They were toast, all of a sudden, and without any announcements prior to this event. The Elysium WoW vanilla Server Elysium died. To be perfectly honest with you guys, this felt a lot like Nostalrius’ demise 2.0. Even the Elysium website went down and it still is inaccessible – says the website will be online within 24 hours, but it’s been over two weeks already.
So, once again we have to endure the annihilation of yet another vanilla private server as if the Nost situation wasn’t enough. There’s one major difference though – Blizzard is not involved this time. Now, let’s focus on the most obvious question you probably have at the moment:
What happened and why is Elysium WoW down?
Now, the whole thing went down on the 16th of October 2017, as I said already. Everything went dark and rumors started to spread among the community. People started panicking about what would happen with their characters and could you blame them?
There were folks who have invested massive amounts of time into this vanilla server and the thought of losing it all in the blink of an eye is a very scary thought!
Interestingly enough though, a server called Light’s Hope emerged on the same day and they promised to provide the same authentic gameplay. The guys behind it were former Elysium devs (Whitekidney, Pittu, and so on) and it seems like they had enough with the corrupt admins (Crogge and Shenna).
Note that this overthrow was carefully planned (I don’t mean that in a bad way), judging from this tweet by Light’s Hope.
Nonetheless, Whitekidney and the other renegades had the original Nostalrius legacy source code, so the whole thing was legit. They had the most recent backups so that the database would be virtually intact and everyone will continue playing from where they left, before the shutting down of Elysium. Now, let me expand on the accusations of corruption and so on.
What’s up with Elysium’s internal (corruption) problems?
Long story short, Crogge and Shenna were doing some shady stuff behind closed doors. The former was duplicating R14 characters and selling them for personal profit and the latter was just stealing from the server’s donations – close to $5000 according to Mr. Crogge himself.
There’s a screenshot from an official statement regarding the whole situation. I don’t know about you, but even if I had some doubts that these people could really do something so lowly, it turns out that it’s true. They even openly admit it! Talk about hypocrisy.
To make it even worse for Crogge and Shenna, there’s a leak of a conversation between the Elysium devs concerning their internal issues. I can’t believe how arrogant these two are – explaining why they did what they did by just saying “I had to help my family” and other nonsense.
This should be more than a good enough reason to throw in the towel and turn your back on Elysium. Darkness surrounds this project in its entirety now and I don’t see that changing, ever.
Note that Elysium has been tweeting about getting their servers back online within 24 or 48 hours (the last tweet is from October 26). Might as well assume that one or two days might turn into weeks or months if they are this “fast.” Not that anyone cares about them anymore.
There’s a new kid on the block – Light’s Hope. Read on as I’m about to show you how to log into their server and continue playing the authentic vanilla experience.
What should I know about the New Nostalrius (Light’s Hope Vanilla legacy server)?
This is what Elysium used to be and a promise for a fresh beginning. White kidney and co are using the Nost source code and their database was up to date (they had backups just prior to the Elysium shut down), and that’s very important, trust me.
One of the reasons for Elysium still not being able to relaunch their servers is probably due to the fact that their most recent database is one or two months old. Or to put it simply – if you decide to return to that corrupt place, you’ll lose one month’s (and more) character progress. Your characters will be reverted back to an earlier date, period.
Apart from the most recent database (one hour prior to the Elysium crash), Light’s Hope is actually the same thing, server-wise. More than 11k players have already moved to LH and the community is booming. The servers are well populated and everything is running smoothly so far. Some of the reasons why I personally left Elysium and decided to jump ship are because of the following:
- The whole corruption thing was the last nail in their coffin – the server is ruined and I don’t want to spend my free time there.
- Light’s Hope’s population is constantly increasing, which means only one thing – Elysium is dead and gone.
- The Elysium servers are still down, after more than two weeks.
- Their last actual database is from September and I don’t want to lose my progress for no good reason.
- Elysium is quickly turning into a fun server
- Light’s Hope’s transparency and corrupt-free, authentic vanilla experience sounds awesome. Plus, they will wage war on gold sellers (apparently).
Now, let me tell you how to set up the realm list and start playing on LH immediately.
For more WoW, check this out: The 5 Best Raids to Farm for Gold in WoW from 110 to 120 in WoW
How do I access Light’s Hope Servers?
First, you don’t really need to change anything other than updating the “realmlist. wtf” file, and here’s how:
- The realm list info is on the upper left corner (lightshope.org)
- Go to your World of Warcraft 1.12 Folder
- Click on the “Data” folder
- Look for the file “wtf” and open it with Notepad
- Replace whatever text is there with the set realm list (lightshope.org)
That’s it, you’re good to go – enjoy your adventures in Azeroth!
Conclusive Thoughts
While I know that many of you will speculate whether or not what happened with Elysium was a black budget project by Blizzard in order to sabotage the vanilla WoW community, the truth is that it’s gone for good.
I personally feel sad that we had to endure yet another Elysium WoW Vanilla server completely ruined, but there’s a positive side to it. Nostalrius started it all and Elysium continued the legacy – now Light’s Hope is our hope of having a stable place where we can enjoy World of Warcraft, as it was more than ten years ago.
If you are already playing on one of the LH servers, I’m playing a Human Pala (called Endtimes) on Anathema PvP so give me a shout in-game if you are on the same server.
In the meantime, if you have more questions or something to add regarding the plight of Elysium and vanilla WoW in general, make sure to drop us a comment in the comment section below!
