On judging other servers with an open mind

Most if not all private World of Warcraft servers are valuable and interesting. Even Nostalrius, Kronos, Feenix, Heroes WoW, Vanillagaming, WoW Mania, Voidheart and [insert all servers you know here].

Why do I say that? Well, I often see forum posts where players comment on servers different than their own and say they are bad, crappy, of low quality, useless, or various negative adjectives. 

Now, everyone can have his point of view, that is perfectly fine, we all have values, previous experiences and beliefs and preferences and the right to think by ourselves. But preferences are not the same for everyone, just like coffee, some like it hot, others cold, some like it creamy, others hate it creamy, some like it with milk, others don't, etc. Some like twink servers, others want vanilla servers, some like retail, some like only Kronos, some would be happy with no raids and no dungeons, some would be satisfied with a server that has disconnects every 30 minutes, etc. It is incredibly difficult to make a general subjective claim on the quality of a server. Because we are all different.

Then there are different ways to evaluate a server. Some will focus on population, others on how easy it is to connect, how its reputation is, if you can find a group in less than 50 minutes, what a best friend thinks of it, what a video review said about it, how the forums look like, how the Nefarian encounter looks like on a youtube video, how the leveling 1-20 is, etc. None of those ways are wrong, they are just different and show how different indicators fit different persons.

On Kronos plain letters cannot be read after a logout. That matters to me quite a lot, but I am confident that most players do not care about this feature at all. Again, preferences.

As such each server has strengths and weaknesses. Some have better scripting, some have a specific raid working, some have logging issues, some have czech forums, some allow fast leveling, etc. And we all approach them in a unique way. What is good and important for someone is not for someone else (if what you like is exploring the vanilla world maybe you don't care about the population and scripts at all). The bottom line for me is that if you have fun then it is probably good for you.

Thus when I read players saying that "server X is bad" what I think they really mean is closer to "I think server X is bad for personal reasons" and what happens is a confusion of one's own beliefs with those of every possible person. If players play on a server for some time they are probably having some fun.

There are obviously other factors that influence those posts, like a possible fear about players leaving for other servers, a will to defend the server's identity, emotional attachment to the server, an effort to prevent cognitive dissonance, a feeling of belonging to the server's group and contextual events. But I will not focus on them, not today.

To conclude, what if you played for 3 days on a very laggy server before it stopped running entirely and you had lots of fun? Was that wasted time? Was the server bad? What makes you think so?