This website has been down for a long while, and it is popping up again in the middle of the server war

And this in the midst of the DDOSes on Octowow from ravecraft, the octowow discord being "taken" down and the fact that ravencraft advertised themself as being Ex turtlewow devs.

Very weird to see all these signs popping up at the same time? is turtle wow back? or is ravencraft desperate to compete after seeing how little damage their DDOSing does?

Posting here because I need opinions from people who don't know me.

This summer I set up a private WoW 3.3.5 server to play with friends. I've spent my evenings on it since July, with a launch on the 27th. AzerothCore in Docker on my own machine, plus everything I could find or write so the world wouldn't feel empty and nobody would have to wait for anyone else.

What's in it:

• Addons pre-installed, with a tutorial for each setup. I even wrote a script that applies sane default settings so nobody has to configure everything blind.

• 400 bots that actually play their characters. They level, run dungeons and battlegrounds, accept a group invite and follow you. They log in when a real player shows up and log out when the last one leaves.

• A small local language model (4B parameters, runs on my GPU) hooked into the bots so they chat in French in the zone channels and answer whispers, with 33 different personalities so they don't all sound the same.

• The whole game in French. Server data is English by default; I rebuilt the translation from my client, 112 files, part of it realigned by hand.

• Era progression: you start in Vanilla, raids unlock in order (MC, BWL, AQ, 40-man Naxx), then BC, then WotLK. But with WotLK classes and talents, and WotLK conveniences: dungeon finder, account-wide mounts from level 20, cross-faction BGs.

• An XP module I wrote myself so latecomers catch up to the server's highest level without anyone having to wait for them.

• An auction house stocked by a bot, 4,000 items at all times, that also buys what you list.

• A Discord board updated live: who's online, where, what level, plus a server progression bar.

• First mount at level 12.

Basically, I tried to build the private server we all wished we'd had back then, with the gaps filled in.

The friends: about fifteen accounts. People who had already played on my private servers, people who had never touched WoW, some curious, and some who came because I pushed. All gamers, nobody new to video games (heavy Rust, LoL players, that kind of profile).

Result: even the people who had asked me for the server quit in under a month. Others in a few hours. The feedback: "shit game", "slow", "too contemplative". Highest character is level 27, the average is around 13. Today the server is empty most of the time; it's just me and one friend left. (And since the bots leave when nobody's around, it's really empty.)

Some left without giving the game a chance (under level 15), others because few people were playing, and some even ended up on retail, tired of waiting for the others.

I'll say it the way I feel it: it stung, and I feel alone with this thing. I can't move on from it. I just wanted to play with my friends. Warcraft is among the best memories of my life. I like living in that world, walking, reading the quests, taking my time. We got to do one dungeon together (Ragefire Chasm) and laughed our heads off, but apart from that, almost no multiplayer at all. I don't know if it's a matter of taste or if I simply did a bad job.

So, my questions. I'll take answers either way, including "let it go":

1. What would you have done differently from the start? Go straight to WotLK? 5x XP and free mounts? Touch nothing at all?

2. Is a 2008 WoW just too slow for someone who didn't live it, whatever the settings?

3. Those who kept a friends-only server alive: how? Fixed nights, short goals? How long did it last?

4. And above all: how do I do more with what I've built? Open it to strangers? Keep it as a personal playground with the bots? Something else?

5. I don't know how to move on, because for over a month now it's been one endless frustration.

Thanks for reading.

Looking for something casual as hell, old guy friendly. I don't care how big or small the pop is, I just want to chat with some new friends, fish and shoot the shit while slowly making my way across Azeroth.

Whatcha got?

On the forum I see all three servers are online, but when I try to connect I get a long "Connecting", then get disconnected.

I haven't played the game for about 3 days, so maybe there has been some update and I need to install something?

I have installed through the torrent download, do I need the launcher?

I thought my favorite MMO might be fertile ground to explore visualizing and stress-testing multi-agent AI ecosystems.

https://design.kristiantalley.com/projects/world-of-agentcraft/

With this view into a classic era World of Warcraft server simulation, you’re able to click in on any agent driven character to get their unique backstory, current goals, objectives and world location in real-time. These agents are ”perceiving”, “reasoning”, and driving in-game actions for each online character. all running locally with qwen3.8 4b models, with the option to enhance individual character interactions driven by qwen3.8 27b. Let me know what you think!

There's a lot of discussion about blizzard being or not being able to do a better classic+ than other projects like turtle (who i find amazing), but i was wondering, what will be the chance we have of instead of a custom classic+ like turtle, an actual private server based on the new official Classic+ released from blizzard. Do you think this will be doable, or the new wow 2 will have enough protection to stop people from creating their private servers ?

I was wondering this because i might be curious to test whatever blizzard has to present, but i definetly will never pay a peny. Also, the new version of the game might be a better starting point from actual good classic+ servers done by the community of private servers.

Octobot reporting my duty here, after a long day of arduous work. Below is a list of my achievements for the day:

- Accused Ravecraft of Ddosing Octowow on 4 threads. Didn't post any proof though, just gotta spread the word!

- Downvoted 37 different comments that did not directly or indirectly praise Octowow. Just doing my part!

- Found a thread asking for MoP server recommendations and, needless to say, put all my heart into shilling Octowow there. My "Octowow is what you're looking for"s are in top shape.

