Everything seems so easy these days, a lot of guides online for how to set up your World of Warcraft private server in just a few minutes. After that you publish it on the best top list for wow private servers and you are good to go. Players start to join and from there the money will flow.
All sounds to good to be true, looks maybe to easy so what’s the secret behind creating a famous popular server and what it takes in 2020?
The road to success
- Free time
First thing you need to create successful wow private servers is a tone of free time. Yes you heard me right. You may not be the best coder out there but if you have a lot of time you can learn to code as you go.
Managing private servers is a 24/7 job and you can’t do it alone when it gets bigger. First you will need a few staff members, recruit them from your actual active player base or choose some close friends passionate about the game.
If you have in mind to start this with a co-owner that has the same knowledge as you in this, zero, don’t. It will not end good, you will end up arguing and in the end the whole thing will ether split or close. I seen this happen to many times. Do it alone but be open minded and ask and accept help from others.
Recruiting staff is has also a side benefit, active GMs will most of the time act as promoters, they will start inviting their friends trough social channels.
2. Unique content
There are way to many Blizzlike servers out there so you need to come with something new and unique on the market to succeed. What about all other big servers? All seem to have really low experience rates, no customs and why you advice me to not do the same?
The server you make should be one of a kind, those servers you may have in mind are running for a few years, they got to a point where it doesn’t matter what type of realms they run. They have a stable community, it’s different.
Focus on creating some custom bosses, items or whatever you are capable of coding and use that to your advantage, promote the unique content you have to attract curious players.
3. Quality support and services
When new players they join and no one is there to welcome them and to answer to “how do I start here?” type of questions they will leave in short time. Don’t forget there are a lot of other servers out there, they know that and once they join your server they are looking for a new “home”.
Home, yes, that’s the key. Players who register to play on your server are actually looking for a community to bond while having fun enjoying the game. Your presence online, good helpful Game Masters will keep your community on.
Another advice, upgrade your hardware as your population is starting to rise, rent good and fast hosts with Ddos protection like OVH. The server performance is important, you need a good CPU, wow emulators require fast gaming processors and enough RAM proportional to your players count.
For start I would suggest no less then 4GB memory and the cheapest CPU you can find. The cheaper you start the safer it is.
4. Promoting your server online
After you have your server up and running and ready for players it’s time to become visible and attract new players.
Most of the time go for free advertising, join top lists for World of Warcraft private servers, create a voting button and put it on your site so players can vote. Motivate your players to vote every day by adding rewards.
Second, use Facebook and YouTube. On Facebook create a page for your private server and on YouTube a video channel. Keep the page updated and start creating an video intro for your server. To get more views just record your self playing and upload those videos.
Third, when players start to join be online. Start recruiting staff but don’t give them to much power and always have a backup.
Coding skills required
You have two options, get a ready made repack or get the source code from GIT and compile it your self. I always go with option 2 no matter how hard will be, it’s safer and on a repack you can’t fix any core bugs.
So you will need to learn:
- Advanced knowledge skills in C++ (Object based). Some emulator use LUA as well for creating scripts.
- High MySQL skills, your database needs optimization and tuning. Wow database can grow huge, the Characters will be the biggest. Login or Auth will have a fair amount of records. First World import is big but the database will keep a similar size. Characters can go over a few GB, it’s hard to create safety backups and also really hard to recover from crashes.
- PHP/HTML/Javascript is also a must, players need to join trough a website. Now you can use a ready made CMS but those are not 100% safe, it’s better to write your own code. In my opinion don’t invest a lot of your time in the design, make it functional and focus on the game first.
Management and networking
- Setup your host Windows or Linux. Most Emulators will offer a guide for how to compile and what you need to install: Visual Studio, GitHub, etc.
- Set your firewall, open just required ports and block everything else. The Login for example will require only TCP port 3724. There is a second port required is for the Realm List, and the third is your Realm. Read the configuration files, open just these 3 ports for the game to run and for players to connect.
- Set your database with MariaDB or MySql, if you run a website on a separate IP you will need to make a ssh tunnel to your server host, I won’t go in to details but you can also open 3306 as alternative but limit it to the web-host IP only.
Be aware there are a lot of low guides out there that tell you to open tens of ports, it’s not true, it’s not safe!
