On Pirate Servers

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By Ravenhawk | November 21, 2006

Pirate servers are a common point of argument between gamers. Some like them, some hate them, some couldn’t care less.

The largest beef that many have with pirate servers is that they’re costing the game companies money. With some games this is likely untrue. If you have a private server that has a group of ten people, all of whom are incomeless highschool students, the company won’t be losing money upon them playing.
However, with games such as Ragnarok Online, where thousands of people play on private servers. Gravity is definately losing money.

Of course there are those who don’t care about the politics of it. They just want to play the game, and if its free, thats that much more of a bonus. Of course if the servers that are free suck, some people will pay just for the better gaming experience.

If you like to have a large player base, often private servers won’t do it for you. Occassionally though, you’ll run across servers with numbers near those of the official servers or at least enough to hold a active community. Official forums can be daunting for some, what with a few thousand posters and all that, it can fail to really feel like a community. Whereas the smaller private servers can be much more close-knit.

The issue of rates is also a popular point of argument. Balance is one of the hardest things to create in a game and most MMORPGs struggle with this. Private servers often adjust the exp/drop rates upwards making it easier to level. This isn’t always a good thing, but sometimes it can be. Some servers provide rates that allow you to level ten levels with a single kill. That is overkill to the extreme. They’re just unbalancing it the other way.
At the same time, often a small rise in exp rates can greatly improve the play experience. I’ve played games where you’d play a day and a half just to get through tutorial land. I’m willing to be dedicated to a game to gain levels, gain good classes, etc. But having to play for days just to get into the “real” game just isn’t right. The only exception I saw to this was Flyff. The novice class took awhile to get out of, but the game had so many quests to go on while you were doing it that you were rarely just grinding.

The other downside to Pirate servers is the events are rarely as cool. Occassionally the DMs will get creative and come up with some cool new idea. I had a fun “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” event once on a private RO server. But for the most part, events just become run of the mill. Invasions really aren’t as special when they happen every two days. And some servers take it a bit far. For instance, they want to have cool prizes for the events, so one server I looked at for a bit had made it so the only way to get bongun and alice pets was to win an event. I found this out only after I had hunted and hunted to get a bongun taming item at a less than 1% chance.
I got the item you turn into the tame, went to the npc, and discovered that the quest gave you an apple instead of the tame.
Needless to say, I stopped playing there.

In the end, it all comes down to what most players want to get out of a game, whether they play on pirate servers or not. They do a sort of cost-benefit analysis to figure out whether the real thing is better than the private. Personally, I forsee a drop in the number of private servers for games. Many MMORPGS are moving to an item-shop format which is appealing to a lot of players as they don’t have the monthly fees, but if they want to pay for a little extra, they can.
With item shop games there is little, if any, reason to play on a private server. After all, is having no one to play with worth getting a couple shiny items for free?