And so I wandered the Wilderness, the blasted dry lands of My Own Hard Disk. Entering my second month without internet access, and well past the longest period I’ve gone without since sometime back in 1999, I looked for substitutes. Offline gaming is all very well, and a good way to pass the time, but there is something indefinable about the MMO that draws at me. So I started looking into emulators again.

Pretty much every MMO out there has at least one half-arsed emulator project on the go, unrealistically optimistic attempts to create an alternative server application to power the game. Usually this springs from dissatisfaction with the Official Servers, and more specifically, the Official Operators – the SOEs, Blizzards and NCSofts of the world:

“I can do better than them! [Game] would be so much better if they got rid of [Large Unpopular Balance Change] again! My class is nerfed, it would be awesome with [Other Class Skill] as well! I hate [Evil Company], but love [Evil Company’s Game]!”

Clearly, this kind of thinking, this short-sighted self-indulgent wish-fulfilment, is no kind of fuel for a disciplined, gruelling (and entirely unpaid) coding project, and sure enough, very few of these follies actually see alpha, let alone V1.0, either shrivelling before anything is released at all - vapourware in the classic sense, or grinding to a halt when the team hits an insurmountable obstacle in the design of the real servers that they are unable to divine, or replicate, leaving a wretched kind of half-server, where it might be possible to teleport around the world geometry, but little else.

I’d imagine that making a server emulator is probably a lot harder than just writing an MMO server from scratch to be honest – the first task would be to use various arcane network tools to find out what the client is actually expecting to see and hear from its server, no small task, and of course, avoid detection whilst doing so. Then you need to work out what the server does that the client doesn’t, usually by painstaking firsthand, in-world observation – meticulous documentation of every aspect of the game world and mechanics. Account management? GM tools? All of these things will need to be included too. At least when writing an MMO from scratch, one would be able to alter the client if necessary as well.

It’s no small surprise then, that the number of gamers out there with the unlikely but required combination of disciplined self-motivation, technical ability, teamwork and management skills (for collaborative efforts), available free time and passion for the game (and yet would rather be writing an EMU, than actually playing all the time), is very, very small, and most EMUs don’t make it. Hell, if you can do all of that, you can probably be using those skills to take your pick of very lucrative jobs in much bigger companies than mere Blizzard or SOE.

But gamers like the above do exist, and with over six million subscribers for World of Warcraft, the odds of one of the WOW Emulator teams sticking at it to completion are much higher. So with a portable data device and borrowed internet connection, I managed to track a few down.

I was going to insert a link to the page where I found it, but it seems as if there’s been a bit of a Blizzard sweep – it doesn’t seem to be there anymore. Still, I imagine those with adequate Google-Fu can track something down with ‘WOWEmu’. MMO Server Emulation is one of those rather murky areas of TOS Legality, with all sorts of semantic wranglings involved – “I own my own client!” “No you don’t!”, etc, and probably isn’t really allowed. How long any particular site that hosts one for download will continue to exist, is probably just as murky. Saying that, if I were the webmaster at r0x0rfilez4gamez.net and I got a long and wordy letter in legalise from Blizzard, I think I’d probably go with the ‘quietly disappearing the filez’ plan too. We at Van Hemlock do not condone breaking Laws! I doubt Blizzard have anything to fear from these projects mind you – the numbers of players opting out of the Official Servers for these halfarsed LAN-party setups must be miniscule compared to those who use the real servers, and in all cases, a shop-bought client box is required anyway, along with substantial patching.

That said, it was a fascinating experience, and with no option of playing any real MMOs at the time, would have to do. After a surprisingly painless amount of monkeying around, I found myself standing in the snowy valley of Dun Morogh, totally alone. The NPCs were all there, of course, but not a sign of any other Gnomes or Dwarves chasing wolves and troggs about. Really quite eerie, but I ploughed into the initial kill-ten-rats stuff, and within minutes, it became very easy to forget I wasn’t actually online at all. WOW is widely known for its soloability – I could potentially get right up to 60 without needing anyone else. I’d just have to skip the Instances and some of the Elite quests.

Of course it wasn’t perfect. Many of the quests were broken, the Hunter and Warlock pets were unplayably temperamental, often not responding at all, and several of the spawns in the newbie area seemed to be missing, broken, or even completely wrong. I even saw a Defias Cutthroat on the road to Gnomeregan at one point, which stuck me as a bit odd, and got jumped by a level 14 Raptor in the Northshire Abbey Vineyard which I wasn’t expecting. Mob respawn rates were much faster than normal, agro radiuses were much larger and self-healing via food and drink seemed slower. All mobs that could possibly drop quest items always dropped two of each and the Paladin trainers were missing entirely.

