Some of the most sad and devastating times in online gaming come when servers go offline. This is especially true for MMOs, which often cut off access to old areas that are less visited, thus becoming irrelevant. It’s like having a shopping mall built over your favorite childhood playground, except not only is the playground gone, but there’s no mall to pop tags at.

The most recent case of this took place a couple of days ago, when Blizzard decided to shut down access to the Nostalrius servers. The private servers, though completely unofficial, allowed players to experience pre-expansion World of Warcraft content not currently accessible in the official game. The folks responsible for keeping Nostalrius running claim that the server has 800,000 people registered, with 150,000 of those still remaining active. A WoW subscription was not required to play on here, which may have influenced the high number of recurring players.

The videos above show the players celebrating the last moments of the server being online before Blizzard pulled the plug on them. As you can see, lots of spell-casting and lots of yelling. What’s not in view, though, is the tears of these players crashing to their keyboards. A little over 60,000 players have joined a petition to keep the servers online, so needless to say, Vanilla WoW is very much missed. Good luck getting Mike Morhaime to agree to pirate servers.

Nonetheless, the videos themselves are pretty entertaining and a firm reminder of how finite time in these MMO worlds really is. Tell us what your favorite expansion in World of Warcraft is in the comments below.

I wonder if this weird gamer guy was somewhere amongst the crowded servers:

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HT: Na suana com Youtube, Oeddelino Youtube
Image: Blizzard

Malik Forté is the Gaming Editor of Nerdist and the badass, fearless leader of the White Pants Illuminati. Find his ramblings on Twitter: @Malik4play.