Is playing wow on the free sites illegal? How do they do it without paying Blizzard for it, or do they? What's the skinny? My son hs switched back from aion, and is playing wow on a private hosting site. I wanted to know if it's legal and how it works. He say's it is as far as he knows, but he's a kid. 16/ He had subscribed to it for a while and got bored, moved to aion, and now he's bored with that. He said that with the private servers you don't get the latest stuff, and the game runs slower at times, and that;s why they can do it legally. Help me out guys.

It is illegal. They reverse engineer the client in order to create the server codes. The client (your WoW software on your computer) do most of the work. The server keep the progress you made.



WoW isn't the first MMO game that have private servers. Many MMO has been reversed engineer and provided for free.





 

Thanks. I will show him this post tomorrow.

NP. One of the most famous reversed engineer in MMO was Star Wars Galaxy. Sony Online pissed the majority of the customers when they updated the game. The update basically change the fundamental way of how the players play the game. The game lost over 80% of the player base. Few players decided to reverse engineer the game so they can play it pre-patch on private servers.



 

Here's a better Idea, get him to stop playing MMOs before it's like a Meth addict going cold turkey on a 20 year old addiction.

Private servers have never been legal per se, at least in wow's case. But for some reason blizzard has only gone after a few of them (I remember a ways back when they got one of the bigger ones taken down). It's not like your son would be in any legal trouble as thousands upon thousands of people use these private servers.

But, most of the private servers also massively suck, both for wow and most other decent MMOs. Just pony up the 15 a month if you really want to play it.

Short articles on the subject

http://www.wow.com/2006/01/16/dubious-wow-practices-3-private-servers/
http://www.wow.com/2008/12/05/blizzard-legal-targets-private-servers/

Before I actually played legitimate wow I tried some of the private servers (this was years ago before all the expansions and such, just a few months after release) and they were buggy and scripted events did not occur correctly for the most part. It was a wholly unenjoyable experience.

As a parent what would you rather have? Addict to MMO or addict to Meth? MMO addictions are easy broken. You either get burn out or the guild drama is too much.
There is a strong collation IMO between the rise of video gaming and the decrease in teen crime and pregnancy. My generation, video games wasn't popular it was just starting. What my generation had was high teen crimes and pregnancy. The Playstation generation on the other hand has lower teen crimes and pregnancy.  
Time is finite. If you spend most of your time playing video games at home then chance are you’re not committing any crimes and not getting some girl pregnant right? You don’t come home drunk or drugged or in a car accident in the middle of the night.
By setting what time your kids can play videos games you can limit the amount of trouble he/she might get into. It’s a good tool to help control your kid's teen years. Use it wisely.
 

I'm not worried about my son. He's played it and quit before. He's played Aion and quit before. He used to pay for WOW, he played it for about 6 months and got tired of and thought he's like Aion better. He paid for and played Aion for a while now too, he was part of the group that got to beta test it, so he's been involved early on. He can take it or leave it. He's a good kid, goes to church, never gets in trouble etc. etc,. He also knows that if something like that get too important in his life I will take the computer out back and shoot it all to hell, and never look back.He just got to the point that he get's bored with the grinding for points. He went back to wow for a little change up. Still the same basic thing to me. Personally, if I were to play one of the two I think I would go the Aion route.

This maybe true but it's still a poor substitute for combating problems like teen crime and pregnancy. This promotes things laziness, obesity, and low intelligence.  A better option would be placing your kids into after school activities like Sport or take up a musical instrument etc. Our son plays games but nothing online and using a Wii which requires some physical activity. Then we've got him in Martial Arts 5 days a week and when it's warm he's usually outside in the swimming pool.

It is logical fallacy to think that activity XXX is better or worst than YYY activity.
I played a lot sports when I was a kid as well as many of my friends. But when the kids enter their teenage years and with a lot of time on his/her hand at night, things can go very wrong very fast. Keep in mind my generation didn't have video games and we had better parenting than the current generation. Yet we had high teen crime rate, kids killing kids, high teen pregnancy rate, DUI, obesity, etc.
Kids from my generation sneak out at night and get drunk. Go to bars and get hook up with girls. That’s my generation, that’s what I remember when I was a teenager.
Today teenage kids rather play online games at night instead of hitting the bars.
Videogames doesn’t lower intelligence. It actually increase problem solving skills because in order to get to the next level the player must figure out a way around the current situation.