WoW private server investigation

Nearly a year ago now I quit the game World of Warcraft (WoW) after playing it for roughly a year and a half. WoW is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) which is a complicated way of saying ‘a bunch of people playing the same game together.’ WoW currently has 10 million players all of whom pay a $15 dollar fee each month to continue on playing, this equals roughly to 50c a day. Now some people in this world decide that they have no wish to spend such an extravagant amount of money on a game and prefer to play on private servers. These servers are set up by independent people or companies that hosts the same game, but with a difference. For starters, there are no monthly payments, instead you have to option of buying ‘donor gear’ but I will get to that later. Instead of spending up 500 hours of constant playing to level up your character to the highest level most of the private servers allow you to level instantly or a whole lot quicker then average; saving you plenty of time and commitment. Generally these servers also offer vendors in which a player can get all the best gear in the game instantly and for free. These items are generally only acquired by the elite players on the retail version, and even then it would take countless hours to obtain the gear.

So basically these private servers supposedly take out all the boring stuff that no one wants to do and leave you with…well, what do they leave you with? There is no motivation for you to try and beat the game any more as you have all the best stuff that the game has to offer. You cannot level and you can’t get better gear, leaving the only option to fight against other players or PvP. This however can turn out to be very frustrating as everyone has the same gear, no one works together, and nearly everyone is under then age of 13. PvP is made even worse by ‘donors,’ people who pay the hosts to give them customised weapons that have outrageous power, thus allowing them to defeat any other play with total ease.

So is it worth it? Despite the fact that you do not have to pay anything, so much of the content of the game is lost that even for free you aren’t getting very much at all, especially when the download for the game is over 9GB. After I quit the game, for a brief period of time I played on a private server but it was nothing compared to the retail version and I soon stopped that habit. Nowadays only my older brother plays a private server occasionally I managed to get some screenshots of the game. Well, this post perhaps begins my line of posts generally about computer games; they are a fun pastime for me and will enjoy sharing my nerdy experiences with you guys.