Why you are trying to market this to current retail wow players is beyond me. Private servers are against the terms of use that every retail wow player agrees to whenever there is a new patch or when they install the game. Is this some sort of trap? Not sure why you are trying to get retail players to break the rules.
Hey guys, lets just take the ToU issue at face value for now. Many people actually do take those seriously. Early on when I was recruiting for Molten, I ran across an actual group of players who figured that playing on a private server is illegal.
I researched this partly out of curiosity, and partly because it is a legit concern, particularly to people who actually don't do the things Blizzard tries to ban. It you're interested, the
wikipedia entry on EULAs is a nice start, while
this article outlines some of the ridiculous language in some licenses.
The overall impression is that many aspects of EULAs and ToUs are unenforceable. The way this works out for private servers is that the vast majority, particularly the actually successful ones, are run outside the USA, because it's much harder for Blizzard to file law suits in other countries. As for playing on them, I know several players have had their retail accounts banned for advertising on the official Blizzard forums. Nothing else has been done, however. It'd be impractical and useless for Blizzard to even attempt to go after people playing on private servers.
Also important is the difference between the EULA and the ToU. The ToU are simply rules made clear so that you know how to behave in game in a way that won't get you banned. It's not something that will get you sued, it'll just get you banned. The EULA is primarily about copyright infringement. However, while
running a private server is clearly considered a copyright infringement, playing on a private server probably isn't, mostly because you're not going to make money off playing someone else's service.
TL;DR: don't worry about the ToU, unless you were considering trying to run a pserver inside the USA. Playing on one is just fine.
