Warcraft Private Servers - A Personal Experience

If you've ever thought of playing Warcraft, but had reservations about the monthly fee, then you may have been tempted by some of the methods that claim you can play for free.
I'm mainly talking about private servers here. These are severs you can log onto that are not owned by Blizzard, and run a version of Warcraft.

To be honest, the idea of doing this has never interested me. I had doubts about these places, but in the interests of investigative journalism I decided to have a look over the Christmas week.

Firstly finding these places was very simple. Typing "WoW private server" or similar in any search engine came up with literally hundreds of these places. I scouted around, a little concerned that some might be little more than hosting areas for a mass of virii, and selected what seemed to be the top five.

Over a period of the next two days I logged onto all of these. Two USA based, two European and one in Korea.
I was hoping to have a varied set of experiences about which to write. Perhaps enough for a series of in depth articles on the pro's and con's of these servers. Sadly this was not the case at all.
They were all uniformly awful. The first (apparently quite well acknowledged as the biggest private server in the world) took twenty minutes to log on to, and was the laggiest experience of online gaming I've had since the 1990's. As for company, a quick scan through Stormwind and I found four other players. All doing nothing.

I moved to Dalaran and found quite a community there, but it was more of a chat-room, a bit like Second Life. No-one was interested in questing or levelling - and why should they be, they had everything the game offered just edited onto their characters - effectively they had all "finished" the game before they had even started.
People milled around, there was a lot of griefing and bad language. All in all it seemed a pretty pointless exercise.

Giving myself enough Gold to "cap out" was simply a matter of 12 key presses. Having a bank vault filled with dream shards and void crystals took all of five minutes. Of course no-one was interested in buying them there was no real point in doing this.
I had all the best equipment, so crafting anything myself was also an exercise in futility.

As for the technicalities, the lag I experienced was a common factor to all five private servers. The logging on took an age on all five, perhaps an average of twenty minutes.
On more than one occasion I would eventually get on, only to find no-one around to instance with. Only to be informed that the server was going down..for the rest of the day. Apparently a 50% up time on these servers is considered quite good!

Of the two that didn't allow such massive customization, the experience was almost as bad. You were still expected to start at level 70, and could edit your achievements at will (Everyone was boasting realm firsts)

Perhaps these laggy places are where the videos are shot for the game guides that try and sell you on how wealthy the guide writer is in Warcraft (rather than actually give you any meaningful detail about the guide they are trying to sell).

I looked into this and found that this was more than likely. Blizzard confirmed as recently as November 2009 that no account anywhere on Warcraft has more than one character at gold cap. It has never happened. If anyone claims that they have more than one character at gold cap, I can assure you it's not on an official Blizzard server.

In summary, I can perhaps see a little value in these places for players who want to spend twenty minutes checking out some advanced mechanics in the game before logging onto "real" Warcraft, Those that treated Dalaran as an extended chat room seemed to be enjoying that experience.
Against that;
The pointlessness of playing when you can have everything from the beginning.
The game wrecking lag.
50% server downtime and
The lack of anyone to actually instance of quest with...
made me conclude that these servers must be an acquired taste. One that I do not have, and have no desire to acquire.

There are a range of free levelling, gold making and profession guides available from Paul Clarke at.
FREE DOWNLOADABLE GUIDES
The best Warcraft Gold guide on the market can be found at
Advanced Gold Guide