world of warcraft


Ok, so wanna play World of Warcraft? But don’t want to pay all that money to Blizzard? I mean, it’s great, I love it really, I don’t mind paying, but sometimes, you just need a month to play for free 😉 so how about trying those free-servers out there. wowTwo places you can find them, at wowstatus.net and at Ragezone Forums.
And instead of screwing around with the install that works with Blizzards servers, try this, do a second install of WoW and patch it to the version 1.12.2 (the version most of the free servers work with). You can find the patches here: strategyinformer.com or at the ragezone servers, there are links to download the patches as well. I’m not sure whether the patches are available for download at the Blizzard’s site, but they should be.
Incidently, if you don’t have WoW and want the installer, you can, I believe, download from Blizzard’s site or here’s one for ya (a full whopping 5GB file): WoW client installer
Before doing the install, clean up the regkeys that Blizzards DVD installer made for you. According to “kath-nukem” from #wowstatus on irc, these are the steps you need to take to clean up the registery so that you can do a second install of WoW as apparently, the keys are not needed after the game is installed to play the game:

  1. Click on Start (on Windows) and select Run
  2. Type “regedit” without the quotes
  3. Scroll to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
  4. Then go to Software
  5. Look for Blizzard Entertainment
  6. You will see two keys there GamePath and InstallPath, delete them or just delete the whole Blizzard Entertainment section
  7. Install the client in a different location from the one you had installed it in the first place.

Once the game is installed, run the two patches, the 1.12 patcher and the 1.12.1 patcher (available here)Next step is to modify the realmlist file. In the new WoW install directory, you will see the file called realmlist.wtf. Edit that using your favourite text editor (like notepad on windows which is a really poor choice of editor, but who am I to judge your software usage, haha). Delete the server address in the file and replace it with the server of your choice. Make sure to register an account at that server. Ragezone forum and the wowstatus.net page has the server addresses as well as locations to register accounts for these servers. Now simply run WoW.exe.

For the ragezone server, change the realmlist page to this entry:

set realmlist 38.114.169.172

And make your free account here: http://warcraft.invisiongaming.net/

That’s it. Now, I love Blizzard servers, they are fast, there are a lot of players there and I really don’t mind paying to play the game, it is expensive, but if you really didn’t want to play WoW and pay for it, you could always go for alternatives such as Guildwars. Anyway, sometimes, you just don’t have the cash to pay and want to keep playing your favourite game, free servers can always be an alternative, albeit temporary, but they can be an alternative.

Disclaimer: I do pay to play at Blizzard servers but with my second install, I also try and play at the free servers every now and then.

Hope this helps


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