“Hi, my name is Grim and I am a World of Warcraft addict!” I’ve been addicted to WoW since 2004 when the original game came out and have been playing ever since. I never left Blizzard but I feel like Blizzard left me over the years. Modern takes of wishing away the War in Warcraft doesn’t sit well with long time players. And the fumbling of the Classic servers and not maintaining simple things like a permanent TBC and Wrath server makes long time players frustrated at best. I’m not a fan of modern retail and held on until Warlords though I own/played all the expansions albeit briefly. The last time I had a blast in Blizzard’s WoW was during Classic alpha/beta test servers. I was playing with Asmongold and the community of players made it fun again. From kiting a dragon back to wreak havoc on Stormwind (I was one of the hunters involved) to the last day when devs rolled in and summon all sorts of mayhem upon us to celebrate the last hooray! But that was short lived as things died down and as the servers progressed Blizzard began adding in WoW tokens and making changes that killed the fun. SO enter the notorious WoW private servers…
I’ve been playing the private WoW server scene going waaaay back to the humble beginnings and ex-Eastern Bloc Soviet Union servers some of which are still with us today like Warmane. And I don’t feel bad for playing on these servers since I keep a Blizzard WoW subscription to check on things, see new servers and when family decides to hop back on to PVP and play together. What these private servers deliver is experiences that Blizzard just isn’t offering. I question whether they even could. Blizzard keeps trying to shut them down but it’s futile as even more rise up in their place even ones they shuttered. So let’s talk servers!
Probably the top on my list is Ascension WoW as it offers a bunch of very creative servers. There is a seasonal draft server where your abilities are random and you have to cobble and re-roll abilities to make something usable. They have a “build your own” server where you can use any abilities to create your own hybrid class including new pets to tame from undead to elementals. Ascension has two Classic Plus servers (hence Blizz’s attempts to stop them) one is a true Classic Plus with og classes/new content and the other is the same classic world but with 20+ new classes called Conquest of Azeroth. They have even relaunched a classic plus server Blizzard shutdown called Project Epoch. Ascension is currently enemy #1 and a huge thorn in Blizzard’s side as their offerings are 100x times more creative and they aren’t backing down.
OctaWoW is one of several TurtleWow classic+ servers that popped backup whenever Blizz shutdown TurtleWoW. It’s called OctaWoW because there are 8 devs each with backups of the server, that do not know who the others, incase Blizzard shuts one down another will immediately go live again.
ChromieCraft is a small community that plays on a Wrath of the Lich King server. The devs are very lowkey yet are behind the Azeroth Core engine that runs many of the private servers. It is a true classic Wrath server which Blizzard refuses to do for some reason.
Whitemane has a Wrath and Cataclysm servers. The Cata server still has the Wrath builds and glyphs before it was fouled up by Panda.
These are just a few of the hundreds of private servers out there but ones that I like. Blizzard created a firestorm with their shutdowns that is only fanning the fan of rebellion. There are even tools to build your own home server populated with bots that you can raid with. The old TurtleWow dev team has turned to making their own MMO to compete with Blizzard and make something they won’t be able to stop. Lots of things happening outside of Blizzard. I just wished they’d stop shutting stuff down and instead put that effort into making something we actually want to play. Keep the WAR in Warcraft!
