Many of you may be familiar with Nostalrius. The largest Vanilla project to-date that was systemically shut down by Blizzard. With attempts to spur ahead and get Legacy Servers released, they met with Blizzard but nothing really came out of it. In a turn of events nearly a year ago(shortly after Blizzcon), they released the playerbase data and core to Elysium. Elysium took this information and re-released the Elysium Vanilla server. It was a smash hit. Gaining ground and even improving the playerbase for a time that Nostalrius had gained. For a short while, it reveled any MMO launch of the year in comparison. Hell, honestly it was top five in playerbase on MMOs by the Steam Charts by comparision if that tells you anything. Well, it seems that all that has changed. Elysium's staff has divided and all that spells for is Elysium may not have bright day's in the future.
So, what happened to this pinnacle marvel of a Cinderalla story?
All inside sources seems to point to a political divide on money distribution. It seems that some of the faction head's awhile back may have taken some of the donation money and pocketed it. Many of the donators assumed that their money was going into strictly maintaining the cost of the server and stability of the project. Now, this may be a blow that many wouldn't tolerate. It seems that goes as deep as some of the staff themselves. In addition to compromising the integrity of the project as a whole and swinging it back into the realm of adversely affecting how people perceive the project, pocketing money for personal gain swings the anvil hard into the realm of legality with Blizzard. Who, for the most part, have remained dormant on the subject at large.
So, without Blizzard even having any involvement in the Vanilla escapade, it seems that all has imploded from within. Several key staff members have taken the playerbase and have informed the public at large that they could no longer be a part of the Elysium branding. They know that the name carried weight but plan on pitching forward and launching a new server called Light's Hope. Will it garner the trust of the Vanilla movement? Are people willing to invest in another private server? Both will contain their characters. It does seem that this one is being spear-headed by transparency but with all the drama are people done with the WoW private scene? Tough questions to answer, I'm sure.
What of Elysium? It is down for the time being. Will it remain dormant? Probably not. As there is still a split staff there and for the time being a lot of the playerbase may well not be aware of all that is going on behind closed doors other than the server is down again. Many people just play the game and let the political side do its own thing. With the server down, this will impact them and they will seek information on what happened. Even if Elysium comes back online. What will the playerbase be like? Will it retain the thousands of daily concurrent users or is this particular phase in the ever imploding World of Warcraft private server scene going to stifle in upon itself.
As for right now the story is just beginning to unfold and more is to be told. But, one thing is for sure, it isn't all peaches and cream over in private server land today and I know one man that is grinning hearing about this....
