World of Warcraft private servers

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I played WoW's "retail" edition on and off from 2017 to 2021 or so, and no matter how hard I try to escape the grasp of Blizzard, I still have a deep fondness for the game's world and art style. No other MMORPG that I have tried to play has hooked me like this one has. I know Blizzard sucks, and I am well aware of pretty much any moral issue that could be brought up about the game, so as the online activists might say, I "consume this media critically."

Part of this involves not wanting to give the original company my money, so, in the past couple years, I've gotten into private servers.

Last year Will, Paula, and I played on TurtleWoW, which was great, but got sued and shut down earlier this year. Now we're playing on ChromieCraft, a small server that's mostly vanilla WoTLK (2008-era WoW). It's built on an open-source core made and maintained by fans, and I think that's cool as hell.

I still get the itch to try retail every so often, and WoW Forever looks cool, but also I know that the reason Turtle got shut down so aggressively was because it was holding a massive amount of the playerbase that Blizzard wanted to target with Forever. That's gonna be a bit of a sour taste in my mouth for a while no matter how much people gush about Forever.

Anyway, right now on ChromieCraft we're leveling a Tauren Druid (me), a Tauren Hunter (Will), and a Troll Shaman (Paula). We're at about level 26, because another cool thing about ChromieCraft is the server-wide 2x XP boost. I've never leveled a Horde character this far through the Classic world, so it's been cool getting to see the pre-Cataclysm areas.

We're leveling in Ashenvale right now, which I sort of jumped to a little early because I was getting tired of the Barrens, but the difficulty spike is definitely something. Today we tried to do a quest where we had to put down a banner to trigger a tower defense sort of battle. We made the mistake of all putting down our banners at once, which summoned three times the amount of enemies that normally would spawn. And the enemies did not despawn until the banner despawned, which was several minutes. So we had to die, run back to our corpses, respawn, get killed by the mass of bears, respawn again, and do that a few times so we could get out of the Bear Hell World. Classic World of Warcraft, babey! For your viewing pleasure, an incomprehensible screenshot of this event has been attached to this post.

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Since I am insatiable, Will and I also ended up starting a couple characters on OctoWoW, a successor to TurtleWoW that's sort of reverse-engineered the latter's code or something. No idea how long it'll last, but it has a character export feature ready in the event it goes down, so that's pretty cool. It's basically just Turtle but with a bit more lag because for some reason the servers are constantly being DDOSed.

We're both Night Elves, because I wanted Will to see their leveling zones. He's a druid and I'm a hunter, an inversion of our ChromieCraft classes. OctoWoW also has a variety of "challenge modes" including all the ones Turtle had as well as a few more. We're doing the "Friends Forever" challenge which means we can only get XP if we are both online and grouped up. I figured it'd help keep us from outleveling each other if one of us, say, wanted to run around collecting herbs for an hour because he can't sleep. Ahem.