The Nostalrius petition will be delivered to Blizzard by the original WoW Team Lead

Its truly impressive to see so many people rally around Nostalrius in order to convince Blizzard to finally bring back the Vanilla World of Warcraft servers, with all of their charm and flaws included.

The community outcry has been so loud that Mark Kern, the original Team Lead for World of Warcraft, got involved and stated that he would personally deliver the petition to Blizzard if it manages to reach 200,000 signatures. As you might imagine from the title, it has not only reached its goal, but has continued to grow past it, and as promised, Mark Kern has released the details of his plan in a brief blog post:

"I can't believe all the support you've shown for vanilla WoW servers. In the past few days you've all doubled the Nostalrius petition count and smashed through the 200,000 signature goal.

Thank you.

Now its time for me to get to work and put together a package to deliver to Mike Morhaime. Here's what I'm doing:

1) Printing the petition. All 5000 pages of it.

2) Writing an open letter to Mike, and sharing it with the community.

3) Shooting a video of the open letter and uploading it to @SodaPoppinTv's channel

4) E-mailing the whole thing to Mike on Friday and making the letter/video public on Friday as well.

5) Following up on Monday with a call to Mike on his cell and office."

I haven't personally played Nostalrius, mostly because I didn't know it even existed, but given the rather poor state World of Warcraft currently resides in I would love nothing more than to see a return to its glory days, with all of the "impossibly" difficulty dungeons, tons of grind, and gear that actually signified both a player's skill, and their commitment to the game.

Whether Blizzard will do anything about this petition or not, I don't know, but this is the first time I've seen so many people gather under a single banner and ask for the exact same thing, so I wouldn't pour doubt on the idea that a team at Blizzard is currently crunching the numbers and looking into this whole Vanilla WoW business.

For now, however, we only get to wait and see what happens on Monday once Mark Kern finally and 'personally' delivers the petition.

The opening of Ahn Quiraji

One of my favorite oldschool WoW images, the opening of the gates of Ahn'Quiraji (source)