You can get about as granular with what sort of World of Warcraft you'd like to play as you might with a deli sandwich or an ice cream cone: Would you like that classic or modern? Permadeath-only? That one expansion with all the alcohol-dependent pandas? But private servers like the popular Turtle WoW are still the only place players can find the WoW equivalent to Old School RuneScape: the classic game, but with new stuff.
That said, while some private servers for other games have gotten the go-ahead from the right people, Blizzard hasn't been gentle with these sorts of projects in the past. Before World of Warcraft's official classic realms serving up the vanilla version of the game, there was the private server Nostalrius, which got into legal trouble before long. Now there is Turtle WoW, which got hit with a lawsuit last September—and on Friday, a US district court judge ruled in Blizzard's favor.
