World of Warcraft: a Poor Man's Guide

As a college student, I know myself and my peers cannot afford the $15 a month for WoW, but we still need to feed our addiction. This is where private servers come in. These servers operate off of donations (which you recieve in game rewards for) rather than monthly fees. Keep in mind though, that they are NOT Blizzard. Not only that, but the legality is a grey area and private servers have been known to shutdown without warning. However, you do recieve an experience almost identical to Blizzard's with only minor in-game glitches.

Google searching "private world of warcraft servers" will return tons of results, but understand that most of these servers are crap. Generally they're several patches behind, have almost no users, and the amount of glitches and broken features make it almost impossible to play. It's very difficult to find a good one. There are sites, such as xtremetop100, which have rankings for private servers, making it easier to find good ones. Personally, I use Wowbeez. The admin is one of the largest contributers to the Arcemu project (the group that creates and maintains the server emulation software) which results in an up to date, less-glitchy WoW, which attracts a large number of people.

I'm not going to get into how to connect to them, but it's extremely simple, and you can find tons of guides on servers' sites that give step-by-step instructions on connecting.

Back on the topic of the legality though. Playing on private servers allows you to download the game without paying for it. This is piracy, which I don't support. If you want to play the game, buy it. However, the monthly fee is intended to maintain and host the servers. So if you are using a third party server and not Blizzard's servers then you should be responsible for the third party's server upkeep, not Blizzard's. This is just my personal belief, but morals don't matter in legal systems, only laws. Which is why Blizzard's group of high-priced lawyers are able to convince courts to shutdown private servers. It doesn't happen that often, but when it does you lose your characters and have to decide if you want to go WoWless or find a new server. This also helps in kicking your addiction to the curb.

Hopefully this helps the less fortunate among us get our fix. Feel free to comment this on my blog.