Private server concept. Would it be viable for a hoster and for players?

[morf_is_a_looser]

Hello everyone,

No this is not a topic on a server which is going to open since i don't have files and absolutely no plans to host a server.
I'm just looking at the majority of the server being dead empty after a short while and i have a couple ideas i'd like to have feedbacks on.
I mean we as players play on a server for a reason, because we like something specific about it and i was wondering if the stuff i like was common to everyone and also if it would be worth it to apply these things on a host's business model to make it worth it for himself too.

Ok so i'll start saying what i really like on the servers, feel free to criticize the ideas, in a positive way tho, i don't want this to turn into a shitty topic.

So basically what i like when i join a new server is the thrill we have when we all compete to be on top of others, like who's going to be able to kill SQ or Talos first to start getting uniques.
Who's going to control the bowl for the same obvious reasons.
I like raiding people while they're farming // leveling in CZ, the high risk, high reward of CZ is a parameter i love.
Also, i'm not a big fan of these full pvp server, because people would get bored after a short while, and it completly removes some big parts of KO.
I really think that these parts have all to be balanced to make a server healthy : : farm, upgrade, leveling, pvp and the whole economy.
I doubt people liked playing KO because it was too easy right?
Nowadays, private servers tend to all go toward easy farm, easy upgrading, but after a week once you're fully geared, when there's no economy, when there's no higher levels to reach, what's left ? You won't catch anyone exp'ing cuz everyone is max level or almost, you won't catch anyone farming because reaching the top gear takes like 1-2 hours at each different drop spots.

Also, playing on a server where old players control everything isn't fun, you're going to get rekt no matter what because they're stacked and you'll have to struggle for long until you can maybe end up competing against them.

So in the end, i came to the conclusion where i think i'd like to see some seasonal private servers meaning :


Seasons : 2-3 months between server resets. Maybe 4 ? idk
Exp : Medium exp farm ~3 weeks to 1 month of exp'ing to reach max level. (max level to be defined)
Farm : Medium ~5 to 10% drop rates on high class items (still a bit better than officials back when we used to farm DMs in CZ back in the days when we were young).
PvP : Bring back old shit talia armors, destruction armors, dagger defence, spear defense, axe defences and other defense items (noone likes to be one shot, noone likes to be buttfucked by 2 rogues banging everyone in a matter of milliseconds).
Economy: Unique drop rates HAVE to be higher than usual on quest items, the server's life cycle is short, so keep in mind you need to have people fighting for them, but on the other hand you don't want to have just 5 people with masteries done after a month right? Conserning other uniques, yes make it so you have again ~10% drops or something, idk how to balance rates, really. Monsters dropping scrolls 90% of the time is i don't know what to say about this one, back in the days, COINS (and GBs...) used to be the economy of the game because buying pots was expensive, repairing was expensive, buying scrolls to upgrade your stuff was expensive. So people needed to bash in order to get coins. Well on a short life cycle server, i guess people would farm DMs and shit to get silver / gold bars ?

There are probably several aspects of the game i forgot simply because i didn't really organize my ideas and because i certainly don't have all the KO system in mind since i had left for so many years my memory can't even remember..
But idk, feel free to tell what you think about the idea of having seasonal server and well if you're a server host with other ideas that only "milking" us why not trying it out? Making money is fine, making the server pay 2 win will only result in people not staying....

Think about how the big farming games are doing it now :
Diablo 3. (ok you don't need to farm anyone on this one, they fucked up).
Path of exile ---> Works with seasons to get a fresh economy going every 6 months and you need to farm a fuckton in this game.
League of legends, they use seasons to make people climb the ladder every new season they launch.
Probably a lot of others i don't remember...

[retail]

What you want is literally YourKO, the only difference there is that you'll get level cap'd fairly fast, items on the other hand is very hard. Youtube YourKO PK and see for yourself. A new server should be coming up in 2-3 months.

[mortal]

YourKO is recommended only with your own risk, take caution because they will abuse your IP to attack the servers that might be threat to them. There used to be a topic about this, but i'm not sure if it still exist but I doubt they changed their ways.

At least use proxy or something to register there , and don't use your own IP anywhere that is involved with them.

[Kallop]

Leveling up is the absolute worst part of KO because of how it has been designed. It's not very fun in most games actually. Most single player RPGs do a good job of leveling because of story elements, but in MMORPGs it's just mindless grinding. Seasonal servers don't really exist, but the same concept is used by servers relaunching every couple months. It's not enough big of a change to keep players interested though, because of people switching from 70 cap to 80 cap to 60 cap on a whim. The other down side of having "seasons" is that if you start late, you'll be late and you'll never catch up.

