tl;drQuote:
In my opinion, Silkroad is still fine. When it comes to the pserver scene, what we are seeing right now is to be expected after files were released; a bunch of people rushing to setup servers for short term pleasantries. There is nothing wrong with that, as for a lot of people, they finally get to enjoy Silkroad how they want to, even if that entails unrealistically high rates and free silk items. Those servers will naturally keep on popping up and disappearing just as fast as they came, since no real investment is being made with them. The same was true with the emulators (SSE and SREMU) in the past.
The root issue you are alluding to is "where are the quality servers that stand out from the rest"? You won't see any of those for a while. There are three main reasons why.
The first is time. It has only been one month since the files have been released. One month is a very, very short time span in regards to a pserver. Even for a person like me, who has been working non-stop the past month learning the files, reversing stuff, and writing tools, I'm nowhere close to being where I want to in understanding the server files. There's literally years worth of research and knowledge to be gained from the files and people are only scratching the surface right now when it comes to setting up new servers. As a result, all the servers look and feel the same right now because only the simplest things have been changed. Very few people are actually taking the time to look into real advancements with the files as opposed to just trying to setup a server and profit from it.
Truly unique servers that really stand out from what is out there now are a long ways away as a result. Simply put, the files have not been available long enough. This leads to the second reason and that's skills. There are very few people around nowadays in the Silkroad community that possess all the skills needed to really develop the tools and do the work needed for pservers. Since the files release was public though, this might change in time with people from other sites and other games taking an interest in Silkroad, but that once again, this requires time. I would expect more people with more skills come around in the future, especially from RZ. However, it is such a huge time, money, and skill investment, the rewards might not be worth it to most with a lot of new games coming out soon that will have markets 10x+ larger than Silkroads (Diablo 3, MW3, BF3, Skyrim, GW2, SWTOR, etc...). What real incentive is there for people to come to Silkroad when there's a lot of more profitable ventures available?
Given what we have now talent wise from the community, the final reason why we won't see anything special for a while is because of a lack of understanding about literally everything that is going on right now. Back when ecsro was the only pserver around, they could get away with anything because they were the only one with files. The same was true for zszc. When elitesro came around, they too could get away with anything from having exclusiveness of modern files. Since everyone has VSRO files now, the same approaches that worked in the past for ecsro and esro will no longer work, but people fail to understand that.
If you simply want to setup a stock server with changed rates and no real changes to the files or custom content, there is no way you will be able to survive in the long run from "donations". Reason be, there's nothing you can offer that someone else won't be able to offer in a better way for cheaper. Unless you are willing to spend money to operate such a server with no real intent on making money from it, i.e. you aren't looking to make money from it at all, there's little these servers can do for the long run to stay alive.
For the short term, some of the current servers can stay profitable due to having the right types of people aboard. Servers that can pull in large guilds and people with a lot of friends that play who all want to play together on something stable server wise, solid support wise, and not absurd rates wise do stand to be able to get their fair share of donations since a lot of people don't want to spend money on corrupt or greedy servers. However, this is not a long term strategy and as people server hop, these types of servers will hurt the most as people leave.
As a result, the community ends up with the types of servers we have right now, mostly everyone trying to take a piece of the pie for themself. Any servers which have long term ambitions and true aspirations of quality while providing something new as well as old to users have to spend a lot of time and resources upfront doing the necessary planning, research, and development at levels none of the existing servers have been willing to show. That is not to say there aren't people out there who are taking the time and really going through it, but for anything like that, it's going to take some time before you actually see it available. Most people simply don't have the patience for it and only care about the "now" and not the "later".
Anyways, getting back to your question, will the SRO era come to an end? No, time after time, Silkroad has shown its resiliency and it's not going away any time soon. Will the pserver scene improve to what people really hope for? That's another question that only time will tell. At this point, I don't think things can get "worse", but only better. How much better, I'm not sure yet, but I think there's a lot of opportunity awaiting for those willing to really work for it. :)
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