Crawled back from the dead to post my 2 cents if anyone cares.
Being part of the SRO community i've truly seen it all, from good to bad and I would be lying if I said I was on always on the good side but that doesn't matter.
What baffles me is that a thread like this pops up from time to time, everyone is reasonable and shares their stories with some reasonable statements but then the thread dies and we go back to our lives and/or the dead Silkroad Private Server community. We have to start realising that we have grown up and this game is gone as we know it. For a server to be succesfull it needs to adapt; usually by joining the "Season x" hype or something along those lines, to get donations and then repeat because people pay, play and repeat aswell.
It would be great to hit a reset button but we don't have that do we? The community is dead and doesn't understand playing this game anymore, the corruption, paying off guilds etc is absolute insanity, I can't comprehend this behaviour, who even started this? Seeing 3500 players on a server is much more fun indeed than 103 players but the community kills the server, every single time, something happens; a guild leaves and there goes the server.
The game has become way too complicated aswell on some private servers, doing x to get y in order to do abc; alot of foreign players don't get it and quit or don't even give it a try and if there is a big team that has all of it covered, it ends up in feuds and corruption.
Most server owners don't know how to run bigger communities and don't have the patience to read and move on; thus what would benefit the community is a GMless server with just moderators, keeping the dev team completely away from the likes of public chats and such OR you have a good GM team who have no job, no wife, no kids and all kinds of time on their hands to be sitting in front of a computer all day; yeah that's what I used todo 7 ~ 8 years ago, people loved that and the servers I did that for were always full but at some point you just can't, the community sucks you dry because of greed and the influence of the bigger guilds, not only that; You start a life besides the internet.
Every time a server closes, the community loses another % of it's players, it's bad and I think it's too far gone to even be able to save it. If people actually now it still could be saved but then you can't rely on just the devs, you need a community to rely on aswell, if that ain't there... what's the point?
pSRO is sick, it needs a huge reset; whoever could make that happen (nobody really) could set a series of positive events in motion, untill then, we're just watching a slow but sure death of the game we all love(d).
Also, there is no point in pointing fingers and naming people, we've all made mistakes, is it really worth pointing out who did what? We did this together.