discussion of private WoW servers.

I've played both Blizzard Live servers and Private servers and although the ideals of creating these fantastic RP via WoW realms seems plausible it is in fact far from reality. The private servers are far from stable, tend to crash often, many known and unknown bugs that spring up, and lack of anti-cheat software.

The main issue is player base and content. Lets start with content. As you may have already guessed any emulated private server will be using the exact same content you'd find inside the Live servers as best they could replicate. This makes individuality scarce and most emulators are simply built to recreate what already works for Blizzard. This includes lore, quests, factions, items, etc. While each individual server does have the ability to change some of the features of the content, it is relatively the same. There is rarely unique features to the content which makes all these emu servers blend together.

If you have played on any private servers you'll notice very quickly the amount of players that are logged in at any given time can vary from around 10 players up to around 1-2000. Servers with a low player base will be lonesome and hardly fun as you grind away Role-playing occasionally with another individual or an NPC. The more populated servers are less likely to host a large number of players willing to RP, but it is still possible. Policing the high end player base servers becomes a chore and generally lacks in support.

Private servers can police their players forcing them to follow their own lore, scripted quests, and interaction with other players/environment using these emulators. However, the volume of work that needs to be put in to make the realm "unique" would require hours upon hours, days upon days, weeks upon weeks, of scripting, programming, testing, etc. Generally the ideals of one community wouldn't be the ideals of another. So it would be up to each individual host to provide these services to best complete their vision of the realms. This is why the paid Live servers become a more viable option. They have a dedicated team that gets paid to do this work. They will still lack the RP aspect but the reliability is there.

We could go into donations to provide support for these private realms, helping with the overall time and money spent to keep them alive, but the big whammy here again is your user base. These private servers never really make the kind of money you could contract a team to make such a wondrous one of a kind WoW emulated server. Not to say that people aren't willing to volunteer to do it, just its further from plausible.

So to wrap this up:
WoW Private servers lack the stability and support of Live servers.

Private servers lack unique content leading to forced RP aspects.

Player base is generally spread thin, larger player based groups tend to be less willing to RP.

I agree that something new needs to take over here. Similar to what Bamko has mentioned. A MMORPG which allows full customization of the world/realm, allowing a one of a kind experience from realm to realm.

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