A bit after November 23, 2004 when World of Warcraft was released by Blizzard and the game started to gain a huge amount of players in record time a new "business" has been born: Hosting World of Warcraft private servers as a full time job.

"Are WoW private servers illegal?"

To the question posted on Blizzard's forums "Are WoW private servers illegal?" official answer was: Yes, it's illegal and against our the Terms of Use. Running such a server will have legal consequences as they hold full copyrights for all the game content and images. Blizzard even posted in the Legal Faq a straight answer to this question: " No. Blizzard Entertainment® is not accepting requests to host Battle.net® servers at this time." They also call private servers "rogue servers".

What makes these servers illegal?

The C++ coded software that is powering your own server is 100% legal as long as you did not copy it from some other person who claims legal rights for it. It would be weird considering this code is a private work and would be hard for anyone to prove this.

The problem is the World of Warcraft client, no matter what game expansion you use, Blizzard has full copyright of the Images and of the whole software that runs the game on your PC. To be more clear, if you could write your own game client from scratch without using any of the World of Warcraft libraries and graphics it would be legal. But that would mean to code a whole new game and the effort would be huge.

Famous servers closed by Blizzard Entertainment

WowScape ended by being closed by Blizzard with a DMCA. Peyton, the owner of the server was sued and long story short had to pay $88 million. Well that's a lot of money. You can read all about this in the posted link.

A more recent take-down was the famous Vanilla server Nostalrius, their website is still online and you can read all about it. What they did different then others is decoding the Warden. What is this Warden, well, it's the Blizzard's anti-cheat system, it's highly important on a private server to have a safe and fair environment. Beside that they focused on perfecting the emulator code to a new level, they offered good support and seems like that was the recipe to success.

The first and the most popular Wow emulators

These days the most popular and the largest emulator for World of Warcraft is TrinityCore. It has over 300 contributors and is focused mostly on 3.3.5a (WOTLK) expansion.

One of the first emulators for Vanilla Classic Wow was developed by Burlex under the name Ascent. The project started as a GIT and it raised interest of a lot of young talented C++ developers who joined the team. I won't start a history of all the emus released but most important were ArcEmu that was later upgraded to TBC and then the team split to Mangos, a bit of a different approach. Burlex left the project and joined as main developer on WowScape but about that will talk a bit later on.

Popular types of server realms

The creation and imagination was unleashed: custom vendors, modified items with higher stats for donations and new quests. The servers type started to get shape: PvP, PvE, Low, Medium and High experience, increased level cap above the official game, etc. Some were Fun servers with instant leveling and focused mostly on dungeons and battlegrounds. Normal items were easy to get on these fun realms, ether you got them from a vendor with a bit of gold or were given as a startup gear.

A lot of these private developed servers had a tone of bugs. We were excited to find new ones and exploit them in to our advantage. Beside the "bug hunt" it was the excitement of the game, after all World of Warcraft is one of the best MMORPG's I used to play as a teenager.

How much money does a wow private server make?

First let's talk about "Donations". It's important to keep in mind you will need a good Payment system, Paypal banned most Wow private servers since a few years ago and starting the business with them may not be a wise choice. You will get your account suspended and all money will be put on hold for endless time. Look at other servers, check what they use for donations, most popular these days is PaymentWall (a lot of payment options) or Bitcoin.

Your Donations are not really donations unless you are a non-profit organization, so it's better to threat them in your terms as payments.

The items or the services you sell is really important, for long and short term. Selling uber gear or stats will affect your new non-donor players and selling moderation or admin power is also bad as most will abuse their powers. The best way is to sell what everyone can get so it's fair and recruit your staff only from active and good players.

Regarding your estimated income, from what I heard from trusted sources, a good wow private server with 100 online players online on average would make somewhere between 100$ to 200$ a day. Now if you multiply this, let's say you have 300 players most of the time connected, you will be making somewhere near 5.000$ a month.

Getting to that high population is the real struggle. You need to promote it to have a good flow on players, you will need 1000 new accounts for 10–20 active online players. So to get to 100 players you need to reach 5000 or more accounts.

What are the monthly expenses?

The most expensive is the development and the management of the server. Hosting price can be under 100$ to start, you still need a good CPU but about all there I will write a different article.

First popular World of Warcraft private servers

I remember a some of them but the one that caught my full attention was WowScape. It was different, highly populated, a lot of bugs were fixed and they had a pretty interesting gameplay. You had to do a set of chain quests to get some superior custom items and the final quest was requiring a donor help. Somehow they managed to keep normal players and those who were paying for advantages, the donors, in a good harmony. That last boss was with timer, had a huge health and only the "chosen one" with paid weapons could slay the monster in proper time.

How to promote your private server

Advertising may be expensive for a starting server but there are a lot of free options. You can add yours for free on top lists like best wow private server.

Top for World of Warcraft private servers ranked by votes, expansions, game-type and locations.

Most tops will rank your server based on players appreciations, the votes they cast every day. You may also reward your players for the effort of voting. There are a lot of other methods to promote but I will talk about that in a new story.

Conclusions

Starting such a business is not legal and I don't advice you do it, this article that may sound like a "guide for how to start your own private server" is intended to discourage you.If you don't have all knowledge to create such your own server you should know from start it will take you a few good months to start it up. Setting it won't be a big challenge, populating it and fixing bugs will require effort and a lot of time. Most important, if you are a talented coder don't waste your youth with this types of business, invest your time in to a future and stable legal business. You will thank me later for this advice.