Ghaji wrote:
There are easily 300+ Lineage 2 private servers being advertised daily, and its possible to continue playing the official L2 servers hosted by NCsoft AND play on a Private Server AT THE SAME TIME! Its not that hard to run multiple clients of the game at once, and just have 1 connected to the official server and 1 connected to a private server. The same concept can be applied to FFXI, and given the right amount of time a team could easily create a legal FFXI private server, that could be played during times when the official ffxi server might be down, or where you want to test something or get bored. The law is like a block of swiss cheese; sure its fairly solid but their are holes everywhere. Even the TOS and EULA has holes that can be exploited if you know enough about how agreements like this work, and you can basically have a company like SE or NCsoft bend just because their own agreements got twisted against them. Why do you think they periodically amend or change these things? Its because people find loopholes and use them against the company. If a FFXI private server became avaliable, I am sure there are a lot of people that would be willing to play on it.
So what? theres like 300+ RO private servers too; And hey guess what? They're all emulated using stolen code from the original which = illegal. The ONLY private servers that aren't illegal perse, would be ones that aren't reversed engineered but using their OWN original coding as it's heart, and the graphics as it's shell.
And no doubt there would be people who would be willingly to play on a FFXI private server, but on the logical, and well..in the terms of.."No ****" I'd rather play on SE owned servers, why play on a server where people who had less then say 10 years game design experience (let alone MMO experience) created the new quests and storylines, then a company and people who been doing gaming for a good 17+ years, great track record, and produced excellent products? I'm going with SE on that one. Because the major downfall of a Private server, besides the legal stuff, would be the fact it would suck, plain and simple. High rate exp and drops? What's the point. Half of the game no longer active? I.e CoP, ToAU areas never being open again because face it, most "Emulated Servers" usually leave out a good chunk of the original game to try to stay "Legal" which is a doubled edged sword, sure it won't seem like a straight copy, but on the other hand it would be a horrible game because it isn't a straight copy.
Therefore, why play in the Pre-Zilart days on a emulated server, when I can progress with my $14.00 a month charge fee I've been paying for 4 years for excellent up time, excellent quests, decent challenges and non-corrupt GMs (as in, purposely deleting your account, teleporting you to places when they say they will help you) and above all, far superior development team for new areas/monsters/gear/story? Answer is, I wouldn't, because they are making FFXI and supporting it because people will pay to play it, and will always play it.
I don't care about emulated servers, I won't technically bash them, but I can see them failing because of so many of the obvious outcomes as I listed. Sure faster exp would be cool, but some Private Server owners are going to the "OMGWTFHIGHEXP1000xRATES" and instead of 10-360exp a kill, you'll get over 12,000 exp+ a kill...tempting, but stupid.