Donation-free Server

[EclipseToo]

Would it be possible for a server to thrive population-wise without donations? Or do players feel like donations are a necessary aspect of a server?

There are some people out there like pay2win style donations because they don't want to have to work as hard, but what about those servers that just have costumes or other cosmetic donation items? If you're not going to add anything to give donors an advantage, do you really need to add anything at all?

Just in case anyone didn't know, running an RO server is extremely cheap. It costs $11 or less to get a DDOS protected VPS at OVH and it costs a mere $79 a month for a dedicated server by them. There may be other VPS and dedicated servers out there for cheaper, but you get the point. For any person that works, this seems a trivial amount of money. That's the cost of Netflix or the equivalent of a couple dates out a month in the case of the dedicated server. So, cost of running isn't really an issue unless you're paying everyone to do everything for you.

Do players just feel like a server has to have donations to be any good or worth their time? If a popular server were run the exact same way without donations, would it be as popular?

[Bue]

No one works for free, especially skilled developers and administrators.

You take away tips from waiters and give them a decent salary; quality of service drops.

You take away donation from developers and administrators; quality of service drops.

Unfortunately, donations serve as a very strong incentive to perform. I've also been a part of several programs that reward performance with additional monetary and benefit gains, no matter how much you like to pretend you're not doing it for the money, it really does work.

My waiter anecdote is primarily based on my experience traveling in China versus in US, and you can definitely see the difference in countries that do tipping and others that do not.

I can't imagine non-donation servers surviving unless a Saudi prince is financing it or you're independently wealth from various tech ventures.

Furthermore, if you like to own a car or house in the US or afford heating and cooling, then say goodbye to disposable income; the $79 a month would either go into your next internet or energy bill.

And if you actually do work in the tech industry, then you most likely have to study on your own time and do additional work for your boss, factor in commuting and everyday errands and you have absolutely no time.

For the record, I used to be naive enough to believe non-donation server would actually work.

[EclipseToo]

I realize everyone wants compensation for their efforts but if a server were announced stating no donations, would that be a huge turn off for players? Do they assume that a server that doesn't have donations is run by someone unskilled?

I don't know if I've actually seen a server that doesn't accept some kind of donations, so I'm not sure how players actually react to that. I do think it's entirely possible to run a server without donations. As long as you have a non-minimum wage job, it's pretty easy to afford an extra $80 a month. I do think that you'd eventually lose motivation if there were nothing driving you (monetary compensation) to push out updates and fixes though.

Just curious how a no-donation server would fare with the RO community. If no donations is seen as a negative or not, regardless if any talented dev is willing to go through with it.

[fdro]

I know only two servers without donations. And both works for years without any donations.

* https://www.free-ro.com/ - around 10 years working without any donations.
* https://woero.net/ - around 4 years without any donations.

[Bug]

As a player, I personally don't care if a server has a donation system or not.
If it does, I'll only play if I find the rewards reasonable. Donators having a slight advantage is fine with me, when non-donators can still keep up.
But that's just me.

Can't speak for the majority on the matter, but I'm sure there are players who find merit in servers that don't take donations, assuming they're solid in other regards.
Off the top of my head, I know Origins RO doesn't have a donation system.

[Bue]

@Bugs; Origins is running on an Intel Xeon E5-1650, 64GB ECC RAM, and 2TB RAID1; that is some quality production server hardware. It leads me to believe he is hosting his website and emulator on personal hardware, which means that his operating cost is low. He is smart in that he does not advertise his server's donation status anywhere on the website or forum. Debunked

@EclipseToo; Advertising a server's donation status won't be as advantageous as you think. It relies too heavily on the negative perception of a donation server, which is not a deal breaker outside of RMS discussion. Doing so, would actually lead to skepticism. Ultimately, you still need to rely on what your server actually offers. (Unless you're just asking for a friend.)