I was grumbling quite a bit actually, until I took a step back and realised what an astounding technical achievement the whole thing was. Some group, essentially of hobbyists, had written this thing from scratch and populated it with mobs, NPCs and quests. That I was playing at all was the impressive part, and more importantly, I could do something about the broken quests myself. The text files that made up the database took a bit of figuring out, but before too long, I’d got it sussed and was tweaking the quests as I went along – becoming my very own Live Content Team. I even managed to get the Paladin Trainers put back in after a while, and the whole thing took on aspects of Trade Skill, in a somewhat Second Life style, yet mingled with the usual hack-n-slash of WoW. Fight a few monsters, hand in the parts, work out what was wrong with the questgiver, down the server, tweak the database, up the server, hand in again, get reward, rinse and repeat.

Having one’s own personal GM on hand was quite agreeable too. By running two clients on the same PC, I was able to have my very own CSR on call (mostly lounging in the snow outside the Kharnos inn – lazy GM!), able to instantly replace any lost or broken items that the questgivers mucked up, without suspicions of scamming or lying on my part! Of course self discipline is important – with the power to grant levels, spawn items and .kill at will, it would be very easy to go a bit mad with it all – go solo MC and Onyxia, that kind of thing, but to my credit, the only minor abuse my GM partook of, was a complete set of T2 Epic for herself, and to be honest, I’ve long resigned myself to never seeing any for real anyway, so it was hardly more gamebreaking than going to Blizzard’s own website armour guide. My ‘play’ account got no special treatment - what would be the point?

Resource contention was pleasantly low – Copper was spawning only marginally slower than I could harvest it and all suitably near to the forge. With an absolutely barren (although functional) Auction House, self-sufficiency is important, and ultimately, an army of Alts with all the different crafting skills, and Gadjetzan AH access would be necessary. The ‘repack’ I found had the Ahn'Qiraj Gate hand-ins available too, but frankly, it took long enough on a server of 3200 players, and I didn’t relish the idea of making 400,000 Runecloth bandages (and the rest) on my own. The Darkmoon Faire was at Stormwind, but none of those quests seemed working.

It should have been ideal for me, all in all. WoW without the idiots, and a world of my own, with top notch CSR Support that beat even the long-departed EQ Legends Premium servers… and yet it wasn’t. It’s hard to describe why, but taps into my ongoing and as yet uresolved quest to find the answer to the ultimate question – Why do I play MMOs? My time on the ‘Vanhemlock Server’ was enjoyable enough, moment to moment, and in basic character, not very different to the way I played on Runetotem, which was mostly alone and in a companionable silence. No pressures, no smacktalk, no paranoia or expectations – just me, my own judgement, my own abilities, and my own agenda. But for some reason I can’t put my finger on, the absence of any other players at all, even when I’d probably be ignoring them all if there were any, seemed to make the whole experience matter much less.

I gave up at around L12 Paladin/L8 Druid/L9 Mage, went off and played Dungeon Siege 2 instead (where it isn’t supposed to ‘matter’) and haven’t actually fired the thing up since. It was a very interesting experience (and possibly the only way most of us will see a complete set of epix), granting me some, albeit very second-hand, insight into what goes on behind the scenes on the average MMO server, the fixes, the database, the GM powers and problems, and of course further insight into the nature of my own obsessions, which is always nice, but I doubt I’ll play the thing again. I have internet again now, and can certainly afford the subscription, so if and when I do play WoW again, it’ll be back on Runetotem, where the AH greens are plentiful, the Ironforge plaza is noisy and the pick-up groups delightfully absurd…

The Vanhemlock Server is not accepting character transfers at this time.

To pre-empt some comments:

  • No, I am not going to host any files here - I’d rather my blog wasn’t Smited thankyouverymuch.
  • No, I am not going to host any game servers for the unwashed masses of the internet - absolute power corrupts absolutely, and you would not find me a merciful GM…
  • No, I am not going to email the files to you, go find them yourself…I did!
  • No, I am not going to provide tech support for any Emus you find elsewhere – the hair-tearing discovery is part of the fun!
  • Yes, I made the Paladin Trainer wear a thong.