Warcraft fans' fury at Blizzard over server closure
The elephant in the room, and the aspect of this issue that no one wants to talk about is that players can play on these servers for free. Any player who drops their WoW subscription in favor of a private server is a loss for blizzard,  and some players are thrifty enough to do this. Thus, even though the server might not be charging, it's certainly draining revenue from Blizzard. If the population was 150k, then some % of those were paying customers anyway, and some would play only if it's free, while others might pay for WoW if a free server was not available.WoW currently costs $15/mo.  Blizzard is in a much better position to have numbers for this, but let's say that the existence of the free server might have discouraged 50 K people from having subscriptions who otherwise would have. Assuming 50K, then that's a monthly loss of $750,000 in revenue; or if all 150K did not subscribe but would have, it's $2,250,000/mo. Given that servers are relatively cheap, probably a good portion of that would be profit.The people who say that the servers do not threaten blizzard are naïve or at worst disingenuous. They threaten Blizzard exactly as much as they discourage people from having wow  subscriptions whenever they would otherwise. A player who spends a lot of time on a private server is probably not going to see a lot of value in keeping their WoW account active, after all. Given the way network effects work, a popular server could have a runaway success effect (people tend to play where a critical mass of their friends play).  Furthermore, it is probably quite difficult to convince a player to reactivate their account once the successfully play for a while on a private server and have friends there; the server is probably very sticky.Rather than asking Blizzard to bring back old versions of the game, perhaps Blizzard should embrace a model where players can run their own servers and list them in a public directory, such the players still require a subscription in order to play. And perhaps the server gets song cut of the profit from players who predominantly play on their server, like 10%. Perhaps this could  align the interest of Blizzard and server hosts too much greater degree. The analog of a gameplay mod in other games is more like a custom server in wow, and think of all the good that's come from mods like DOTA. There are still a number of reasons why Blizard would not want to do this, such as the fact they lose control of customer experience, but maybe it's closer to a workable model.