Special Report "The Truth about Private Servers"

Lineage 2's biggest private server closing which counts for 30,000 users, Blizzard's award of $88 million from WoW private server lawsuit, we hear all these big numbers related to private server every so often these days. What are the private servers and what is the big deal? This special report will take you into the heart of millions of private servers where numerous gamers play without realizing the huge risk it may bring.

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Online Gaming and Private Server

Online games used to be only available for paying users. Gamers would either subscribe to the game and pay monthly fees or buy a PC game CD package. However in the middle of 90's Free to Play game came into the scene of online gaming. At the beginning it wasn't a big issue. It was just a few users get together to have fun, however when it got larger and introduced a payment model, then it changed a whole paradigm. When private servers started to make money, it brought a huge loss.

For subscription based model games, it was a financial loss. For free 2 play games, it was something more than that. This would cause them such a problem that the original intellectual property holder would avoid publishing a game in the regions where private servers are popular which was a huge loss to gamers.

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Why is it a loss to gamers?

So you would ask here why is it a loss? You would get to play for free whereas in official servers you will have to pay to play or to buy items? Plus in private servers, it's so much easier to level up!

Well, there are a couple of facts that are not known to gamers but which could matter a lot once they get to know.

First of all, private servers are laggy and unstable. As often the case is, private servers are run by 3-4 people without professional experience. They usually have only 1-2 channels on the contrary to official servers. These channels get easily shut down when it gets just little crowded.
In addition to that, the characters which you spent an immense amount of time and leveled up are always at a risk of losing. These private servers show a typical cycle of 8-10 month where it would be consistently "off" There is no promise that your character and vault information will be kept safely.

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Moreover, remember always that by playing on a private server, you are giving out your valuable personal information to a non-registered company which can sell your information at any time for a huge amount of money.

Last but not least, if this illegal private server ever gets sued, you might be subjected to pay a huge amount of fines or receive a criminal penalty.

"I'll never play on a private server again!!"- Player interview

We've talked to number of gamers about private servers, and there were numerous problems that players had to go through even after quitting. Here are short excerpts from the interview:

"Yeah, I used to play on private server a lot. Probably like 5-6 hours day. Then one day, I typed in website's address only to find out that it's gone. Just like that. There was no warning or nothing.

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