My son and his mates were into WoW in a big way many years ago when he was a teenager (he's married with 2 kids of his own now!). The subscription cost was significant for him, so I looked at setting up a private server at home. It took me a week to figure it all out and set up, but as soon as it was running, he and a fair percentage of other pupils at his school used that instead of the official servers, and maybe had more fun as they all knew most of the other players IRL - it certainly became a busy little server.
It also turned out to be a great parenting aid - if he washed the car, cut the grass or did the washing-up etc I could pay him with game items simply by modifying the SQL database, which he valued far more than real money. Conversely punishing his misdeeds by knocking him back a level or two was also very effective.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
