Have you been longing to go back to the days of vanilla World of Warcraft, or didn’t get to experience it at all?
In the last couple months there’s been an increase in popularity for vanilla World of Warcraft servers. ‘Vanilla’ as in the original state of the game, before any expansions came along.
There are now 2 new private servers up and running. Nostalrius launched in February, and Kronos in March.
They are both stable private servers and already with a large population . The bigger of the 2 is Nostalrius, with about 3-6k people online at a time, while Kronos I believe around 2-3k. There are no major technical differences between the 2, they’re both professional and as Blizzard like as you can get. At the moment of writing this they’re both running the World of Warcraft game version 1.12.1.
Installing Vanilla WoW
To play on these servers all you have to do is download the 1.12.1 World of Warcraft client, make an account on their site and update the realmlist to connect to the server.
Realmlist for Nostalrius: set realmlist login.nostalrius.org
Realmlist for Kronos: set realmlist login.kronos-wow.com
As for the World of Warcraft 1.12.1 game client you have to install it from scratch (links to client from Nostalrius no longer work – see update below).
All that’s left is to experience and hopefully enjoy the fun and struggles of the original World of Warcraft!
Update: Nostalrius shutdown and World of Warcraft Classic
With the massive popularity the vanilla World of Warcraft private server Nostalrius attained, Blizzard shut the Nostalrius project down april 2016.
However, 2 weeks after Nostalrius was taken down, 240 000 vanilla WoW fans signed a petition asking for legacy servers. With a huge part of the World of Warcraft community demanding to be able to experience previous expansions, Blizzard invited Nostalrius staff for an official meeting. As a result of all this, Blizzard ended up announcing World of Warcraft Classic during BlizzCon 2017.
Thank you Nostalrius and the vanilla WoW community for making this happen. I can’t wait!