# World Of Warcraft

World of Warcraft (WoW) is an AAA [proprietary](proprietary.md) [game](game.md) released in [2004](2004.md) by [Blizzard](blizzard.md) that was one of the most successful and influencing games among [MMORPGs](mmorpg.md).

There is a [FOSS](foss.md) implementation of WoW server called [MaNGOS](mangos.md) that's used to make private servers. The client is of course proprietary and if you dare make a popular server Blizzard will kill your grandmother and rape your children.

{ The classic WoW (some time until the end of WOTLK) lied somewhere in the middle between good old and shitty [modern](modern.md) games (the WoW of today is 100% shit of course). For me the peak of Warcraft was [Warcraft III:TFT](warcraft.md), it was perfect in every way (except for being proprietary and bloated of course). As a great fan of Warcraft III, seeing WoW in screenshots my fantasy made it the best game possible to be created. When I actually got to playing it it was really good -- some of my best memories come from that time -- nevertheless I also remember being disappointed in many ways. Especially with limitation of freedom (soulbound items, forced grinding, effective linearity of leveling, GMs preventing hacking the game in fun ways etc.) and here and there a lack of polish (there were literally visible unfinished parts of the map, also visual transitions between zones too fast and ugly and the overall world design felt kind of bad), laziness and repetitiveness of the design. I knew how the game could be fixed, however I also knew it would never be fixed as it was in hands of a corporation that had other plans with it. That was the time I slowly started to see things not being ideal and the possibility of a great thing going to shit. ~drummyfish }