General questions

[Detox]

Hello guys!

I've never been a moderator for this subsection alone, and so I don't know much about the development going on in this scene, especially now as I've been gone for so long. However, I have some additional time in my studies now, and as my boyfriend studying software engineering is looking for some project to learn and develop from I thought it would be a good idea to start a private server. I've had a lot of experience running flyff private servers, but I've never really been in the world of warcraft scene as mentioned before.

As I'm thinking of going through with this, I would like to ask some of you more experienced people for some questions and concerns I have before I'm investing heavily. So, I'll just go ahead and ask the questions, and hopefully some of you might have some answers for me. Also, being an ex-supervisor, I really hope I'm posting this in the correct section, haha.

1. Player base & development activity

I bet this is one of the first questions most people considering to heavily invest in a game ask themselves. Is there still a good player base for private servers for this explicit game? Many private server communities for other games have taken a big hit the last years, and I'm hoping there's still a lot of activity for this game. Also, is there a lot of open development, or are mostly everything private?

2. State of current released files

Is there good, stable and reliable source files released already. Or when starting a server, do you have to take some unstable shit that has been released and do a lot of work in order to even set a working server up? This isn't a big problem, it just gives me a pinpoint about how long the development and testing stage will take before evening getting to a beta test stage.

3. Blizzard interference

Is Blizzard/Official wow interfering with the private server community? Some games doesn't seem to care to much about private servers are made, while others are attempting to shut down everything but their official game server. Maybe some of you have some personal experience you can share, if it has happened to you and your server.

4. General server concepts

Which side is the biggest player group at? Are most of the players playing on high rate servers with most focus towards PvP, or do most of the players enjoy exploring the games with slightly higher rates and a slight faster gameplay.

5. Tools and resources

Are there good tools and resources released already, or is this something that have to be developed? When I was developing flyff, there was already a lot of great tools such as world editor etc already on the market and publicly shared with the rest of the community. I'm just wondering if there are good resources out there already, or if this is something that has to be done individually.


I'm looking forward to your answers, and hoping for some good replies that can give me an insight. Thank you to those helping me out, it's very much appreciated!

Ohh and by the way, have an awesome weekend you guys!

Best regards

[MentaL]

[Darkicon]

1. Yes, absolutely. As long as people play Blizzard servers, some of them will seek private servers. There are still plenty of huge and very active servers.

1a. A little of both. Your big-name private servers are running proprietary cores their developers made that in many cases can be significantly better than any open-source ones. Other public private servers are running major open-source cores, which may or may not also be being further developed by their own devs.

2. WoW emulation is very old now, it's been highly developed and almost forced by Blizzard to get to know how it all works more and more. It's almost professionalized. Cores are very stable. Functionality of features is the only concern, and when core version approaches live, especially an entire expansion pack, functionality will be limited for some time. But that's obvious. The big issue is that emulation is still quite far behind.

3. Blizzard is fairly tame, but if you're making money, you're also taking a hugely risky trot into lawsuit land.

4. I do not have a definitive answer on that one. If I were to guess, I would say the most popular servers are running Blizzlike vanilla (i.e., v1.12.1).

5. Creation of content is pretty simple itself, but tools exist to speed these things up or if you don't know SQL. Other content like anything that is hard coded into the core, there aren't any tools. You need to know the programming language (Generally standardized to C++).

If you just want to run a server, that's easy. Our own guides in the tutorial section for MaNGOS should still suffice, if not then the core you want to run (Probably TrinityCore) will have an up-to-date guide on how to set it up.

If you have any other questions or want to go into more detail on the points, feel free to ask. I'll field them if I see them.

[Detox]

1. Yes, absolutely. As long as people play Blizzard servers, some of them will seek private servers. There are still plenty of huge and very active servers.

1a. A little of both. Your big-name private servers are running proprietary cores their developers made that in many cases can be significantly better than any open-source ones. Other public private servers are running major open-source cores, which may or may not also be being further developed by their own devs.

2. WoW emulation is very old now, it's been highly developed and almost forced by Blizzard to get to know how it all works more and more. It's almost professionalized. Cores are very stable. Functionality of features is the only concern, and when core version approaches live, especially an entire expansion pack, functionality will be limited for some time. But that's obvious. The big issue is that emulation is still quite far behind.

3. Blizzard is fairly tame, but if you're making money, you're also taking a hugely risky trot into lawsuit land.

4. I do not have a definitive answer on that one. If I were to guess, I would say the most popular servers are running Blizzlike vanilla (i.e., v1.12.1).

5. Creation of content is pretty simple itself, but tools exist to speed these things up or if you don't know SQL. Other content like anything that is hard coded into the core, there aren't any tools. You need to know the programming language (Generally standardized to C++).

If you just want to run a server, that's easy. Our own guides in the tutorial section for MaNGOS should still suffice, if not then the core you want to run (Probably TrinityCore) will have an up-to-date guide on how to set it up.

If you have any other questions or want to go into more detail on the points, feel free to ask. I'll field them if I see them.

My apologies for not getting back to you yesterday. I saw you had answered my questions, I just didn't have the time to read through cause I had one of my finals today. Thanks for helping me out with these questions, I'm very thankful. Based on your answers, I might actually swap lanes, trading out flyff development for this. But first, I'm taking a week off in Mallorca, so we'll see when I come back.

Thanks again, and really sorry about the delayed response!

Have a nice weekend!