the problem is not everyone has the room to host for free.
the money has to come from somewhere. especially with growing MMO community's
as soon as u bypass the 200players online constantly limit, u'r bound to upgrade datatraffic, bandwith, buy more servers/diskspace etc. I've calculated the datatraffic my server generates excluding the client downloads, just purely the game itself and the database server + replicating db-servers which are in another datacentre. and it's quite much
The temptations to sell exclusive items for cash are really high. as soon as my server hit the 100 players online mark PM's kept comming in about players willing to pay over 100$ for items other players could not get.
As a fanatic Dekaron-eXtreme player
(I'm sure we can name private servers that no longer exist here), I completely understand where you're comming from. and I know alot of private server started with exactly the same Idea, however after 6 months of hard work and only getting **** from players instead of thanks, a server owner might just get tired of it and start selling op items for cash