The Daily Grind: Want a private server?

This seems like a tech support nightmare to me. How would the company deal with bugs? Updates? Patches? Expansions? And if it crashes, how fast should it go back up?

If I where Turbine or Blizzard or SOE I would not touch this idea with a ten foot pole.

"Accurately" replicated? It's been a long time since I bothered looking at the private server scene for Warcraft, granted, but last I heard private servers still tended to be more unstable and lacked any advanced scripting on mobs (making all the awesome scripted boss fights into nothing more than tank-and-spanks). Has that changed?

i would love to see mmorpg's and sandbox games mixed. A NWN online that came with tech support=omg!

The idea of private servers seems to be contradictory in relation to the idea of MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER. Private servers would simply suck up resources that could be better applied to the normal game servers and the game in general. Frankly private servers just reeks of catering to a small crowd in a genre that is based on large scale social gaming environments.

As much as I would love this, especially with the ability to mod aspects of it, its self defeating for the MMO developers. It would splinter the player base too much.

MMO's need stratification of the player base without splintering. Part of WoW's staying power is the investment the players have put into their characters. A major side effect of this is extended stratification. In simpler terms, MMO's need the newb to envy the casual player's achievements and the casual player needs to yearn for the advanced player's equipment. In WoW this desire almost causes feedback on itself because of the depth of stratification. You have more groups, each of which envies the next higher tier: newbs

WOW..I had no idea these existed. Kinda looks like fun. But can you set one up just to entertain yourself?

I ran a private server for a game that was shut down. Administration and development took all of the fun out of the game for me. I was glad to see it reopen as a f2p game.

That said it was fun for a while. But with only around 20 people on it, it was less than Massive.

I actually find many private servers annoying for the reason that they are trying to replicate the online game mechanics. Look, if I want to play WoW, I'll play WoW.

What I would LOVE to do is see someone apply a totally different gameplay experience. How about a WoW without levels and other advancement techniques? Picking up the really cool features of other games and combining them utilizing the existing graphics of WoW?

so much could be done.

I used to be a part of the Lineage II private server scene for a long time. What I enjoyed most about these was:

- No bots. Unlike retail these servers are easily manageable by 5 or 6 GM's. Since they don't have to go through what might be typical protocol to ban a bot (since it isn't a "retail" game) they can ban incredibly quickly.

- Faster leveling. Lets all be honest, Lineage II was (and is) a large grind. What was nice about the private scene is that you could essentially choose a server based on the XP rate you wanted. If you still wanted a bit of a grind and such you could go 7x. If you wanted a more "balanced" XP rate you could go for 50x or so. Of course if you just wanted to get into PvP real quick you could go for a custom server with custom buffers, shops and the like that was like 300x.

- Smaller community. There generally would be a couple of thousand of players online at the same time in these servers. Because of this it was pretty easy to get known if you were a good player (or, alternatively, a dick). Of course a lot of the community happened to be players who didn't have the cash to play on retail (younger kids, Brazilians, ect.) so you did have to deal with some annoyance but on a PvP game it was never an issue.


Pretty much it was one of those things where "why would I pay for this game if these guy's made it BETTER for free?". Generally almost everything would work on a private server (there would be bugs) and there was no real reason to deal with retail. Essentially retail on L2 was bot filled, a grind fest and a game where only the higher levels take any risks. On private servers they were bot free, the XP grind was what you wanted it to be and people took plenty of risks in PvP which made it a more exciting environment.



Sadly the L2 private scene is all but dead due to all of the great servers going away.

I do not like private servers they most of the time feel like developer test versions. But amazing enough I heard of games (Aion I'm looking at you ...) where the Christmas and Easter events were more fun and had more GM's and content on the private servers than in the actual retail version. That is just sad :(

Hopefully a hearty "Hell Yeah!" puts it as concisely as is possible.

I've used them, it's a fantastic idea. This is just another opportunity for developers, much like gold sales. I hate gold farmers and their spam. Some developers embraced it and worked it into their model. I still hate it. Incorporate private servers though and just charge for it.

