A Battle.net post from J. Allen Brack offers Blizzard's official response to the negative reaction to the news of the closure of the Nostalrius private "vanilla WoW" server, explaining the company's position on the situation. He explains the legal move was required to protect their intellectual property, and claims it was beyond the limitations of our legal system to do anything but shut them down: "And while we’ve looked into the possibility – there is not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server." Responding to player's desire for such a service, he explains if they "explored options for developing classic servers and none could be executed without great difficulty." This seems to ignore the possibility of somehow acquiring the project they shut down, though he doesn't completely rule this out, saying: "One other note - we’ve recently been in contact with some of the folks who operated Nostalrius. They obviously care deeply about the game, and we look forward to more conversations with them in the coming weeks."