World of Warcraft Classic – a retro server by Blizzard

Hello to all Azerothians!

World of Warcraft Classic – a retro server by Blizzard

As you all know, Blizzard recently announced a “second return to the past.” After revisiting TBC, that is, the Legion expansion… Classic is also making a comeback! Both with the World of Warcraft Classic project, which apparently will be an official “retro-server” by Blizzard, and with the new expansion that seems to mark the beginning of a new old-school battle. Well, as they say…The Drums of War, Thunder…Once Again!  In short, as Indro Montanelli said: “A people who ignore their past will never know anything about their present.” Because, I add, it is thanks to that past that they became great. And it is thanks to successes like TBC, Classic, and Wotlk, of course, that Blizzard made the Big Money… so why not try again? 😛

But someone might ask: why Classic and not Wrath or some other expansion? ….the answer, believe it or not, starts right from AzerothShard!! (now someone might be cursing the author of this post but… take it easy and read the rest :D)

The origins of the Classic case: TrinityZero and MangosZero

So, I would like to tell you a story that has its roots in the second era of AzerothShard, around 2009 (more info here: https://azerothshard.org/info/storia-di-azerothshard/#h.igj3abwrt0vi ). Before AzerothShard reopened in its second era, there was Blizzard’s announcement regarding the expansion following Wrath, namely Cataclysm.

This expansion brought a significant shift in the world of World of Warcraft. While expansions like TBC and Wotlk essentially “added” content and mechanics, with few replacements and some improvements to old features… Cataclysm, on the other hand, began the process of “dismantling” entire Zones, Quests, Instances, Mechanics, and so on… completely changing WoW as it was known.

Thus, a rift was created in the community of developers and players: lovers of pre-Cataclysm on one side and lovers of post-Cataclysm on the other. This is why today the active emulation projects are essentially divided into Legion (unstable version of TrinityCore) and Wotlk (stable version).

Anyway, given the imminent expansion and since I was an active developer of both Mangos and TrinityCore at the time, I started thinking: Why not work on the total perfection of “World of Warcraft Part 1” (that is, pre-Cataclysm)? Starting from the beginning perhaps: WoW Classic 1.12.1

So, in the TrinityCore project, I found another crazy person (Maddogz) who had the same idea, and this project called “TrinityZero” began (a version of TrinityCore “sugar-free,” a bit like Coca-Cola Zero, so to speak :P, which supported WoW 1.12.1).

Unfortunately, both the repository, the forum, and the IRC chats were lost, but I found an old “web-archive” from 2009 about it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090709072159/https://www.trinitycore.org/forum/trinityzero-faq-t5002.html

Where you can read the following posts:

Maddogz:

What is Trinity Zero?
Its TrinityCore for 1.12.1

What is this based from?
TrinityCore 1, it was originally nicknamed ‘TC rollback’

Why did you use TC1 instead of building from an old mangos, such as rev 3462?
This is a lot more feasible to begin with. Updating from a revision that old would take thousands of commits to catch up to where Trinity is today. It’s just a lot easier to work backwards. Also, I really like the idea of Trinity having all three cores. It just makes sense.

Yehonal (in response to a certain Slycopper):

Originally Posted by Slycopperr
When you all could be fixing some damm Bugs in Trinity Core 1 and 2 no, you waste your (and Devs) time doing such useless sh***.
This is my opinion, but if you have a GOOD reason, I think it would better explain it, because starting a new Core with a Patch that is so old, sincerely, is a waste of time (which can use to get the newest of Bugs).
Hi slycopper, I’m a dev of TrinityZero ATM…let me say that it’s a wrong opinion:

1 you must try to learn the Open Source Philosophy, and the Trinity “umbrella project” policy… we won’t ask TC devs to spend their time for us, we are just searching “interested” ppl for this “old days” project.

2 the actual W0W and W0W 1.12 are 2 different games as Machiavelli said, but the most important differences from TC and TZ are:
TC: pros -> you have a core updated with the latest patches
cons-> but there will always be a lot of bugs when a patches will be released.