Private servers though? Oh hell yeah. Would I pay a little extra for our guild to literally be the only heroes in our own little world... Let me say a third time Hell yeah.

We could just call "private servers" the desire for Diablo multiplayer and be done with it... (execpt sprinkle in a persistant world)

I still don't understand why mmo's need exorbitantly drawn out leveling curves. The Diablo series had a leveling curve that was almost 1/10th (even without turboing or cheating) what it takes to get to level cap in modern mmo's. Yet that didn't hurt the games longevity at all.

Obviously, using someone else's product without their permission isn't kosher. Obviously, allowing a third party to modify your flagship investment and profit from your work isn't going to be attractive to a game developer.

But those aren't the interesting ideas. The interesting idea is designing an MMORPG that is intended from the start to support 'private servers'. More specifically, the interesting idea is a framework for serving a game world with tools to modify and customize it, and a business model that permits third parties to resell (or give away) access to customized worlds, for a fee.

Not all players of games are passive consumers. Some are authors, artists, and creative hobbyists, and would enjoy the chance to build characters and settings to share with others. There are large, long-lived guilds who organize grand efforts of creativity to create such things for one another in conventional MMORPGs. Undoubtedly, they would welcome an MMORPG that would give them greater power to invent--as long as it's a basically good game.

Why don't publishers give us products like this? Because nobody's ever done it. Putting up the millions of dollars that it costs to build a decent MMORPG is enough of a risk for investors, without asking them to believe that you can succeed when no one has ever seen the game mechanics or the business model working.

That doesn't mean that such a model can't work. It just means it's a really really hard sell to guys who have some investment capital and are looking for a place to grow it.

Some studio might manage to pitch an idea like this successfully to some investors at some point. What's more likely is that a small group of industry professionals or gifted amateurs might put together a hobby project that eventually turns into something pretty fun. If that happens, then there will be a model that studios can point to and say, "look! that worked. Now let's do one for real, as a product."

The reason why I left Lineage 2 official for private servers was you can have alot more variety in private servers, because you can have many characters anstead of just one or two (due to time constraints), since the exp rates and adena rates are usually higher. I don't play highrate because I think that ruins the game but, lowrate (below 10x) is alot more relaxed and enjoyable for me. If MMO companies would licence their server software to third parties for some sort of percentage of revenues or donations I think alot more people would play many of those games, because they can go and choose their flavor etc, maybe integrate some sort of inter-server messanging or porting system as well.

All legal issues aside, it appears that it requires a non-trivial amount of effort to run a private server well. I have never tried a private server, but people I know who've actually tried some WoW private servers have told me they experience extreme stability issues. There may be a few out there that are run fairly well, though.

The only case I feel that it would be worth it personally is:

1. The game is no longer officially supported by the company.
2. For making machinima.

As has been stated above, it would be interesting if a game, or at least game framework were released with private servers in mind. It would be cool, but it sounds like a risky endeavor on the part of the developer.

Please folks, educate yourselves in the difference between criminal issues and civil ones. EULAs and TOS are not, and have never been a legal issue. It's an agreement between you and a company, not a law. If you break the TOS, the company can choose to terminate your service. They can also choose to sue you (civil court). But it's not "illegal" and you won't be going to jail for it.

Also, private servers are created using the well-protected right (at least in the USA) of reverse-engineering, another good thing to look up if you aren't familiar with it.

I played one of the games mentioned on a "private" server for a couple days. The numerous bugs made it pretty difficult to keep playing any longer. If it hadn't been as buggy, I'm still not sure I would have played more than a month or two. The challenge just wasn't the same (from things like vastly accelerated leveling pace).

I think a game publisher could make the idea work - licensing out a product version suitable for private servers. Just a different EULA/software agreement, different pricing, and different stated expectations of service and maintenance (namely, not much aside from each major iteration).

For example, Blizzard could offer each previous generation of WoW in such a fashion. For example, the pre-WotLK build packaged and sold at something like $300-500 a license with no offer of future software maintenance.

Huge pipe dream though.