Seriha wrote:
There's nothing gray about it. They allow players to play a game they would otherwise need to pay for for free, even if the server itself is incomplete and/or buggy. More specific discussions in the past have also been locked up or nuked, as while it probably doesn't mean much anymore, being an official partner-site doesn't exactly jive well in tolerating piracy and is a sure way to get SE's lawyers knocking on the admin's door here..
Yeah see, that's why it actually is because of a few things:
1. You can get the entire game, for free, from SE themselves even today.
2. You do need to pay to access the servers that is true.
3. The reason the project, which takes only two seconds of google searching that even SE can do, hasn't been shutdown is because it falls under not only the proper license, but it doesn't breech POL's ToS/EULA.
4. The previous software for private servers got shutdown because it breeched the EULA by bypassing POL altogether, which is a big nono.
That's why it's kind of "okay" and "not okay" so unless you advertise on the official forums, SE doesn't care, much like as per material usage agreement you technically can upload videos of you exploiting and using bots but as long as it's relevant to the game and not using 3rd party resources you're not breaking any rules perse, since even the GMs stated they aren't allowed to use screenshots or videos for evidence to ban people unless it's submitted directly to them.
So yeah, a lot of discussions got nuked simply because of the risk involve more than the legality of it, because you have to download .exes and sometimes custom .dat packages which can contain who knows what, any good forum would keep that off of their discussions. If we're to compare, XI isn't too old because there's plenty of well established and retail like EQ and Ragnarok Online servers out there.
Those games are just as old if not older than XI.