 by that time but I was also leveling alts, so I'd like to say I know what I'm talking about. I found both herbs to level alchemy on my rogue as well as minerals to level engineering on my warrior. It wasn't easy like on retail, but very much possible. So the dynamic respawn was great - the only places where it could get too much were caves where you really had to be very careful about the mobs and where to eat/drink. It didn't make them impossible unless you rushed ahead without a care in the world.

The population wasn't a problem at all at 6k. I leveled both a tauren shammy and a nelf hunter through STV when pop peaked from 8k to 10k. Including doing the Nesingwary quests. Yeah, running around alone at all times was stupid, but somehow - if you realized that WoW is supposed to be A MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER game - you might have grouped up with other players. And somehow getting quests done and surviving wpvp weren't an issue. They fixed the honour grind by removing the prem vs prem priority, which made the honour grind easier for premades. If you cry about the ranking caps being high, well then just blame the nolife poop-sockers who pushed the ranks that high. Dire Maul camping was insane but it was still possible to get inside, again especially if you entered as a full party.

"Don't feel like ranting on, especially since it's not something I'm all that passionate about", yeah sure you're not :D I'm butthurt about BS that people claim about Nost, since I tried Feenix before it and Rebirth/Kronos/Vanilla-Servers/MagicWoW after and all let me down, pretty badly. Pathing, for example, is usually fucked on most servers and even Kronos that has player pathing fixed, has pet pathing still broken in many places. It's easy to find something to complain about Nostalrius but in fair hindsight, it was the best vanilla WoW server available. And for sure Elysium will continue that. They've already promised a big list of fixes before launch, stuff that they've been working on during the closure and merge. Saying that people shouldn't play on Nost/Ely is like telling people they should play Giana Sisters instead of Super Mario. You know, the lesser known, buggy version of something really popular that functions well enough.

 

[Wilian]

Rebirth - One of the oldest realms, still has lot of bugs in it. Very low population.

I know you're well blinded with the tales of Imbaslap (And his tale is most hilarious one) in terms of Rebirth. It's still technically the most advanced private server on all front (Que 2 weeks AQ was bad ridiculing whilst Nost MC of all things was terrible for 5 weeks)

Script wise, The Rebirth is still best, despite the awkward AQ opening that I hoped was better and I do like the irony of your "still has lot of bugs in it" whereas we (they) suffer from very little major bugs of overall scene

 

[dibens]

Script wise, The Rebirth is still best

Here I was hoping this new thread will get away with not having Willain shill his dumbshit ghost town server.

How the fuck do you even have the balls to call Rebirth the best scripted server when any lvl 1 can log in and see that mob aggro is completely broken and they' ll chase you across the whole zone.

 

[Wilian]

Script wise, The Rebirth is still best

Here I was hoping this new thread will get away with not having Willain shill his dumbshit server.

How the fuck do you even have the balls to call Rebirth the best scripted server when any lvl 1 can log in and see that mob aggro is completely broken and they' ll chase you across the whole zone.

I'd like you to demonstrate that.

As far as your ulterior comment goes, I'm not shilling for this server anymore, best bet is Kronos, as disgusting as it sounds.

 

[GarfunkeL]

I know you're well blinded with the tales of Imbaslap (And his tale is most hilarious one) in terms of Rebirth. It's still technically the most advanced private server on all front (Que 2 weeks AQ was bad ridiculing whilst Nost MC of all things was terrible for 5 weeks) Script wise, The Rebirth is still best, despite the awkward AQ opening that I hoped was better and I do like the irony of your "still has lot of bugs in it" whereas we (they) suffer from very little major bugs of overall scene

Maybe I am but you can't deny that after Nost shut down, one Nost-guild moved over to Rebirth. They reported a shit ton of bugs, best of all which was that Onyxia was half-broken. That's after how many years of being in development? Four? I'm sure the r/wowservers gang talk shit about Rebirth but come on dude. Especially as that guild left Rebirth as far as I know.

 

[Metro]

Where's my Blizzard OFFICIAL legacy server?!?!

 

[Turisas]

Where's my Blizzard OFFICIAL legacy server?!?!

You think you want it, but you don't - not really. Plz buy subscription to Legion instead.

 

[Scroo]

Any news on the elysium release date?

 

[Turisas]

Any news on the elysium release date?

Nada. Maybe they'll tell more after the 17th.

 

[Wilian]

I know you're well blinded with the tales of Imbaslap (And his tale is most hilarious one) in terms of Rebirth. It's still technically the most advanced private server on all front (Que 2 weeks AQ was bad ridiculing whilst Nost MC of all things was terrible for 5 weeks) Script wise, The Rebirth is still best, despite the awkward AQ opening that I hoped was better and I do like the irony of your "still has lot of bugs in it" whereas we (they) suffer from very little major bugs of overall scene

Maybe I am but you can't deny that after Nost shut down, one Nost-guild moved over to Rebirth. They reported a shit ton of bugs, best of all which was that Onyxia was half-broken. That's after how many years of being in development? Four? I'm sure the r/wowservers gang talk shit about Rebirth but come on dude. Especially as that guild left Rebirth as far as I know.

Onyxia isn't really half bugged, her flight mechanic is visually broken but the mechanics of the fight itself do work. Most of the ciriticism comes because of release of AQ, which I agree with, was released too early without proper testing. It was fixed up to a notch top condition in two weeks after release and larger test base but sadly the first impression word had gotten out by then. When we talk about overall situation, Rebirth is the single most advanced server technically speaking. Everyone's favourite Nostalrius promoting people tend to forget that when they launched, even their MC was broken to a point they had to do reroll on it (Not to mention, in Nost's case we're talking about server that launced 3 times, failed, then got popular momentum on 4th) and that they practically launched a server that was basic ManGOS emulation with altered gear stats. Bugs that hadn't been part of ManGOS in two years before of it's release were present.