Farming and PvP are the main focal points of KO Private Servers. Even YourKO, which used to be a hard-farm server, started moving towards a more farm-based direction to maximize PK and make it more enjoyable to just join and leave as they please.

[morf_is_a_looser]

People usually bitch when they paid for premiums etc and server just shut down or something like that, i think if they ever make a seasonal server they should just wipe chars, item, money, etc...but keep the premium active as it was.
Some people might hate the leveling of KO, i really think a harder leveling keeps the pvp going because you'll have people who don't really want to exp at start, they'll pvp and harrass people leveling but on the other hand, they'll be behind level wise.
If they need just half a day of grinding to reach max level then yeah...they won't really be affected, on the other hand, if they keep doing for about a week or two, they'll soon fall behind too hard on levels that people spamming exp will kick their asses pretty fast when they reach key level caps.

@Kallop : you're probably from the ones who get really base gear and go straight for pvp (since you hate leveling i guessed), don't you like ganking people while they're leveling at exp spots on a fresh server? Imagine, if the leveling took longer that it is currently on easy/mid farm servers, the pleasure to gank these people would last longer, and i think it's also a stimulation, for instance if your clan ganks a clan exp'ing they might be like "aight fuck this, let's go pk a bit for a change".

The same goes for gear, the harder it is, the longer people will need to farm and the longer they need to farm the less they'll get bored because there will be interactions with the opposite faction.
Look at how official servers used to be, it was super hard to get some gear and to level up before they start all the exp premium shit and genie shit...back in the days where you had only bronze and gold premium. And yet, people loved this game and weren't getting bored of it because they needed to work their ass off to get shit done.
That's my point of view, and i respect yours, i agree that i like farming a lot, maybe too much compared to other people.

@retail : thanks mate i'll have a look at it
@mortal : ohh you never what kind of guy you'll find hiding behind an IP. Sometimes it's good to beat up these people with their own stick if they deserve it


edit : Just looked at yourko's website and i came across it couple weeks ago, i gave up on trying it because everything in their forum is written in turkish, they didn't even bother translating important topics such as exp rates, level caps, upgrade rates, drop tables in english....shows how much they care about having an english community. It's sad because if what you say is true, i might like that server but having everything in turkish is going to bother me at some point, if they don't even translate important messages on their forums i bet the whole client is in turkish and i just can't be bothered. Plus i bet a lot of english speakers gave up on it for the same reason i did so idk, it might be super hard to find a competitive english clan on this server no? But i have to admit it's the kind of shit i'm looking for

[SheldonCooper]

Me and my brother are working on a server you're describing pretty much. We've run a pk light farm server until now. We decided to make a farm one, I see that farm server attracts more people nowadays. I merely posted a teasing screen shot on the facebook page and it hype triggered lots of peruvians and turkish players. It's gonna have old maps and all that back at 2004 Ares usko like including old weapon skins and old skill animations (old blizzard, inferno animations etc). Farming is going to be easier then on official back then ofc. And also there will be automatic questing added to make exp bit easier (quests activate upon hitting a mob), and mastery items will be easier to come across through some gamble options aswell not only from bosses. Also there are events added exactly for the purpose of keeping PK alive, such as collection race pk events, different pk maps for a limited time, bdws, csws, unified death match event that equalizes everyone's HP and special skill can be used with a specific weapon which enables all character's to have equal chances in the event including int priests that otherwise don't get so much PVP fun. There will be more posted under my bazinga topic, as soon as the new website is about to be done. ETA for beta should be around a month or so since server is pretty much ready, working on website and other stuff atm.

[Kallop]

People usually bitch when they paid for premiums etc and server just shut down or something like that, i think if they ever make a seasonal server they should just wipe chars, item, money, etc...but keep the premium active as it was.
Some people might hate the leveling of KO, i really think a harder leveling keeps the pvp going because you'll have people who don't really want to exp at start, they'll pvp and harrass people leveling but on the other hand, they'll be behind level wise.
If they need just half a day of grinding to reach max level then yeah...they won't really be affected, on the other hand, if they keep doing for about a week or two, they'll soon fall behind too hard on levels that people spamming exp will kick their asses pretty fast when they reach key level caps.

@Kallop : you're probably from the ones who get really base gear and go straight for pvp (since you hate leveling i guessed), don't you like ganking people while they're leveling at exp spots on a fresh server? Imagine, if the leveling took longer that it is currently on easy/mid farm servers, the pleasure to gank these people would last longer, and i think it's also a stimulation, for instance if your clan ganks a clan exp'ing they might be like "aight fuck this, let's go pk a bit for a change".

