MMO On a Small Scale: A look at private MMO Servers

Written by: Chris Maginnis • Edited by: Michael Hartman
Published Nov 27, 2009 • Related Guides: Proprietary Software | Mmo Gamers | Blizzard

Back when MMO games began to grow in popularity, MMO gamers became jealous of a single player gamers ability to pirate their games. Free private server emulation was born. Today many of the latest games, including World of Warcraft, are available on free to play private servers.

What Is a Private Server?

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A private server is the common name for a server emulator. Essentially, a private server emulates the functions of a normal MMO server. It allows users to login and play as they would on a normal retail server. Private servers have gained their player base by being free to play and through content customisation. At the same time, they have been criticised for poor performance and low player population. There is mixed truth on both sides.

How Is a Private Server Made?

A private server emulator is created by reverse engineering the data stream between the retail client and server. It is not an overnight job but most private server emulators are released as open source tools.

In some situations private servers used leaked code from the retail servers. The biggest case of this was AEGIS from Ragnarok Online. The server code was leaked and used to host private servers. In fact, the original code was considered so poor server emulator developers improved on it with their own code.

History of Private Servers

The first widely acknowledged private server appeared for Ultima Online, while the retail version was still in beta. An open source tool was released which allowed players to play without connecting to the Ultima Online server.

From this tool, several private server emulators spawned. Ultima Online now has many private servers, known as ‘Free Shards’, with enough customized content to rival the retail servers.

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Older private servers for games like Ultima Online and Ragnarok Online have existed, with an active player base, for several years. Private servers are still being developed for recent games. Aion Online, released in 2009, has an emulator released and several private servers already exist.

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Mark Dec 4, 2009 12:19 PM

private servers

legality is hard to hit since most servers are hosted outside of the US and those countries have different laws.

u stated latency issues i have played over 100 private servers for wow over 4 years and i have only saw maybe 5 with latency issues the rest have good hardware because of those donations lol, just from donations you could pocket 4000-5000 US dollars a month and still have enough to keep the server up and pay a advancemnet on the server hosting for the next 2 months. and upgrade the hardware.

blizzard banning private servers.
sadly the only private servers they have shut down were ones hosted in america. which i know for a fact are back up after a 3 month or so downtime. after they switched server hosting to another country. wowgasm for example has been shut down twice now and they are back better than ever. toxic wow was shut down and they are back. oblivion wow was also shutdown and they are back with a different name. and many more have returned and they dont plan on leaving lol.

also one last thing about the game clients being capable to download from the private server sites thats not really illegal , the owners of the Ip's allow you to download it free of charge. i just downloaded aion from the ncsoft launcher. wow has a launcher that should only be used people who purchased the games /expansions but those are relased so wide spread its not even funny lol. you can actually download wow and both expansions for free directly from blizzard. and then get all teh updates from them or mirrors.

if blizzard wants people to leave private servers and join there game they need to drop that monthly price to 5$ since thats all i hear people moaning about. but truth be told about 30% of people that play on private servers which is pretty vast. about estimating 1000 private servers each holds on average 750 people which is about 225,000 players are actually active blizzard subscribers.

and ya aion already had them during beta like most mmo's do.

MMO On a Small Scale: A look at private MMO Servers

What Is a Private Server?

How Is a Private Server Made?

History of Private Servers

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