World of Warcraft: Nostalrius

So, I've always loved oldschool WoW.

Well, this private server runs oldschool WoW:

https://en.nostalrius.org/

1. They're dedicated to keeping the experience accurate to the actual game. No weird private server gimmickry.

2. It's actually really fucking reliable.

3. The server is POPULATED AS FUCK. I've seek as much as 7.5k people online at once. You will always have people around to quest with. It's amazing. Even better than when I first started playing the game in 2007.

4. It's free. They've got a free download of the oldschool version of the game, and server access is free. They don't even accept money in exchange for levels or gold the way other private servers do.

I'm not sure where this stands in a legal sense, mind you. Certainly, Blizzard doesn't want you to play it. They'd love to get the server taken down I'm sure, but it's in a country where Blizzard's lawyers don't have much power. BUT, since Blizzard refuses to actually sell this version of the game, I don't think they can complain too much.

(Honestly. Someone asked them at Blizzcon if they'd ever give us Vanilla servers. Their response was to tell the person who asked: "You don't really want that. The old version of the game was terrible." Apparently we're too stupid to know what we want to spend our money on. Except for the fact that Nostalrius is the single most active WoW server I've ever seen in my life, soooooo...)

Well if anybody ends up rolling, they should let me know. I'm a level 21 warrior named Scaevola, or a level 16 Mage named McJibbins. It's always fun to play with friends.

But I also recognize that WoW isn't a lot of people's jam, and Vanilla WoW is even less so.

If you've ever felt even slightly curious, this is a really good way to give the game a chance. Today the server had 8.6k people online. Things always start to get unstable after 6k, but a few glitches here and there don't bother me so much. And I really enjoy having such a thriving community around me all the time.