How would you rank private servers on levels of piracy?

[Taxman1]

Basically, private servers are free servers for P2P MMOs like WoW. Sometimes they're private servers for F2P MMOs like Maplestory to get high level caps, free premium content, custom content, and etc.
For me it depends on the game, though any private servers would be considered an act of piracy. For example if its a F2P MMO and they want to fix or change something for themselves that I can sort of understand but it would still be a form of piracy

 

[migo]

Well, if you've paid for World of Warcraft, and don't want to pay a subscription fee, and are playing on a free WoW server, I don't see anything wrong with that.

If it's Free to Play, but they make it unplayable if you don't pay, I'd wonder why you bother with a pirate server at all.

If you're paying for a pirate server, something like $8/month instead of $15/month, I'd say that's where the problem really is.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

If the private server is free, then I would say it is exactly piracy and nothing more. If said server charges people to play in any capacity I would rate it as worse given that the person running the server is diverting revenue from people who demonstrate a willingness to pay for the game and it's content from the people who made the game to themselves. As far as a person who simply plays such a thing, I'd count it as piracy in either case though the latter seems incredibly silly.

 

[Plucky]

Probally low or high depending on the game, like in WoW, you would need ALOT of people to fill Battlegrounds and such...otherwise its just singleplayer...MMOs are about people and stuff.

Comparing it to regular game piracy, its more severe since games are alot smaller in comparison to MMOs, not to menction alot of systems not even checking if it's being pirated...

To put things into perspective, a DS game can probally be somthing like 8-128MB+....WoW is over 29 Gigabytes..thenagain, im only basing WoW's size on the client i already have on the computer. (it's real, not pirated if you're wondering.)

Chances are theres still some trimmage i could trim off, like old patches plus i also included my Addons too..so that would add alot to the bulk.

 

[Gamerlord2]

Depends on the status of the game.

Dead or nearly dead like Ultima Online? Not piracy.
Alive and running i.e WoW? PIRACY!

 

[Atmos Duality]

Nothing wrong with it as long as you paid for the game. The private servers are usually completely rewritten pieces of software by private people and aren't subject to any copyright claims as such... that they are able to interact with the MMO Client software shouldn't really matter in that case...
Reality is a little different though as usually the corporate entity with lots of money tends to win on bullshit charges (like Blizzard apparently did against some woman)...

Anyway, there's a good Wiki article about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_emulator

My guess is that they only filed charges against her because her server was actually successful. I imagine most servers lack the necessary population to provide anywhere near the same social experience.

 

[Taxman1]

Well doesn't Blizzard have the game files for download? Like for a trial account?
I think you can use that for private servers.

Also paying for private servers is just beyond explanation. Ive actually seen one that cost more than the actual cost of the game.