geoffwhill.com - Research Project 1 Histories

Lurking in the shadows of the glitz and glamour of Blizzard Entertainment's popular commercial product are the World of Warcraft private servers. These pirate servers are significant in scale. In the order of hundreds of thousands of players, hundreds of servers, and hundreds of server developers. But very little is documented about them outside of the communities their participants frequent.

This research project seeks to uncover and document the hidden history of World of Warcraft Private servers.

You think you do, but you don’t: A history of Word of Warcraft private servers.

Recording of DIGRAA 2022 Conference Presentation

In this presentation at DIGRAA, we will discuss the practices of three private servers in order to highlight the variety of game design and development activity in the World of Warcraft private server space.

Presentation slides for DIGRA 2022 Conference

As one of the largest and longest running Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games, World of Warcraft has attracted an audience in excess of 100 million over its lifetime. In the 17 years since the game was released, there have been numerous changes and expansions to the design of the game. Such changes have not always been well-received, leading some players to seek an alternative World of Warcraft experience. To support these and other experiences, a significant private server community exists, developed and operated by often anonymous third parties. Through classifications and examinations of case studies we reveal the significant scope, variety, and labour associated with the World of Warcraft private server space. We demonstrate that these practices are far larger than simply providing free to play World of Warcraft like experiences, and that the private server space has diversity that has yet to be explored by researchers.

Digra Presentation.pptx