The petition to resurrect the private server Nostalrius following Blizzard's cease and desist has surpassed 200,000 signatures. This was the threshold at which former World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern pledged to deliver it to Blizzard president Mike Morhaime personally. He's more than making good on that offer.

From TwitLonger:

"Now its time for me to get to work and put together a package to deliver to Mike Morhaime. Here's what I'm doing:

Printing the petition. All 5000 pages of it. Writing an open letter to Mike, and sharing it with the community. Shooting a video of the open letter and uploading it to @SodaPoppinTv's channel E-mailing the whole thing to Mike on Friday and making the letter/video public on Friday as well. Following up on Monday with a call to Mike on his cell and office.

"I want to thank @SodaPoppingTv for being so passionate and doing the WoW stream to publicize this. I want to thank @Nostalbegins for taking the time to Skype with me and show me what a great bunch of devs they are, and thanks for everyone on my feed and following me @Grummz for all the moral support and tweets.

"But...Especially, thank you petition signers! Thank you vanilla WoW fans! Thank you for supporting this petition and for playing and loving vanilla and early WoW so damn much! YOU did this! YOU can make it happen. And I'll be there right alongside you.

"For the Alliance, for the Horde, for Azeroth!"

I spent a few months playing on Nostalrius, and recently delved back into it to find out how the players are reacting to the shutdown. There were a handful simply there because it was free, but on the whole it's populated by passionate fans trying to relive the glory days, or curious as to what all the fuss was about. For my money, it'll be a travesty if nothing comes of the community's efforts.