Restorative nostalgia[1][2] is a practice where people or groups of people will recreate and preserve media that are subject to nostalgia in order to keep them available. This practice wants to keep the media in its purest form, by disregarding, ignoring, or cleaning out the “impurities” that settle with time.

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World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game created in 2004 and quickly became the most popular one in the market. World of Warcraft Classic was created in 2019 with one specific goal in mind: give the players the beloved experience of the first version of the game, World of Warcraft Vanilla. Indeed, as early as the release of the first expansion, groups of people have been craving a return to the Vanilla experience. Throughout the years, the desire grew, as well as the attempts to reproduce it, by, for example, creating private (illegal) servers that give access to an unofficial version of Vanilla. Despite the unauthorized nature of these servers, Blizzard has most definitely been inspired by these initiatives for creating Classic.

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Blizzard has expressed their wish in remaking the game as closely as it was before in 2004 in order to reproduce the experience many people on the internet have tried to reproduce and/or relive. This is an initiative that falls under restorative nostalgia.

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Despite the few changes Blizzard made to Classic, most of the game falls under a “no changes” philosophy expressed by the community. This creates a blind spot where the experience, being an overwhelmingly important part of a game, isn’t fully restored. 

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These changes in the experience are also mostly due to the ever-changing community, context and environment around the game. We will analyze this context in order to have a clearer big picture.

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The goal of this thesis is to understand the differences in experience between Classic and Vanilla, while understanding the challenges of restorative nostalgia when it comes to MMOs.