Okay I don't mean to start anything with this, but I must say you're giving Private Servers a little too much crap. I've run them before ...
Well, I'm going to be frank, you
are pushing my buttons, especially since you're casting yourself as a stalwart proliferator of pirate servers for extant games. That is nothing to be proud of.
... and I know for sure that one major reason that CoH never got one is because there was little to nothing seriously wrong with the game. There was nothing wrong enough to make players go "man I wanna' make my own version of the game!"
Lest you forget, City of Heroes used to have a thriving PvP community. I'm not much one for PvP, but I did notice that Paragon/Cryptic did wind up alienating the lot of them with some developer decisions. In fact I recall that in the final days of CoH, some of them came back to troll the boards with some nastygrams for the devs.
As positive as I am about the overall CoH community, I haven't forgotten how we as a whole used to spend pages of threads debating about game mechanics we disliked. But to my knowledge, it remained debate, and no one tried serious attempts to undermine Paragon. Maybe part of that is because the people who had the resources and opportunity to undermine Paragon
if they wanted were instead supportive of the devs.
I can't say much for WoW (If it has private servers) because I honestly only played a trial of it and didn't get a very good opinion on the game, but from what I DID gather it had slow leveling.
It does. That's another reason why I call City of Heroes the exception to the rule, because no viable server emulators were released in its day. In World of Warcraft's case, it's the 800 pound gorilla in the market. It's one of the few games that can shrug off the significant problem of pirate servers because it would actually cost more to pursue legal action than it would to take the loss.
But WoW is, again, the 800-pound gorilla. I wouldn't be surprised if someone did the numbers and found out their current subs is still a match for the legit playerbases of all other MMOs currently on the market, or close to it. Considering how many other MMOs tend to live short lives, I think it's worth considering that your actions might
not be harmless.
I believe this also addresses your dismissal of financial damage caused to MMO developers by your bringing up Nexon and what not.
They key to this point is: Most (if not all) of the games with private servers available had some issues that players hated but Devs didn't care to fix / didn't feel the need to fix.
Remember what I said about "too many cooks spoil the broth?" This is exactly what I am talking about.
Point is: Private servers aren't necessarily bad. You're just looking at them in a bad light. You're making it sound like everyone who associates with them should be put on a blacklist and hunted down as monsters.
By eschewing a game that's legitimately on the market for a pirate server, you are doing a disservice to the game developers. There is no wiggle room for discussion on that point. People who regularly pay and play on the legitimate servers while using some private server for build testing or whatever, that's a gray area on my moral compass--but they are still supporting the devs, which is more than I can say for a lot of pirate serve players.
You literally have been saying they wish the death of game studios:I've yet to see a game where a Private Server has legitly bankrupt the developers.
So you say. But it would be intellectually dishonest not to even consider that piracy of an extant MMO has a significant effect on the developers' viability, no?
Remember what Greenheart Games did with Game Dev Tycoon? Not an MMO, sure, but the point they make has relevancy. Note that their experiment revealed that 94% of the people playing the game were pirating it, not buying it. And this is even taking to account the people who "try before they buy" through this method.
And if it did, maybe it was the publishers faults in the first place for bad marketing.
If you're saying this to completely dismiss the impact of pirate servers on a developers' survival, then that sounds like victim blaming to me.
It's all about the players desires for what a game should be like. That's what Private Servers are normally made for. Are you going to say I'm horrible and am trying to ruin Nexon because I want Maplestory to be the way it use to be but with my own little touch?
Your solution to "fixing" games isn't a solution at all, that's the problem. You're helping to spoil that broth. As they said once at Broken Toys,
Fixing MMOs is Hard.
You claim that it's all about the player's desires. Broken Toys addresses that with his response under "Listen to, and engage with, players:"
"The players are often WRONG.
What’s more, they will lie to you.
DIRECTLY.
TO YOUR FACE.
No, really, their class is horribly underpowered, any fool would know that if they only played the game and that bug you’re talking about is really a feature and anyway you shouldn’t remove it because our entire side is underpopulated so it’s only fair.
The players are not the ones at financial risk if your game fails. They simply move on after consuming all you have to offer.
Of course the players are also often right. There’s a whole discipline of development which revolves around figuring out which is which. At least until they figure out they’re the least paid people at the company and move on to junior worldbuilder so they finally get some respect in the break room.
But engaging with players entails the willingness to do some very fundamental things which, to date, have been unpopular with both developers and players."See that thing about financial risk? What do you think you're doing to the developer of your beloved game when you all scatter to ten thousand pirate servers because you want to play the game with one minor tweak or another?
There is a fine line when it comes to figuring out whether what the devs are planning or what the gamers want is good for the game as a whole.
Tangent here, but putting aside the whole issue of financial risk that pirating an extant MMO does to the developers, ditching the legit game for a pirate server just because you want to make a minor change is not nearly as justifiable as when it comes to the mod scene for single-player or limited multiplayer games. On that side of the pool, everyone's playng in small groups anyway, so companies can embrace modding and let players tinker to their hearts' desire. MMOs, however, by their nature feature some form of community and world persistence. So on top of the whole financial issue, this fragmentation also dilutes the whole community aspect of MMOs.
And I am saying this as a guy who does a
lot of solo play in MMOs. Even as a lone wolf, I still connect with the game's greater community.
I'm not trying to bash you in any way shape-or-form, and I'm not trying to start a huge argument. I'm just trying to let you know a little bit more about the world of Private Servers. Just because there are a few bad eggs out there doesn't mean the whole community is evil.
Honestly, I think it's
you who doesn't have the whole picture. I think now would be a good time to drop this link here:
http://adultimum.net/rw/extras.php?section=soapboxThat's an essay I wrote on the impact of pirate servers in 2004, when they exploded on the scene for the particular MMO I played. I think that's all the evidence you'll need. No, I didn't go far as to cite sources (and given the transient nature of the internet, especially forum posts and other evidence, citing sources is difficult anyway), but this essay was the product of talking with people who had insider knowledge of what was going on at Gravity, as well as close encounters of the pirate server kind.
You need to remember, I have a long history of dealing with pirate server types. My opinions weren't formed out of a vacuum.