World of Warcraft (WoW) is by far the biggest Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) video game in the world, with over 11.5 million subscribed players and around 800,000 people playing at any given time.

According to Blizzard, there are an estimated 5000 - 7000 active WoW subscribers in SA. Of course these numbers only refer to the players that Blizzard is aware of.  According to an industry source at iGame, there are around 20,000 users currently playing on private illegitimate local servers. At one stage, wow gold there were reports of around 40,000 registered players on these servers.

Private WoW Servers

Private locally hosted World of Warcraft servers present two primary benefits to their users. Firstly, they are free, where as official WoW servers cost around R160 per month to use.

Secondly, they offer far lower latencies than the legitimate servers which are hosted in Europe and the US. With international latencies of between 500 and 1000 milliseconds, many WoW players resort to seeking out local alternatives.

While they may deliver much lower latencies and are free to use, private servers are known to be buggy and unstable. Reports of bugs and broken quests are regular, with a number of players leaving the servers due to technical issues.

Ultimately, wow gold players are left with a choice between paying to play on the official servers along with the handicap of high latencies, or playing locally and illegally, enjoying low latencies but being stuck with a buggy game.