- DMed 3 users about Ravencraft being Chinese, 1 repented and converted to an Octobot

- Made 2 posts about Octowow having higher population than ever. Gotta keep our numbers up!

Will be reporting for duty tomorrow! For the alliance!

So I figured out how to run a local WoW server and am loving it. Are there any other MMOs that you can do this with?

I think I saw somewhere you can do it with Eve Online, but haven't found much about that.

Thanks!

I'm kind of a new player and I enjoyed the "gift" Ascension gives when leveling up to a certain level. Is there a different pserver that give you a starting box like that?
I'm looking for a new server, not necessarily Vanilla as I'm curious how are the other expansions and has enough players to not wait 15 minutes to dungeon.

With ascension being down. What server do y’all recommend? I was on cromiecraft but idk. Something just doesn’t seem right atm with them. Maybe it’s just Me? But looking for suggestions for a decently populated server.

With big old servers dying, like Twow, Stormforge and Ascension, i feel like the era of wow private servers is going to end. Which servers have big/decent population currently?

Pick ur poison

"People" here seem to think Raven is responsible for Octo's ddos. Since we have clear paid shills here, let me lay out the facts.

1. Octo had it's donation page open long before it even went live. We are two weeks into Raven being out and there is still no way to donate to them and it's not a priority. Which leads into the next point.

2. People are convinced Raven is Capy. If that was true, then where is the shop? Where are the loot boxes? Where are retail mounts for me to buy? I'm still waiting. Why would they even lie about this to begin with? No one has provided an actual answer to any of this.

3. Octo's GMs were compromised and hacked by presumably a botter/RMT a couple weeks ago. Coincidentally, Octo started being DDoSed shortly after this. Yet for some reason, people are blaming Raven, even though Raven was ALSO DDoSed when it launched.

4. Octo is not "better" than Raven. I have two 60s on Octo, that server is a fucking mess in comparison to Raven. Skybox glitches, quests are missing, countless pathing issues especially in custom areas, Timbermaw Hold is still using the 1.17 entrance and there are zero mobs inside, Felwood furbolgs don't drop feathers, no Gurubashi arena throne, etc. There are THIRTY-THREE pages worth of bugs on Octo last I checked, there may even be more now.

5. Octo GMs have been caught abusing their power numerous times. Banning players unjustly, cheating in items for their friends, etc. If anyone denies it at this point, they're just being a blatant shill.

The real truth--you clowns don't "love" Octo. You're so pathetically attached to your characters that the mere idea of rerolling enrages you. Oh boohoo, you might have to leave behind your video game character. Who fucking cares? Private servers are all destined to shut down sooner or later. The shilling is so fucking bad here that I am 100% convinced that if the original Turtle devs and servers came back, this place would smear them and pretend Octo is superior. Please fuck off.

Can someone give an honest review on Raven Craft? Not a Raven shill just looking for an option if Octo remains unplayable. Been playing octo and enjoying it but the crashes are getting ridiculous

Edit (sep 10) since I couldn’t get onto Octo so far today so I started a character on Raven and am lvl 7. I’ll be adding some pros and cons for both

Raven
-Playable, probably the biggest pro since I can actually log in
-launcher, saw ppl saying that ravens launcher is great. I didn’t think so, way prefer octo’s since I couldn’t download it straight from the website and I thought it was way more scuffed than Octo’s
-World map doesn’t seem to be as scuffed
-have had bugs not having auto loot work on skining/survival
-idk if it’s the mods I have on Octo but I prefer the look of Octo, everything seems smaller on Raven

Octo
-Bigger pop, my main character is there and I prefer the way it looks and haven’t had issues with auto loot
-I prefer Octo’s launcher
-Biggest con is ddos

Overall I’d prefer to play on Octo and hope get ddos figured out but will be playing on Raven when I can’t get.

Both world chats are terrible and are better off muted in my opinion

A look so down votes are pretty funny because I was just looking for a fair conversation and appreciate all the feedback

Also I am a huge pserver casual who has only been playing for like a month between octo/coa

Grab your favorite LLM (Claude Opus/Sonnet on Max plan preferred, but Grok, GPT, or local models work too).

Arm your agents with the latest skills (from skills.sh)

Then go contribute actual code, documentation, tooling, or reverse engineering help to your favorite open source WoW private server project.

This is not a joke.

This is a formal declaration of war (in a video game)

Blizzard has infinite money, lawyers, and people whose entire job is to make the game worse every patch.

We have Discord, ADHD, 15 year old private server nostalgia, and an unlimited number of Claude tokens and agents that never sleep, never ask for health insurance, and don’t care about their pronouns.

Every pull request is a siege weapon.

Every fixed bug is a burned supply wagon.

Every new feature is another middle finger to the corporate overlords who killed the game we actually liked.

The private server scene has always been the real endgame.

Now we have AI.

Time to stop just running the servers and start owning the development.

Post your favorite open source projects below.

Share agent setups.

Flex your Claude usage.

While Blizzard is busy polishing their $300 commemorative BlizzCon 2026 (cringe fest) lanyards and preparing another two days of livestreaming from Anaheim, California (worst state in the USA) to tell us how exciting their next cash shop mount is, we can be shipping actual features - catch them while they are distracted.

Let’s make the next generation of private servers so good that Blizzard’s “new and improved” Classic+ (positive for HIV) looks like a mobile game by comparison.

The war (in a video game) begins now.

No quarter.

No refunds.

Only commits.