Play World of Warcraft for FREE

First of, i apologize for the long break between posts. I was, well... occupied with what i am about to blog about.

For starters, yes you read the title right, you can play world of warcraft for free. First of, this is not the official World of warcraft hosted by blizzard. Well it is the same game but it isn't hosted by blizzard. So if you have friends playing there, you wont see them here. This is a totaly different server hosted somewhere else. I dont know how, but someone has managed to get the server side programs to host this game. Its been a while now since world of warcraft has been released, and from that time, i could see pirated dvds being sold around with the title "World of Warcraft offline" Basically it is the server side program and the client which you both run on your computer to be able to play the game. But since this is an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game), theres really no sense in playing by yourself unless you just want to try it out, or test a few options or skills. This apparently this was the foundation of this server which was suggested by a friend. Someone actually made a server, hosted the game, and distributed it for free for all to enjoy. This is no small feat mind you, as i have experience with maintaining a private server for ragnarok a few years back. Its a drain on money, resources and time to maintain a server like this one, especially this one where the computing powere needed is way beyond what was needed to run a ragnarok server. Setting that aside, according to the website, the serve has been up for 3 years now, and suprisingly it is up to date. Actually, when you first download the installation, you log in to the official server of WOW (world of warcraft) to update the game, and patch the files, then you just change some settings to direct the game to the raidenwow server, and your off playing.

The server is hosted, well i don't know where its hosted. It looks like some remote country where there are no international, internet piracy laws in effect since its been up for 3 years now. But you can visit the site at RaidenWOW. From here you can download the client side game. Just a note, if your going to download from here, its a torrent file, you'll probably be redirected to mininova, so you must have a torrent client like bitcomet or utorent to download it. Also the game file is over 7gig so you have to have patience before you can play. With a fast internet connection, i was able to download it in a little over 3 days (78 hours to be exact). After downloading the client side program, its not really an installation, its a ready made game structure, all you need is to run the program, after uncompressing it of course, so you'll also probably need a winRAR program. Where was i, oh yeah, after downloading the game, go to the raidenwow website again and click on the link on how to update the game. follow the instructions and after that your ready to play. Oh yeah one last thing, you would need to make an account in raidenwow first. A website account, for logging in to the website, and a game account to play the game. After that just click on the wow.exe and your good to go.

Now for the game itself, I have never played the official WOW game so i have no comparison with this one. but needles to say, i believe that this is close enough to the real thing. The graphics it good, sound is good, movement is good, and the frame rate depends on how good your graphics card is and your internet connection. I've always wanted to try this game out ever since i saw a friend play it with his mage character. At that time, he was fighting a battle of some sorts with other characters online, against other characters online. All i could say is that this is the first time I've seen a mage, charging into battle,... in the frontlines. He was a touch cookie to put down, it took a fighter, a priest and a wizard to kill him. Well needless to say after seeing that, i always wanted to try, but didn't really see the logic to spend and buy the original game, and then pay a monthly fee to just try out the game. But behold, what lands on my lap? a free version of the game itself, for me to try and play so i can decide if it is worth the money i'm going to spend for it, so far it looks promising.

Having said all that, there are a few drawbacks to the game. Yes it is considerably easy to level up. x5 XP i think, it is also easy to get items, x5 monster drop, money isn't an issue (yup x5 money), You even get an auction house where some of the epic stuff which were modified so that a lvl 1 player can use them, are being sold. The game does lack, how should i say this..., players. Its no Blizzard WOW population, but it beats playing alone. There are somewhere 20 players online at anytime. a lot of characters and players have registered. But since their all over the world, you don't all play at the same time, considering also that the maps are huge, gynormous even, so you'd rarely encounter people along the way. Besides that, there are also some glitches to the game itself, like a few quests not working, and some parts of the game not being activated since there are so few people playing. Overall its a good game to play, if you can wait for the 7+ gig download. In the end its up to you right now if you want to be a member of the population and play along with us. Hopefully they'll be more people playing to fully enjoy the experience, so here i am, blogging about it, in hopes that you will read this and be interested enough to register and play the game with us. If you happen to register and play, get your friends into it also, since you already have a copy of the game you just need to just burn a copy for your friends so that they dont need to download it anymore. Who knows, you might see a blood elf warlock running around named Lillandra, if you do say hi, so that she could welcome you to the game.