There is a lesson that I learned very quickly when I first began dabbling in the world of Vanilla servers in 2012: One day, you will wake up and all of your work will be gone.
It is inevitable; the illusion that your character will continue to exist forever is not even rational. We spend hours upon hours grinding, farming, and working to improve our characters, as if there is some finishing point. But what is that finishing point, really? Farming Naxx and one-shotting people with your full T3 for all of eternity? Or hopping over to TBC, and essentially starting from scratch?
The truth is that we choose to play this gimmicky, imbalanced, grindy, and occasionally frustrating 11 year old game for a reason. That reason is the journey. People love to say that investing time on a private server is “pointless” or “a waste of time.” I say that’s bullshit. Unless you are among the world’s elite DotA or CS players, then you are “wasting your time” no matter what game you choose to play.
We play for the journey. We play for the experience. We play for the friendships and the rivalries. We play for the drama. We play for the feeling of slaying a new boss and seeing BiS loot drop. We play for the feeling of hitting your PvP rank after weeks of hard work and sleep deprivation.
We play for the feeling of riding into Blackrock Mountain with 39 other people who love this game as much as you do, running beside you and laughing in TeamSpeak. We play for 6 hour battles at world bosses. We play for 100+ player battles over Devilsaur Leathers.
We play for the feeling of venturing out into Azeroth and never knowing what lies around the corner, which is a feeling that Vanilla produces better than any game ever has or ever will.
We play for the journey. That is the reason that players like us choose to replay this severely outdated game on a bootleg server. Because this game has a journey that is truly unlike any other game. This journey is a beautiful thing, and it was more beautiful than ever on Nostalrius.
I will never regret a single one of my 127 days /played here on Nostalrius. Why? Because I wasn’t playing for some imaginary end result. I was playing for the journey. Believe me, I am just as disappointed as anyone else that we will never see Naxx. But disappointment does not have to include regret.
I beg ALL of you, as a community... don’t regret the hours that you spent playing here, cherish them. You got to be a part of something that was truly incredible. Nostalrius was not like other private servers. Nostalrius was legendary. And there will probably never be a private server experience quite like Nostalrius ever again.
Cherish the time you spent here. Cherish the journey. Because in the end, thats what it is really all about.
See ya on the next one,
O.G.