Completely agree that OW is super fun and a blast to play...

However, I am 32 and I still twitch shoot at about 90% of where I was at 15 and playing on CS (v1.3-v1.5) competition teams. I commute about 85 hours a month for work and really can only drop an hour or so every other night + maybe a Saturday in terms of…

Well, seems to me you know an awful lot about game development and product cycle. Not to mention the business acumen of one who has been there and done that...

Also, those developers were making money. They offered certain features for people who helped donate money to the cause. Obviously the monies went to server maintenance and as best it could, the developers themselves. This is also one of the reasons Blizzard had to step in for legal reasons.

The biggest and only real issue with “hiring” those folks who spent years hosting and maintaining their own Vanilla server is that Blizzard would then be on the hook if that staff simply up and left. Likewise, using legacy code 12 years later isn’t applicable anymore; so Blizzard could not simply step in and fill that…

The are major reasons as to why Blizzard does not / will not (any time soon), open a vintage server for Vanillia game play.

I could honestly begin to go through the technical reasonings but suffice to say it IS NOT easy. (The hardware has changed. The server architecture has changed. Scripting has changed. ETC ETC ETC)

None of the Vanillia server scripting was stolen. Their development team had been slowly scripting the world and raids by MEMORY and VIDEOS. The 1.12 build was essentially a shell that needed the guts plugged back in.