The advantage of self-hosted WoW is that you can cheat to your heart's content.
So no more grinding if you don't want to.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Wrath WoW Best WoW
I don’t know if I played it much if at all.
It’s been so long and I know for sure that I did not play cataclysm.
I also never got too high of a level in the game either and mostly solo quested. It’s just fun to go around mindlessly.
ChatGPT was mentioned and now the thread is all about AI being good/bad, as usual.
Anyway, I'm glad you got your server going - hope you enjoy your flight!
I might be mistaken but at the time of writing there was 1 post about AI
Not gonna go back and search for "AI" but when I read the thread hours ago there were multiple back and forth comments criticizing/defending use of ChatGPT (which is what I meant by "AI" in this case), and this was not at all the point of OP's post.
ChatGPT said
When i was researching
🧐
The latest LLM's are pretty damn good as a research assistant - that was its original purpose. Using chatgpt as your first go at researching a new subject (like self hosting) is perfectly valid.
What’s wrong with this?
I remember when "research" actually meant something. Now it just means "throw it into the black box and get some info that has a 50/50 chance of being completely made up "
For dipping your toes into a new topic I think it's perfectly fine. It helps to provide useful pointers for further "research" (in a sense that would meet your requirement) and also manages to provide mostly accurate overviews. But sure, to really dive into this, LLMs like ChatGPT and co. are just some low-level assistants at best and one should go through the material themselves.
It’s all become quite convoluted now with all the other shit out there but they do actually serve well as a research tool in a more intuitive way than a search engine can
You can ask CharGPT for sources. TBH it’s often a much better search engine than Google, although that’s not hard nowadays.
Perplexity does a good job as LLM-search-engine-combo.
Haha, well when searching for games that can be self hosted, it’s gives a list which I can then further research on the web.
Oh wow, thanks for the recommendation. This looks perfect.
That's awesome.
That looks fun like old Everquest.
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FYI there are free wow instances out there if you want other humans involved. Turtle wow and ascension.
Turtle WoW is great, I'm dreading Blizzard shutting it down though. I'm hoping they avoid them but I feel their upcoming remastered client might attract too much attention.
Thanks, I’ve always solo played and didn’t get too deep into the game, so when I play with others I feel like I’m holding them back or need everything explained.
Plus self hosting it lets be play on my up coming 14 hour flight.
I did too a couple months back to play with the wife and kids.
There is a mod that enables bots which I guess could be helpful in dungeons and raids. I didn't try it though.
That’s awesome! I was wondering how I would do raids.
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While I have heard of people doing this a decade, I have never looked into it.
How was the install and setup process? How is the resource consumption of the server? At one point it seemed one had to supply their own quests. Are there open source quests available? Anything cool I didn’t ask about?
I just checked the server without logging into the game and it’s using like 106% of the CPU on idle when I logged in and played a little bit. It didn’t change too much but it’s consistently running that high at idle because I guess things in the game world are running so I’m probably going to stop the service and start it when I’m gonna play to just lower my electric usage
Great to know. I don't know if 106% of CPU is good or bad, but it is not what I had anticipated. Thank you!
Other places have said that it’s not resource intensive, and I’ve heard that it can run on pi4 with some optimization.
I wonder if I need to do something to optimize it.
Install wasn’t too bad, I used a mix of chatgpt and install documentation when I get stuck.
One problem I had was that I was aiming for burning crusade, but and chatgpt told me that Azerothcore supported burning crusade.
So after getting the server up and learning this, I had to find a wotlk client.
The choose of expansion was arbitrary, I just didn’t want modern wow.
There are some data files you have to supply, but they can just be downloaded from github and the guide even links to it.
I’m not sure about resources, but for a small instance, I think it’s pretty light. I’ve only just installed it on a i5-3470 cpu server, and it seems to play fine.
I’ve only played for like 5 minutes as I’ve not had time to play and monitor how heavy it is.
I did it like 10 or so years back? It was pretty easy to be completely honest and didn't require too many resources, at least not if you're the only one using the server. You just run the server locally and then use the client to connect to that server. That's basically it.
And no, the game comes with all the quests and everything, you don't need to really do anything else. The downsides is that you'll be locked out of a bunch of content like dungeons and raids since those require groups of 5 or more players.
Yeah me too. The biggest hurdle was understanding that the code, dB and scripts need to be in versions fitting together. Until then it was a bit off 🤣.
But as you said, about 10 years back but even on a pretty small vm for me and friends.
I have read that modern servers have np. Bots you can add so you can do dungeons and stuff. I haven’t tried myself. Would love to find a guide on how to set up a Linux host.
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I have one as well, and it's so much fun. It's pretty much just for my SO and me, but sometimes I have friends join. It's super cool having GM commands and all that.
Good work, I hope you have fun with it!
Nice!
I self host Minecraft on our LAN so my kids can play together, and it's super nice.
I haven't played wow in a long time.... Classic, TBC, then wotlk, cata, then took a break from it, came back a loooooong time later and just... Didnt enjoy it.
I would definitely do something like this to play with family and friends, going to have to check it out!
TBC was peak WoW for me.
Classic to TBC.
Did my pally quest for the mount, only to see that no longer be needed just a bit later....
I am also running my own instance of azerothcraft on a vps so that i can play with some friends. Love it so far but summertime means there is not too much activity yet. Im running with autoscale mod and it is quite fun to run some of the lower lvl instances at lvl 60 and it is actually a challenge (yes i capped the level at 60 because that is what i know)
Anything in particular you like to do with your awesome gm powers? (moonfire spam wins)
I need to look into mods. I didn’t even know that was a thing.
I have no idea what a gm can do, I made a gm account though.
I wonder if there are moss that will let me do raids solo.
Yes you can use the autoscale mod to make content soloable but you might want to tweak the settings to get it to a difficulty level you like. Some raid bosses have some game mechanics that make soloing difficult though
You should look into the gm commands to see what you can manipulate and also the server configs have a lot of things you can tweak that could make the game more enjoyable for you
Thanks, I saw there is a mod to add bots to the game. I wonder if that is good enough.
I self-hosted a TBC server for short period and I liked being able to crank up the default run speed and increase the drop rate of purple items.
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