Uhhh... I hate to break it to you... but the very game and assets itself are inherently copyritten material. You couldn’t take a direct copy of Stormwind, plop it down in your game, call the game something else, and expect not to lose a lawsuit for copyright infringement.

They didn’t completely recode the game, they built their own server code yes, but not the game itself. The name and art assets are all blizzard owned.

I’m fine with Vanilla servers if Blizzard published them themselves. But I find it totally reasonable and understandable for them to shut these down, too. However, I find it hard to imagine that a Vanilla server option would be viable long term with no new content over the course of months/years. People already…

Games that are shut down, sure. Active games, even if different versions? Shut them down and sue the people running them. They didn’t do shit to make the game, just profit from other people’s work.

Well, I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I dislike private servers for games like this, and feel that they do harm to the overall franchise. I have absolutely zero issue with Blizzard shutting this down, and I feel the ones running it shouldn’t have released the source code.