TZ: pros -> maybe with hard developing we could build a (almost) perfect core and satisfying nostalgic ppl
cons -> we can’t follow Blizzard updates 😛

We then began a long process of adapting TrinityCore, and when we reached the point where we could roam the old lands of Azeroth with the old 1.12.1 Client of only 5GB, it was truly exciting!

Gradually, several enthusiasts joined the project, but the first real obstacle was paradoxically TrinityCore. In fact, the community managers had no intention of giving prominence to our project except by giving us a small section of their forum. Maddogz then got discouraged and abandoned the project, and TrinityCore erased all traces of it… So I decided to start over, but this time on Mangos, where thanks to the “legendary” Vladimir-Mangos (for those who know about old emulators, this guy was like an unstoppable fixing machine) we managed to create the MangosZero project!

AzerothShard Classic Edition (2nd Era)

This then became the basis of Azeroth Shard (2nd Era), the first playable retro-server based on MangosZero.

A video from the 2nd era:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc-7lOHskns

The small realm unfortunately had little success in Italy because at the time “retro-servers” were something extremely pioneering (who knows why in Italy when you don’t follow trends you’re always “snubbed”) and indeed Wrath was the expansion in vogue.

The project closed after almost a year due to little interest, and the database went to an international realm called Feenix, which had adopted MangosZero as its base. I continued to develop for MangosZero until Feenix also closed and was absorbed by Nostalrius, which in turn was based on MangosZero but without ever contributing fixes or giving credit on their site.

End of the second era, the collapse of Mangos, and the birth of Nostalrius

That was also the period when Vladimir distanced himself from the project, and Mangos “imploded,” creating two separate communities: Mangos (supported by the original founder but carried forward by developers who violated their own copyrights) and Continued-Mangos (developed by the most active members of the old community, preserving the original copyrights and fortunately also the history of the work I did on the project: https://github.com/cmangos/mangos-classic/commits?author=Yehonal )

But back to Nostalrius…. in all this chaos, this project managed to absorb many classic realms that were born from MangosZero, including Feenix and thus indirectly also AzerothShard 2nd Era. Moreover, as I was saying, based on MangosZero, they created a real business behind it that allowed them to make so much “noise” that they ended up under Blizzard’s radar, which applied the DMCA, forcing the closure of Nostalrius. But apparently, despite the lack of honesty and the mountains of money they made, there was still a real passion. That passion that drove all of us to work on this Classic project and that brought tens of thousands of players to Nostalrius. The same players who then signed a petition, through Nostalrius, to ask Blizzard to create a retro-classic server.

Blizzard then invited the Nostalrius team to their studios, and from there, a process of reevaluating the retro-server case began, leading us to today:

<<<<World of Warcraft Classic is officially announced!>>>>

The Nostalrius team at Blizzard’s studios:

Well, what can I say… a Blizzcon full of twists, a story that started from a small emulation project put together by two crazy pioneers… but above all, a slap in the face to those who every month are there to “dirty” our posts on Facebook with phrases like:

<<Shut down these retro-servers! the real WoW is something else!>>

<<People are tired of old things! update yourselves!>>

etc. etc.

One old collaborator told me one day: <<It’s simply a matter of crop rotation>>. That’s why here at AS we try to offer you always new custom content, enhancing the old contents mainly thanks to Timewalking and the annual First Kill, all this on our beloved Wrath of The Lich King!

AzerothShard and its third ERA. Help us believe!

Today AzerothShard is in its third era, characterized by the Wrath of The Lich King (The last expansion of WoW Part 1 as we like to think of it) and once again we are pioneers of so many innovations (more info here)

Anyway, who knows… maybe one day Blizzard will bring Wrath back into the limelight and at that point, we will write about the third era of AzerothShard which fortunately is having a significantly greater success than the previous one!
And you? what do you think of this return to the past? Comment and let us know your thoughts 🙂

With this, I say goodbye!

A hug, Yehonal