Exactly this. Everyone trying to run a server for free should step away already. It wont work. By now rohan is more or less a business for me, i scratched the idea of a complete free 2 play server long ago. On the other hand, if you charge your players, you should aswell give them something for it. Not only the items they get for their money but aswell a quality server of course. Indo servers are a whole other topic there.Quote:
Then the question becomes:
Why create a Rohan private server, Maintain it, Add to it, Support it, just so others can play on it?
I'm gonna just throw this out there...
Being the good samaritan and putting up a private server for everyone else to enjoy, but yourself really getting nothing but the privilege of running it, even if you are breaking even with it, gets really old, really fast. It stops being fun and becomes real work.
I mean seriously - your players expect you to be available 24/7 because, well, they are playing 24/7. You can't actually play it yourself without seriously pissing off your players to the point where they charge back their donations on you and accuse you of favoring their opponents if they actually see you talk to anyone in a friendly way in-game. All you can do is run the damn thing and pay the bills. Boring!!
If the server is not making decent money, I mean enough to give you motivations to make it great, there really is no point in going through the whole exercise. It is a thankless job and all you really get is players griping at you because the server it doesn't work they way they personally want it to work (which is directly opposite of what the guys over there want it to run like).
I will give you this : All servers have a honeymoon stage during the first couple months of their opening. After that, people get bored and leave until you have less than 100 players online at one time. That 100 players will not be donating enough to pay for a server that is setting you back $400-$500/month for a decent physical one (not a stinking VPS like ammad's which are dirt cheap) unless it is really really special and makes a lot of people happy (very, Very, VERY rare).
None of us really gives a rat's ass what you pay for your cheap-ass VPS.
Either way, a good dedi of a company which ignores DCMA costs roughly 100-150$ a month and is totally fine so actual running costs are minimal.