TriplePoints of Interest – Week of April 11

This week in TPOI, Nostalrius, a private legacy server for WoW, shut down to the dismay of its many players. Rust also stirred up a bit of controversy by randomly assigning genders and races to players, but still managed to keep up its outstanding sales numbers. Oh and ESPN has also started investing in drone racing.

Goodbye, Nostalrius

World of Warcraft’s largest private server, Nostalrius, closed on Sunday night after receiving a cease-and-desist order from Blizzard earlier that week. According to Blizzard, private servers violate the company’s terms of use. The popular server, run solely by enthusiastic volunteers, was known for their support of a vanilla version of WoW and boasted over 150,000 active accounts. The forced closure drew a significant amount of backlash from the community and many felt that Blizzard should have supported the nonprofit fan project despite the illegal nature of the server, reports BBC. According to Polygon, in the days leading up to the closure, many players paid tribute to Nostalrius through a pilgrimage march from Orgrimmar to Thunder Bluff, while other fans posted footage of the crowds that gathered for the server’s final moments.

Rust Throws Gender and Race into the Mix

Rust, a multiplayer survival game still in Steam Early Access,has found itself in a strange intersection between controversy and impressive success. The game recently introduced an update that randomly assigned players a race and gender (mixing up the completely white, male character population it had earlier). The change has received both extreme criticism and praise from the community. Developer Garry Newman posted an interesting article on the feedback received after the update in The Guardian. Despite all this, Rust has reported hit 3.5 million in game sales, reports GamesIndustry, heralded as “a paragon of the creative potential of Early Access”.

ESPN Gets Their Drone Racing On

Drone racing is getting serious. ESPN has recently signed a broadcast deal with the International Drone Racing Association. Drone racing features fast-flying drones that navigate through preset courses, while racers don head-mounted displays that show them the view from the drone’s front camera. The network will stream the 2016 Drone Racing Championships on ESPN3, with an hour-long special on ESPN2 and potential other channels. Tech Crunch notes that drone racing may someday get its own vertical, much like ESPN’s efforts with eSports like DotA 2 and League of Legends