Private server World of Warcraft and related drama.

I'm still floating around. I feel like I'm drifting around not doing much as of late. The inner artist in me wants to create something but I'm not sure what to forge. I need to play around with some video editing as I've had fun doing so in the past. In the mean time I'm dealing with the wait... I'm waiting for PSO2 (Phantasy Star Online 2) to be released but as of late I've heard of Tera going free to play here in February so I may give it a go.  PSO2 is shaping up to be the same as PSO from what I've seen so far which isn't necessarily bad but the lack of an open world limits the exploration the game can offer. I'll go over that more at some point today I wanna talk about private servers for World of Warcraft. 

I'd say around 2006 or so I dabbled in a lot of private servers for World of Warcraft.  I don't remember the exact number but I tried half a dozen or so different servers. If you're not familiar with the concept of a private sever its basically an emulation of game server. In the case of World of Warcraft it was a way to play the MMO without having to deal with a $15 monthly fee. It was good as I didn't have a disposable income at the time.

The last one I played on that I can remember was WoWscape. It was probably one the best ones anyone could play on at the time I was playing it. It had a big player base for a private server and it worked well with my dial up I had to use at the time. It closed down around 2009 since the owner of the server, Peyton, made bank on donations for the server by selling items offering them as a bonus for donating. The practice of taking donations isn't that uncommon among private server owners but Peyton made $500k a month or so while the the costs of the running the server weren't nearly as high. As it turns out Blizzard didn't like others profiting off their intellectual property.  It did suck losing all my progress I'd made with the characters in that server but that's the chance you take with any MMO. This of course is even more of an issue on private servers since there's really no contractual obligation for the server owner to maintain or upkeep the servers whatsoever.

Blizzard doesn't really care much about private servers for the most part. Legally its more work to prosecute private servers than it is to go after them so private server owners have next to nothing to fear. In a way it can be argued that private servers are free advertising for WoW. Personally, I did end up buying an expansion and a month or so of time for WoW. The official servers are a lot nicer than private servers. The allure of the official servers being the scripted events that work, lack of bugs all throughout, and of course general customer support that you won't find when using a private server. What really drives an MMO is the community and strangely that's one of the reasons I quit playing the WoW altogether. I had a rather sour experience on the official server involving a guild. The simple politics associated within the community of a guild are enough to leave a bad taste in one's mouth if you happen across the wrong megalomaniac group. That was just my story though. I'm sure there's a lot of better structured guilds and my experience was merely an isolated incident but it was enough to turn me off to the game. There was also the issue of me not being able to play from home reliably,  at this time the official server wasn't as easy since I was using a dial up connection. Finally, I felt the $15 a month wasn't really justifiable for the amount of fun I was deriving from my playtime.

It was around this time I started looking into more action oriented online games.