dragreb

I disagree with you on multiple points. Once again, it is not only the quality of the servers internals that make for the quality of a server. Good servers also need an active development team (because even Elysium is still far from finished and if exploits show up, the better you know the code, the quicker you can fix them). It needs an active and good GM team to support the players and servers. It needs more than anything else a big population to sustain the community. As well as good hardware and everything else. While Elysium does have all of this, it is not the reason anybody here chose this server (except maybe the population). The only reason we chose this is because of the good software. Which means it is really a limited choice because none of the other things I mentioned mattered as much. As a community member, it would be much better if our choice could be made based on much more than just the server software. I understand that you fear that people would run off to another server the moment one would spring up with the same quality, but that is just not the case. If they are not a significant improvement in all the other departments like developer activity and quality of their GM team, people won't make the switch. On the other hand if Elysium ever started to go downhill hard on some of those points, people would at least have a better place to go to. Lets not act like Elysium is certainly invincible. Few people expected Nostalrius to go down so quickly and even fewer expected them to act as shit as they have (with character transfer failing after a week). Elysium is here already, if it remains in the forefront of quality servers, it will not fail. It has the population, which, after software quality is probably the biggest reason to choose a server. Just having the source also does not mean you have a server set up. Not at all. It still takes a lot of work and knowledge to go from the source to an actual stable running server. You need physical servers, you need a GM team, you need to actually understand what you are running. Set up a safe website to make your account and so on. And all of that to compete with a server that already has a huge active population as well as every other person who managed to set up their server using the source. If you are the shitty one, you won't be the successful one. It will have been a huge waste of time. You fail to see how vulnerable both Elysium as well as the Vanilla community as a whole is. Elysium could see the same faith as Nostalrius, perhaps by a rogue developer, perhaps by accident. And Elysium is by far the best the Vanilla community has right now. But still everything they have is locked away, so if Elysium fails, we have lost over 5 years of development done by the Nostalrius and Elysium developers. And you are also wrong that its hypocritical to make money of of open source. Nothing in open source says you can't use it as a viable business method. If you can make money on it, thats great. But you will be in a very competetive field because if you can make money of it, anybody else that is as good or better than you can do so as well. So you better stay the best. That is another thing making this open source would do. Give an incentive to not just be the best, but to stay the best. If tomorrow I bring a car to the market that gets 10000 miles to the gallon, I will be the car of choice for pretty much everybody. But it would not be healty for the car market because everybody else would crumble and I could start to be a let down on many other things like comfort or build quality. While if I gave the technology to everybody else, that would mean that I am confident that I will remain the best car for anybody out there and thus believe I also beat every other manufacturer in things like comfort and build quality as well as probably still understand my technology so much better than them that I can still beat them. And it would be to the benefit of every car driver out there. No user should ever fear competition, the only ones that should fear competition are those that create, and it should be an incentive to them to remain the best ones around.

Obviously you cannot make the code opensource today because that would indeed lead to a huge number of hacks. This is why it is good to first team up with other respectable servers. Many security bugs can be found when trying to make multiple systems cooperate. And more respectable people looking at the code is always a good idea. However in the long run your intention should be to ensure no hacks exist. Closed source projects get hacked all the time (as they are right now) and they have a very limited number of people able to help them find the bugs. Even worse, those looking for the bugs are almost exclusively those also looking to abuse. It is a falacy to believe that by not showing your code, less bugs will be found. But once again, you of course do need some time before an open source release to fix the biggest bugs. Let us not forget that the only WoW servers today not based on open source projects of the past are the Blizzard servers. And in my opinion they aren't fun to play anymore. Open source protects the community from having to reinvent the wheel over and over again, so many big servers are gone and so many small bugs have been fixed 100s of times by servers and will have to be fixed a 100 more times because the fixes do not get returned to the community. It also protects the community from the developers chosing a path they do not want to follow. Many of us are here because we like Vanilla legacy more than the current WoW. In an ideal world the servers would have been open source forever and we would have never had to resort to this poking and prodding of an old client just to be able to play the version we want to play. Some of the Nostalrius devs that did not more over have suddenly, for some unexplained reason decided that they should have never shared the code with Elysium. If we weren't so lucky that they had already shared it before trying to retract, we wouldn't have this big Elysium community that we have right now. Making it open source would not increase the cash grab. As a matter of fact, it would likely crumble it. If every server out there has the highest possible quality of code, the integrity of the community and dev team could become a major factor to chose your server. If you had a choice between what Elysium has now and the exact same code quality but with paid for level boosts and items, which one would you chose? Perhaps the one where you pay, if that is the case, more power to you. But it makes it so your choice can be based on more than just the mechanicals of a server, which is just a small part of what makes a good private server. I wouldn't say that the Elysium dev/GM team is bad (although it seems that many on the crestfall forums actually dissagree), but as a vanilla wow player, they could be pretty bad before you even think about choosing a different Vanilla wow server. And that is sad, it gives this dev/GM team a licence to be shit if they wished to do so. It is very sad that you believe that is a bonus. If the project were fully open source at some point, and it enabled everybody to make a server that is mechanically as good as this one, there is still no reason you or anybody else would choose a server made by moneymaking scrubs trying to profit from somebodies else work. It doesn't work that way. It is very hard to steal a great product because by the time you find out its a great product, its already the most popular and best one out there. Even if you had the code, you would have to put substantial effort into getting the community size of this server. But having the code could allow you to make better side projects. The only reason why shitty servers could try and cash/playerbase grab after Nostalrius was gone was because the good server was gone. If the good server doesn't leave, they cannot do the cash/playerbase grab. I cannot be the only person here who looked at private servers projects for years, getting excited and every time they would stop updating and all the work they put in it was lost to the community, there again for the next good looking project to try again.

Here is to hoping you stand by what you said and find closely guarding all your information and code a real problem. I hope this is the first step in a possibly long series of steps to open sourcing all the code. It is sad that those who remained with Nostalrius backed away from wanting to make their code open source, I hope you guys will not forget that the original intention of the Nost code being shared was for it to be shared with the full community, over time. Let us not forget that if Nostalrius started acting strangely sooner, we may have once again lost years of minor and major improvements to the legacy and emulation community.