For years, players have quietly voted with their feet — leaving Blizzard's official servers for unauthorized private ones that preserved a version of World of Warcraft frozen in 2004. At BlizzCon 2026, Blizzard answered with World of Warcraft: Forever, a permanent vanilla server that borrows its philosophy from Old School RuneScape: keep the world classic, but let it breathe and grow through community-guided additions. It is, at its core, a company reckoning with the truth that nostalgia is not a phase to be managed but a home some players never wished to leave.