Earlier this week the most popular Vanilla World of Warcraft server Nostalrius was shut down by Blizzard, a decision that did not go over well with the its immensely loyal following of old WoW veterans. Instead of the issue blowing over in a couple of days like Blizzard most likely expected, it has been gaining steam with numerous online personalities coming out and publicly supporting the petition for legacy World of Warcraft servers.

And to add even further fuel to the fire, or perhaps a stick of dynamite in this case, the Vanilla World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern came out and stated that he would personally send a message to Mike Morhaime if the legacy petition reaches 200,000 signatures. Here's the full quote:

"If we can get 200k sigs on this petition, I will personally send it to Mike Morhaime. But if we’re going to convince Blizzard, we need more than 100k. 100k is well, not enough to move them. My guess is that if Nostalrius can do 850k signups, then there are probably a couple million who would do legacy.

It doesn’t matter if Blizzard cares, it matter if we care enough to push them to do it. So please send a message to Blizzard to listen to their fans. Sign the petition so I can bring it to Blizzard."

While some of you might dismiss an online petition as a simple joke, its worth mentioning that the PC community managed to convince Bandai Namco to port the original Dark Souls on to PC, a decision that ended up bringing in millions of sales across the entire franchise, with Dark Souls 3 already nearing its '1 million copies sold' milestone on PC alone. What I'm trying to say here is that petitions can be a powerful tool when it comes to bringing your message across, and while they might not always work, they do showcase the public's interest in a certain topic.

And currently the public demand for a legacy World of Warcraft server is very loud, and very clear. Perhaps even loud enough for Blizzard to reconsider their "no legacy servers" policy, especially considering that the current 'modern' World of Warcraft is losing subscribers so quickly Blizzard has for the first time in history stopped releasing their numbers, but not before showing a measly drop of 5 million subscribers over the course of a few months.

So if you would like to bring the old World of Warcraft back, and either re-live your glory days, or see what all of the fuss is about, now is your time to act and put your name on the petition. It might fail, and even if it doesn't it will probably take a long time before Blizzard finally mobilizes a legacy WoW team, but this is the best chance we've ever had in years to bring back the World of Warcraft many of us fell in love with, all of its flaws and features included.

The opening of Ahn'Qiraj, one of the most spectacular (and laggy) moments of WoW history