any wow players

I expect you do have to pay to play on a private server, or they will freeze your account all together if you're not paying to play. Because you can only play the game and access all the servers when your account's unfrozen.

have not heard of it. i think that would be great.

There are private servers that you can join without having to pay a subscription fee for the game. However, many of these servers don't remain around long as most of them are operating using illegal stolen, or pirated copies of Blizzard's server software. Be especially careful attempting to connect to a private server that you are not providing the server with username or password information that is valid for your paid WoW account.

As to your question concerning what it is like playing on private servers, generally they are sparsely populated and often are run by players who are interested more in providing themselves with a god-mode experience than actually allowing you to enjoy the game for free. You will find a large number of server-admin running around as players in the game abusing GM tools and carrying equipment with altered stats that will allow them to abuse whatever players actually discover and join their servers. Of course, your experience may vary.

Yes, there are several private servers and you don't have to pay anything. It's true that some server admins play with moded characters and is unfair, but it's not in all the servers. I recommend magic-wow dot com, is a very good server and the gms are there to help players and correct all the bugs and probems to make it as good as possible. You can also find many other private servers on google and you just need to check the comments and the amount of players they have, which is an indicator of how good it is. Your experience when playing will change depending on the realm you choose to play. For example there are 2x, 3x or more realms, which means that the experience given for killing creatures or doing quests is 2,3 or more times than in blizzard's servers. You can choose to play in a blzzlike realm too, in which you will find the same characteristics of blizzard's servers. You'll find that some quests and features of the game don't work, this is because the admins are using a copy of the blizzard server and there are bugs and some problems, but they are always working to have it as good as blizzard's.

Hope it helps.

Regards,
Julián

I play on private servers since 2 years and there's some crash or bugs sometimes so you don't pay each month.
Bye