Warmane is getting shut down. This time for real.
More leaks from the internal server have been discovered, it's looking pretty grim:
It has been a glorious decade-plus of "educational research." Together, we have successfully proven that a 20-year-old expansion can be kept alive indefinitely through the sheer power of Russian hosting, questionable "queue-skipping" donations, and a player base that refuses to acknowledge any expansion released after 2010.
However, it seems our friends at Blizzard Entertainment have finally finished counting their Dragonflight money and noticed a small, multi-million dollar smudge on their quarterly earnings report. After seeing what happened to our neighbors at Turtle WoW, we realized that "poking the bear" is only fun until the bear hires a $2,000-per-hour legal team to transmog our servers into a "Cease and Desist" letter.
Effective immediately, our realms (Lordaeron, Icecrown, and Onyxia) will be entering a permanent state of "Scheduled Maintenance." This maintenance is expected to conclude roughly around the same time Blizzard releases a bug-free expansion—so, never.
For those of you who spent your hard-earned donations on a legendary orange axe, we have good news! While we cannot offer refunds (as our treasurer has recently moved to a non-extradition country with no internet), we encourage you to print a screenshot of your character and show it to a Blizzard GM. They probably won't give you the item on Retail, but the laughter you'll receive is a reward in itself.
We’ve had a good run. We survived the Molten-to-Warmane transition, we survived the "fake" population numbers allegations, and we survived years of forum meltdowns. But we cannot survive a legal injunction that is written in a font larger than our actual server capacity.
"It is better to have loved and lost a Shadowmourne than to have never paid 150 Euros to skip a queue at all." — Anonymous Warmane Admin (currently packing a suitcase)
IT'S OVER GUYS! WE'RE DONE!