Why are there no popular lowrate vanilla pre-re servers?

[lunker]

I get the general sense that vanilla pre-re is the most popular form of RO, yet all I see these days are Renewal/Classic/Revo servers.  Am I wrong in thinking that pre-re is popular?

[Orange]

The top 10 low rates on RMS is 4 pre-re, 3 renewal, 2 classic and 1 revo.

Midrate is 7 pre-re, 3 renewal. Highrate is 8-2. A lot of the draw of the pre-re is afaik WoE being good, so if you're playing pre-re its likely because you think it has better pvp/woe, and if you're playing for pvp/woe then it makes more sense to play a mid-highrate

So I'm not sure where you're getting the "everything these days is renewal/etc" - I'm going to take a guess and say that you're looking at primarily newly opened servers. It's a set up market with more servers already, and as you said people like vanilla pre-re. If there's already ~20 good pre-re servers, and you can't do much to stand out or people don't like the changes then why enter that competition?

Revo classic is also new so you'll be seeing a higher frequency of them being opened in the meantime.

[lunker]

I suppose I have other filter criteria, that being English servers.  By my count the top ten lowrates are 1 pre-re / 3 renewal / 2 classic / 1 revo.  TalonRO does not count because it's not vanilla at all.

Furthermore the pre-re servers that do exist always have terrible population (sub 100).  There aren't any populated vanilla low rates pre-re's which is just odd to me.  Can it really be that vanilla pre-re players are all playing mid/high rates?

Like before GGRO, DoMRO, and RoMRO we still had some servers that would pull 100-300 players happen every half-year or so.  But I hardly ever see these anymore.

[Orange]

Like before GGRO, DoMRO, and RoMRO we still had some servers that would pull 100-300 players happen every half-year or so.  But I hardly ever see these anymore.

Before then renewal was often poorly implemented/buggy so fewer people opened renewal servers and even if one did, most people had it in their minds that renewal was buggy/sucked in general. That's changed over the years and more people are happy to play on renewal. We now also have revo classic, meaning the population is sharded even more.

There's also the fact that the server open > gief moni pls > server close got worse and worse which I assume pushed more people into playing highrates, rather than get invested in a server like GGRO where they openly advertised that the server will die in in <1 year.

There's now more choice than ever, classic, pre-re, renewal, revo and then you have vanilla+heavily customized in each of those categories.

[Zinnia]

To be honest I wouldn't be against the idea of launching a true vanilla low rates server as we did with dom and rom, but I want to build it in a way that it is a sustainable business model that can last for at least 18 months.

[draugadrottinn]

i think its because vanilla pre renewal servers are played by older generations. while renewal and classic revo are played by alot younger players which just started playing RO when it was already renewal or classic revo. vanilla pre renewal taste best because its really feels nostalgic when we were playing it. most vanilla pre renewal players already got children or working so they got almost no time to play. i dont think its easy to attract younger players who started playing RO at renewal or classic revo patch. if someone want to commit in making vanilla pre renewal server they must know that they only can attracts old players. for classic server mostly played by old players too especially who quit before pre renewal patch. but mostly played by pre renewal players who want to nostalgic how were things before pre renewal. some said classic more balanced compare pre renewal though, that's why some prefer classic server.