Are Official World of Warcraft Vanilla Servers Incoming?

Whilst there are a number of World of Warcraft players who hanker for the days of "vanilla" WoW (the world prior to the game's many expansions), it's something that Blizzard have never provided. There have been a number of private servers that have cropped up over the years to cater for the demand, but all of them have been closed down by the big B as quickly as they could pop up. The latest server to get shut down was Nostalrius, but this spawned a lot of backlash from the community, and even a petition to bring official vanilla servers to the game, which got 240,000 signatures.

Initially, after the shutdown, Blizzard went on record to say that Vanilla servers wouldn't be a thing that they could do. The amount of time and effort needed to keep such servers running and updated would be too difficult for them to do. The team running Nostalrius disagreed and apparently, so did those near quarter of a million people who signed the petition. 

The furore surrounding all of this drew the attention of Blizzard, who are adjusting their stance slightly. In a turn up for the books, the Activision-owned developer are now in talks with the former admins of the server to discuss the concept. This might be the point where we finally see vanilla servers as an official thing. In a message on their forums, the Nostalrius team issued a statement to advise about the meeting:

"The last few weeks have been full of exciting events that we did not anticipate. We saw the first official answer from J. Allen Brack on the topic of legacy servers, the petition reached 250.000 signatures, and we are currently scheduling a meeting at Blizzard campus!

We are very excited to be able to help Blizzard understand the part of their community asking for legacy servers and many other related topics, in the hope that they will eventually make it possible to legally play previous game expansions."