A private server is a game world run by someone other than the company that made the game — usually from reverse-engineered or emulated server software, sometimes from code that leaked, and almost always with settings the official world would never use. This section collects the explanatory material that goes with that: what the rate labels on a listing actually promise, how a toplist ranking is produced, how to judge whether a client download can be trusted, and where the law stands on running or joining such a world.

Those four questions are the ones every newcomer asks in the same order, and they are worth separating. Rates are a design choice, not a measure of quality — a world with very high experience and drop multipliers is a different game from the one it copies, and a good share of the players who try it leave within a week because the progression they came for has been removed. A ranking on a toplist measures the voting effort of a server's own community rather than the size or the stability of the world. A client is untrusted software and needs treating as such. And the legal position turns on copyright and on the terms a player has already accepted, which is why shutdowns tend to arrive as letters rather than as lawsuits.

Below the guides, the section keeps the original directory listings as they stood when voting closed. Those pages are historical: rankings no longer change and new sites are not accepted.