Every time I see someone talking about how playing on private servers is “free”, I want to HoJ them, pop wings and give them a stern talking to. But since this is a blog, we’ll have a friendly conversation instead~.
Playing on private servers is nowhere close to free. You’re not paying any money to do so, true, but that doesn’t mean what your doing is without a price. You’re paying with your energy, which is limited, and you’re paying with your time, which is finite as well.
Time and energy you spend on private servers could be used elsewhere. You could be playing some other game, you could be hanging out with friends, or you could be working or studying. The money, the experience, and the pleasure that all these other activities can offer — you’re missing out on them because of WoW.
This is not an attempt to paint WoW as an unworthy activity that’s a “waste of time”. It’s up to you, to each one of us, to decide what a waste of time is — not to some outside authority. Sinc we’ve been dedicating parts of our limited lives to WoW, this means that the game is high on our list of priorities, of things that we value. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t be devoting all that time to WoW, and we’d be doing something else.
I love WoW to the point at which I’m not even interested in any other games (especially modern ones, ugh). A decade old version of WoW is the newest game I play, and I do it because I value it above all other games. When I’m playing WoW, the game is the most important thing in the world for me because if it weren’t, I wouldn’t be playing it. Whatever you’re doing at a given moment is the most important thing for you simply because you’re doing it.
Our actions determine our values, and they also determine our identities. You play a lot of video games; you’re a gamer. You play a lot of old school WoW; you’re an retro gamer. You write a blog in 2018: you’re insane. You actually read blogs in 2018: ❤ YUO ARE AWSOM and a part of the elite ❤
Playing on private servers isn’t free; it costs energy and time. And the time you’re paying with isn’t just any time. You’re not a 90 year old man, laying in bed in a retirement home, unable to do much apart from talking to whatever visitors he gets and operating a computer (as much as his hands, damaged by a lifetime of button mashing, allow him). You’re probably somewhere in your 20s or 30s, enjoying all the benefits that being relatively young has. If you’re a teenager, you probably think people in their 30s are old, and if you’re in your 30s, you’re aware that your energy levels won’t stay the same forever.
The time that we’re using to pay for the old school WoW experience comes out of our most energetic, most productive, most imaginative years. We all get to decide what’s valuable for us, and no one has the right to tell us otherwise, but it’s good to be aware of how scarce the currency we’re paying in is. Don’t tell me playing WoW on private servers is free. Nothing is free.
Value, Meaning, and Other Cute Concepts
Owners and the staff of private servers that aren’t pay 2 win are also not doing it for free. The amount of money they earn is small, non-existent, or they’re even covering the costs themselves, but the real prize is the emotional satisfaction of creating a project and presenting it to the world, of managing, maintaining, being a part of something greater than yourself. This is why people volunteer to be GMs, and this is why people will attempt to start servers that are destined to go nowhere.
For those who aren’t religious, the world can be a cold, meaningless place, and it’s exactly this kind of activity that generates meaning and turns our lives from wading through the darkness, staring at an empty, infinite chasm, into an exciting adventure where rewards are real and all the waifus are 3D. A chance to be a part of a private WoW project that you believe in or starting one yourself has a massive pull, and the constant stream of new servers appearing every month confirms it. Most of those servers aren’t P2W.
Some of them are. Notable examples, apart from the entire post-Nostalrius shitshow the vanilla scene has turned into, are Feenix and Molten. Feenix, at its peak, had several paid full-time employees ranging from developers to GMs and routinely sold every existing item in the game including legendaries. Molten has always been a beast that attracted the pay 2 win crowd and players who liked big population numbers and/or didn’t know any better. This resulted in the only type of community that could’ve emerged from it, but it sure paid the bills, and it continues to do so to this day.
There’s nothing ethically wrong with running a pay 2 win server. Starting a private server requires work and knowledge, and this extends far beyond technical skills. (One major issue on which I see both new and existing private projects fail time and time again is marketing.)
Owners and their teams work hard on their servers. All donations are made voluntarily by players, and it’s on them to decide whether to spend money or not — no outside authority can (or should) prevent them from doing so. We all decide for ourselves what the most valuable way to spend our time is, and the same goes for our money.
All pay 2 win projects are based on thousands of hours of development by programmers that have no ties these projects. Their work is taken, modified, and then released with a goal to make money. This is perfectly ethical as well.
Contributors to open projects like TrinityCore, projects that enable everyone to create their own private server with relative ease, do so without expecting any monetary compensation. They do it because, again, it means they get to be a part of something bigger than themselves, and they can do so in a way that’s challenging and helps the improve as programmers. It may seem unfair that their work is then used by P2W projects, and I don’t like the looks of it either, but ethically, it’s completely sound. Besides, those who contribute do it with at least some kind of remote expectation that their code will go live. If no one puts up the servers, P2W or otherwise, then all the open repositories are nothing but piles of dead code.
In reality, some sort of a cash shop is often necessary to keep the server running. Kronos, an established vanilla project, had to re-open their shop after trying to get by without it for a few months. Relying on people donating out of principle, donating just because “it’s the right thing to do”, without getting any in-game rewards in return, proved to not be viable. Kronos’ shop, however, only offers vanity items and an option to buy characters from other players, and while some might argue that this falls under pay 2 win, it’s nowhere close to being able to buy endgame epics and legendaries.
There’s no use in bemoaning the fact that most players will only support their servers in exchange for rewards. The only two times I’ve ever donated was buying full S4 gear on Smolderforge and getting the 4x XP boost on Sunwell. I will never donate just because “it’s the right thing to do” unless the server I’m playing on is on the brink of shutting down due to a lack of founds. But then again, why play on a server that’s been mismanaged so badly that it can no longer afford hosting? Especially since there are numerous ways of monetizing a server, ways we’re going to look into in the part two of this post, coming next Sunday.
Until then, I’d like to know what you think of this post.
Have you ever donated to a server, and was it for something tangible, or was the feeling that you’d supported it enough?
Would you pay a monthly subscription to a private server if that made it superior to everything else?
How many millionaires are playing on private servers, and how many of them are cute, fertile girls?
Let me know in the comments below!
Amberpine Lodge 