I have a long history of playing World of Warcraft.

It was the first MMORPG I had ever played way back in early 2005.

I got a dwarven hunter to level 47 in the first 6 months then quit as the game became to much of a grind.I never saw any end game raid content when it was current.

So I stopped playing from the Autumn of 2005 until round spring of 2008 just before the launch of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

The reason I jumped back into it was because I found out about private servers with different exp rates and rulesets.This seemed like a cool way to check out the content of The Burning Crusade without having to pay a subscription fee or go through the grind to level cap.

So the first private server I played on was a Burning crusade server where your agility stat was so high you could solo raid content even tho it could take up to an hour or more to kill a raid boss depending on your gear.

This was alot of fun for a month or so but by the time I had killed Illidan Stormrage there was noting left to do so I stopped playing.

After that I kind of stopped playing games for a while altogether.In 2010 when the Cataclysm expansion launched I bought the retail version since it had been around 2 years since I had logged into the game and the hype for that expansion was huge so I felt I had to check it out.

I rolled a Dwarf Shaman and got to around level 70 before getting bored and canceling my subscription.Again I never saw any end game raid content from the Lich King or Cataclysm expansions.I played for around 3 months during the Cataclysm expansion.

So from late 2010 to early 2015 I didnt play Warcraft at all ,then I found out about the incredibly popular Vanilla private server Nostalrius.I made a Dwarf Paladin on Nostalrius a few weeks before it got shut down by Blizzard.Just as I was starting to enjoy the server it got taken down.

Feeling the itch to keep playing I looked for other Vanilla private servers and found the Kronos II server.I played there until I hit level 38 and the grind kicked in.That's when I remembered how much of a time sink the original version of the game was.Agian I gave up and again I didnt reach my goal of seeing end game raid content.

So its been about a year now since I have logged in and once again the WoW bug has bitten me.I checked to see what the most popular private servers are and the one that kept popping up was Warmanes Icecrown server.

The server is set in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion timeframe.It has 7x ep rates and 7x drop rates with the added bonus of using the updated character models from the Warlords of Draenor expansion.

This got my attention , I had never seen the WOD models so I decided to check the server out.Again I went with my Dwarf Paladin,I love the Dwarven starting area with its snowy mountains ,its the area Im most nostalgic for so I always end up going with the dwarven race.

I tried logging on at peak time , there were 12,000 players on the server which is the cap , I was in position 1350 in line to get on the server and it took a wait of 2 hours to get on!

This is by far the busiest private server I have ever seen and after playing for a while I can see why.First of all it is incredibly stable.I have never been disconnected even during peak times which is impressive for such a high volume of players.

With the new character models and updated graphics I have never seen WoW look so good.I get decent frame rates even when recording gameplay with fraps which is a problem with other games since I play on a old Laptop.

The 7x exp rates make leveling a bit to easy but Im here to hopefully get to level cap and finally check out some end game raiding.If the exp rate is to fast here there is the Lordaeron server which is pretty much the same as Icecrown except it has 1x exp rates and no Random Dungeon finder , so its aimed at players looking for a more hardcore experience and it has around 3000 - 4000 players on at peak time.

Ive made 3 youtube vids of my early experience on Icecrown and I figured I would share them here as they are getting no love on Youtube.Maybe someone in the steemit gaming community will find them interesting.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PaUROOXPGA&t=1429s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6V52QQfSMA&t=44s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvUW0eXCYQo&t=160s