The same goes for gear, the harder it is, the longer people will need to farm and the longer they need to farm the less they'll get bored because there will be interactions with the opposite faction.
Look at how official servers used to be, it was super hard to get some gear and to level up before they start all the exp premium shit and genie shit...back in the days where you had only bronze and gold premium. And yet, people loved this game and weren't getting bored of it because they needed to work their ass off to get shit done.
That's my point of view, and i respect yours, i agree that i like farming a lot, maybe too much compared to other people.

@retail : thanks mate i'll have a look at it
@mortal : ohh you never what kind of guy you'll find hiding behind an IP. Sometimes it's good to beat up these people with their own stick if they deserve it


edit : Just looked at yourko's website and i came across it couple weeks ago, i gave up on trying it because everything in their forum is written in turkish, they didn't even bother translating important topics such as exp rates, level caps, upgrade rates, drop tables in english....shows how much they care about having an english community. It's sad because if what you say is true, i might like that server but having everything in turkish is going to bother me at some point, if they don't even translate important messages on their forums i bet the whole client is in turkish and i just can't be bothered. Plus i bet a lot of english speakers gave up on it for the same reason i did so idk, it might be super hard to find a competitive english clan on this server no? But i have to admit it's the kind of shit i'm looking for

That's not it. Ganking is fun if you're the one doing it. Getting ganked is fucking annoying. To sum up my previous thoughts, farming is fun and it's the grinding part of games that you were speaking of. In KO, where people know exactly what skills they're getting and stat points are brain dead, there's absolutely nothing to "unlock" by leveling up. It's more like a tedious task to do before you can do what you actually want to do. There are plenty of servers where you can spend months getting better gear and have fun grinding, while also enjoying trading and economy. Essentially what it comes down to is that KO is too simple and there is no build variety or you can't make any cool builds by spending stat points differently. There is a limited amount of play styles and none of them are a surprise to the majority of the KO population. So, in the end, leveling achieves nothing. It's pointless.

[TankxD]

seasonal private servers are what is currently out there besides one that i know of thats been out for what 2 yrs now. Besides that the same people constantly are opening and reopening servers for $$$$$. Look around its literally the same people hyping a new server making $$$ then closing after a few months lol.

[morf_is_a_looser]

No it's not, they shutdown, wait a couple month and come back with something different. What i'm talking about is like couple months season, server shuts down say a wednesday and reopen cleared on saturday.
There would be no scam since it's profitable to get a new economy for a server owner and as a player, we can say w/e we want but the best moments are the beginning of the server where you strive to be on top of everyone else. So as long as your premium don't get cleared up it's fair.

I mean let's be real, ko is a business, if you're not ok with that then nothing much i can do for you, it's how the world work nowadays.

@SheldonCooper : i'm looking forward to test it, plz don't screw up with all the pathos gloves, wings and valkyries and all these shits.

[SheldonCooper]

@SheldonCooper : i'm looking forward to test it, plz don't screw up with all the pathos gloves, wings and valkyries and all these shits.

It's the old client, without those add ons. Also the gfx is the original old one, no cringy graphical add ons to the client.

[Ching]

It's the old client, without those add ons. Also the gfx is the original old one, no cringy graphical add ons to the client.

you should really take in consideration that many people might play it, and add more farm spots/exp spots unlike yourko which is extremely full and sometimes you cant even exp, might be good to launch when a yourko server is about to die.

[bigdudle]

Me and my brother are working on a server you're describing pretty much. We've run a pk light farm server until now. We decided to make a farm one, I see that farm server attracts more people nowadays. I merely posted a teasing screen shot on the facebook page and it hype triggered lots of peruvians and turkish players. It's gonna have old maps and all that back at 2004 Ares usko like including old weapon skins and old skill animations (old blizzard, inferno animations etc). Farming is going to be easier then on official back then ofc. And also there will be automatic questing added to make exp bit easier (quests activate upon hitting a mob), and mastery items will be easier to come across through some gamble options aswell not only from bosses. Also there are events added exactly for the purpose of keeping PK alive, such as collection race pk events, different pk maps for a limited time, bdws, csws, unified death match event that equalizes everyone's HP and special skill can be used with a specific weapon which enables all character's to have equal chances in the event including int priests that otherwise don't get so much PVP fun. There will be more posted under my bazinga topic, as soon as the new website is about to be done. ETA for beta should be around a month or so since server is pretty much ready, working on website and other stuff atm.

Coming back to KO just for this lol.

[Alcohol]

So u are looking for server like LostSoulzKO was in old days 2007. 1 of first private servers ( i think , dont mind if i am wrong).

[morf_is_a_looser]

Would be so good to have the old feelings from our good and old ares, before it became full of +9s and +10s added by GMs and exploits....without all the koxp bots and all that shit...

[ImmortalOne]

Hereticko and phoenixko was best sever where warrior used quake to aoe dk for exp with mp build