For the last month, I've been playing World of Warcraft for free. Unfortunately, this means that I have to play it as a single player game. There are other limits, most of which come with the single player play, but there are other limits: I can't level past 20.
If anyone is still guessing, I'm talking about the World of Warcraft free trial. In this sense, I am experiencing The Shattering, and playing the original races up to level 20, experiencing a good chunk of the changes that WoW 4.0 brings.
Since these trial accounts are throw-away accounts, I've been using a web service called Mailinator. Mailinator is a temporary e-mail service. Their slogan is, "Let them eat spam." Essentially the service saves a step in creating a rubbish Battle.net account.
As I register for Battle.net, I set an e-mail, such as Doodlybits1234567@mailinator.com. I proceed to set a password that I would never use, and put in false information. The confirmation e-mail is sent to Mailinator, where I (and actually, anyone else) can get to it, and click on the link to activate the Battle.net account. I then log-in, and ask for a WoW trial. After that, I'm able to immediately start playing WoW. All I have to do is copy my previous WTF/Account folder into the new WTF/Account folder, and I don't even have to worry about resetting key bindings.
I now have 10 days to level through as many starting zones and secondary starting zones as I can. When I get to level 15, I can choose to try out several instances, using the dungeon finder. On average, the 1-20 journey is about 10 hours, at the end of which I usually have a mount, since just questing gives more than enough gold for everything I would need.
So here are a few questions:
1) I am playing WoW for free. Is what I am doing wrong or am I simply playing within the confines of the Free Trial rules.
2) Morally (not technically), is there any difference between what I am doing, and playing on a Private Server?
3) Either way, I am not paying Blizzard, and will not do so for a while, does that change anything?
creative use of game mechanics.
ReplyDeletetechnically what you're doing can be done by creating throw away e-mail accounts manually with the multiple available free e-mail services.
unlike private servers that basically violate copyright etc - what you're doing to me amounts to doing what I used to back when I was a poor student and wanted to go to metropolitan museum of art. haven't been there in a few years, but they used to have an option to pay as little as you could afford, so I made many a trip for a nickel per visit.