[RANT]
For a while now I have shunned the game World of Warcraft with a vengeance, and have repeatedly mocked friends and acquaintances for getting "sucked in" to this thing.
Seems like anyone who starts playing it loses all track of life -- they suddenly become unavailable for anything social, and tend to even put their own hobbies and life on hold, preferring instead to play this stupid game!
And of course, there's the other matter of the COST of playing... Roughly $60 to buy the game itself, then (I haven't looked it up for myself, but the reports I hear are) $10-25 PER MONTH to actually play it!
The game is designed such that your character(s) and stats are all stored solely on the SERVER online, and so the part you install and run is simply the engine for displaying your world. The server controls every aspect of the actual game flow itself! Therefore, if you want to play this game AT ALL, you must be connected to a server. This means you have to have a working internet connection, as well as cross your fingers that the servers at Blizzard (the folks who host WoW officially) are actually online. Not to mention the cost.
[/RANT]
OK now for the nifty bit.. A friend of mine online (SB you know who you are) was talking about how he'd scored a copy of WoW and had been playing it for a while. For free. Intrigued, I asked him how, and that's when I discovered that there are thousands of "Private" WoW Servers out there! Free-to-play servers.
I did some sniffing around and found a great Torrent for the game itself (2.64 gigabytes total download, plus any needed patches). In the torrent are 4 .ISO CD images. You can either burn all 4 as CD's, or just use Daemon Tools to mount the images on a virtual CD drive.
Next I found (after much patient searching and further research) copies of and instructions for setting up an actual Private WoW server! It's running now, in fact.
Now the trick to these servers is that they all work for only specific versions of WoW. The geniuses at Blizzard have released something like 60 patches so far. The basic game is version 1.0.0 ... There are "major" patches for 1.1.0, 1.2.0, etc. There are also sub-patches for these majors, eg: 1.1.1, 1.1.2, etc.
My server (Titanium Realm) is for game version 1.5.0 .. After installing the game (and if you already installed the game and want to try this, you have to install the game again - you can just install a second copy in another directory and have both versions installed - and re-apply the specific patch. The current game version release is 1.10.0 or something...) You can get the 1.5.0 patch here (176 megs).
Once that's installed and patched you must perform the next step BEFORE LAUNCHING THE GAME. If you load the game first, it will attempt to connect to Blizzard servers and will almost immediately start trying to update your WoW to the very latest version!
In the game directory, where the wow.exe file lives, you will find a file called realmlist.wtf - simply open this file in notepad and edit that first line. The first and only line of realmlist.wtf should be: set realmlist saturn.bounceme.net
Lastly, you need to create an account on the private server. The above instructions will let you connect to MY private server. I don't guarantee 100% uptime, but and downtime should be very minimal and for only brief periods of time (minutes, not hours). Note also that when you go to a private server, and since all character info is stored BY the server, each new server means creating a new character.
Since the first 15 levels or so are pretty damn boring in this game, if you decide you want to play, please let me know and I'll gladly upgrade your character to and reasonable request. Money too.
So, back to creating an account... Simply visit the server status webpage, http://saturn.bounceme.net:8080 and register a username and password (with your VALID email address). Remember: the username is just your logon. You can then create any number of actual CHARACTERS under your login.
Anyhow, I figure the server can handle up to 20 players at a time, though I'd like to keep the typical peak down around 13 or less. The PC this is running on also serves as my Media PC, and will soon have more RAM added. The server auto-saves the World and Guild and Player info every 20 minutes, and I have noticed a brief lag during each save, as it's a HUGE dump to the hard drive each time (around 250-350 megs of data each time!)
Lemme know whatcha think!
...that's our flag
