It's pretty obvious since literally everybody is biased in their opinion regarding this topic. Though, the reality is that the official servers would become more popular if the private servers were shut down, but that doesn't mean that the overall player base would increase in size, in fact it would probably be cut in half. So, whether we measure the game's "life" based on official servers or the whole player base is too much big of a factor to even discuss whether private servers are harmful or not. If you're a fan of official servers, then obviously you'd want more players, but that's a biased opinion as well.
There is no actual way to measure whether the game would have more players or less players if private servers didn't exist. But considering how shit the developers are, I'd say it's a strong guess to say a lot more people would've just straight up quit and forgot about the game. I know some people who stayed around in private servers and these days also play official servers when new servers come out, and these people quit years ago.
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