They weren't making any profit off of this server, like other servers that have all this goofy custom stuff about them and they slip under blizzard's no fun allowed radar. It's hypocritical at best. Private server's might be considered theft, might. If they're hosted on Blizzard realms then technically they're not. There are a lot of aforementioned grey areas that keep servers from being 100% legal, bot those grey areas are so minor even the most competent of corporate, with the exception of Blizz, will ignore.
To make matters worse, the whole reason people left the current expansion was to get away from the stuffty facebook game fiasco that was going on. You don't need to travel anywhere anymore, it's not a "world" of Warcraft, it's a loving garrison lobby where NPCs replace players, towns, and cities. In all honesty, it felt like a prison. Blizzard won't release any more figures after Wrath of the Lich king because they know their industry is declining in playerbase. They try to counteract this with new stuffty attempts at attracting the more moronic time wasting players to frantically complete all their garrison quests and spend at least a full hour on their game.
There are many more reason why people left the current wow for other servers, but blizzard refuses to accept that they themselves are wrong. Nostalrius was what it was, Nostalgia. It WAS a "World" of warcraft because in order to do things you had to travel and form raid and dungeon groups throughout the land of Azeroth and Kalimdor. Along the way you met new and interesting people with their own story to tell in a sense that it was like sitting down and listening to an old man's adventures and tales of excitement. No longer will anyone ever experience what i experienced again because of Blizzard's feudal attempts to "modernize" their game. The quests are so mind boggling stupid now that all you have to do is follow a yellow arrow in your minimap. No one actually reads and puts time into the quest story-lines anymore, no one will know what it's like looking for landmarks and clues to find out your next objective.
They took out so many class specific actions and abilities to dumb down the classes even more for moronic players. Did you know, you once had the option of controlling your pet as a hunter? Removed because it was a "useless feature" when in reality was probably one of the best tools for kiting around raid bosses. Mounts costed about 1k gold which meant that you had to spend wisely if you ever wanted to tread the lands in style. Hell, the game had it's own self sustained economy for a while. People would sell precious ores for blacksmiths in certain towns and there was even a gold black market at one point.
All of the aforementioned features are now gone, and all you have are Battlegrounds, Raids, Easy "Kill and collect" quests that boost your ass so hard you're already over-leveled by the time you're finished with the questing zone. Now you can buy lvl 90+ characters without learning a single loving thing about them.
Debunking everything I've just said with "bbbut its uhhleeeeeeeeeeegalll!" just shows that you've had to play vanilla to truly not care about the minor as forget legal system that's already at play.
