Private Server Legality

Howdy,

So I was thinking about hosting another game server of some type; either a pserver or something esle. While looking around I found some information that is in response to the age old topic of is running pservers legal. I have explained this to clients before but I feel that this guy explains it better than I ever could; this guy is talking about Lineage 2 servers by the way. Credits go to Turix on WHT.
 

Disclaimer: I am not a legal professional, these are my read on the current state of affairs based on personal experience - take them with a grain of salt... of simply ignore them!

Private servers for MMORPG's is a massive grey area both in Europe and the USA. Depending on how the server has been derived and what (if any) client modifications are required to use it.

For example if you're server software is a leaked copy of the official software, then it is most defiantly piracy as you don't have a licence to have that software, let alone use it (not to mention possible criminal issues for getting it in the first place). However if the server has been derived completely by reverse engineering and you haven't had to by-pass any copy protection measures, then you are on much more solid ground.

Similar rules apply for the client software, as MMORPG clients are not sold in the same way as retail games (most are free to download without an account), simply having a copy of it isn't at all piracy. The tricky bit is how you convince it to use a different server, if you are modifying the client to change it server lists/remove anti-cheat mechanisms/etc then you are once again on a weak footing. However if you simply reroute the connection by changing something in Windows without touching the game client, then you haven't modified a piece of protected software and are in a safer position.

The bigger issue however isn't the relative legality of anything, its the darker side of things. The companies who run these games are massive multi-nationals, they can afford to spend more money on lawyer than most people will every see if their lifetime. They can and will simply bankrupt you with litigation they know they can't win, but they also know you can't afford to defend against.

Not to mention the above point; people who run private servers tend do be pretty shady, or know shady people - they become prime targets for a variety of nasties. Regularly DDOS/exploit and vulnerability abuse are rife, if you're going to run a private server make sure you're website/set-up is rock solid - or you will loose it.

Legal stuff aside - From my experience with L2J (admittedly a couple of years old now) I remember it being a Java resource hog something akin to Minecraft servers now. Based on that I would recommend something along the following:

Reasonable CPU (i5/i7/E3/E5)
As much RAM as you can afford (8GB+)
Something with strong IO performance (SSD/RAID1/RAID10/RAID5)
Bandwidth volume isn't important, make sure its good quality! (500GB-1TB at 100Mbit) - To be honest, that's probably overkill

As for hosts, it seriously depends on you're budget and systems administration ability. If you are capable of running an unmanaged set-up and are more concerned about price rather than support, then both OVH and Hetzner do servers in the £40-50 range that satisfy the above - however if you need a managed service then that price will double...at-least!

My advise, take a look around the offers section of this forum for something meeting you're criteria/budget.

With that if anyone has any ideas of something we could run let me know. Also feel free to discuss the topic of pservers. PA falls into the same area of legality; I have had a discussion with the Brand Manager at Gamesamba a company we did game reviews for and he confirmed what I already knew. Hosting of sites like PA is gray becuase we don't physically host the content and generally speaking are not modifying it. Read the topic above about pservers and you will get what I am saying; cheers folks!

Josh