[Bug]

@Bugs; Origins is running on an Intel Xeon E5-1650, 64GB ECC RAM, and 2TB RAID1; that is some quality production server hardware. It leads me to believe he is hosting his website and emulator on personal hardware, which means that his operating cost is low. He is smart in that he does not advertise his server's donation status anywhere on the website or forum.

The second sentence of their homepage introduction "What makes us unique among private servers, other than the lack of a donation system..." doesn't count then.
I see your point though.

Ultimately, you still need to rely on what your server actually offers.

Absolutely.

[Bue]

I went to a few pages and ctrl+f donation. I guess I missed that one.

I didn't want to recurse his site with a script to search for the keywords.

Thanks for the correction.

[fdro]

Would it be possible for a server to thrive population-wise without donations? Or do players feel like donations are a necessary aspect of a server?

There are some people out there like pay2win style donations because they don't want to have to work as hard, but what about those servers that just have costumes or other cosmetic donation items? If you're not going to add anything to give donors an advantage, do you really need to add anything at all?

Just in case anyone didn't know, running an RO server is extremely cheap. It costs $11 or less to get a DDOS protected VPS at OVH and it costs a mere $79 a month for a dedicated server by them. There may be other VPS and dedicated servers out there for cheaper, but you get the point. For any person that works, this seems a trivial amount of money. That's the cost of Netflix or the equivalent of a couple dates out a month in the case of the dedicated server. So, cost of running isn't really an issue unless you're paying everyone to do everything for you.

Do players just feel like a server has to have donations to be any good or worth their time? If a popular server were run the exact same way without donations, would it be as popular?

You don't even understand how many money invested by gm's for a server with "middle" features.
Let me explain how much cost complete RO server in 2016.

1.) You need website & Design.
2.) You need to pay for forum software & forum design & plugins
3.) You need advertising.
4.) You need DDoS Protection for game-server (more then 1 ddos protected host)
5.) You need DDoS Protection for website.
6.) You need server for website.
7.) You need server for game-server.
8.) You need buy game protection.
9.) You need buy paid features for your server, like npc's, sources mods, different  in-game systems.
10.) You need pay for work for guy which will configure game-server and website hosting for you.
11.) You need pay for your second GM / third GM, and for all people in your team with who you develop a game server.


Let's count 'real price' together:

1. Website Design
-------------------
We are talking usually about FluxCP design. Average price for FluxCP design around 400-600$.

2. Forum Software
--------------------
You can select ugly free php forum software's, or you can pay license for IPB or XenForo, average price ~200$ for just forum. Then, you need some design for it, usually it cost 40-60$. So summary: around 300$ for forum.

3. Advertising
---------------
You can launch the game-server without advertising and maximum what you will reach is 10 players online. And you need always pay large amount of money for advertising. There are a several sources:

- RMS paid banners: for effective advertising you need to buy more then 2-3 banners at the same time. It will cost for you ~100$+ / mo.
- Facebook, you need around 200$ invested in each post you made for attaching more attention to your project from 60-80k people, and only around 3-5% of these number will visit your project website. So, for effective Facebook advertising you need around 400+$  / mo.
- You need cool banners for your server, average price for them around 20-30$ / banner. You need few of them for your needs.
- You should try different big advertising networks, avarage price 200+$ / mo.

Summary: 100 + 400 + 100 + 200 = ~800$ / mo you should invest in advertising.


4. DDoS Protection for your game-server
-------------------------------------------

What you should to know about ddos protection is next:
- DDoS Protected networks is lagging, and lagging very much. So you need minimum 2 different ddos protected networks at the same time for players.
- Classic (PRO) OVH DDoS Protection do not working at all. People who have real experience with ddos attacks, can confirm it.
- Average price for vps / dedi server inside ddos protected network around 50-60$ / mo. You need minimum 2 of them.
- Sure, you can buy ddos protection from s*** providers like USA based (forgot the name) where VPS with ddos protection cost around 10$ in Voxility network, but you will move out from their network very soon, because these low-end networks abused by different customers, and they always will lag.
- A normal ddos protected network which will give for just ip cost around 80-100$ / mo (usually it's cost 300$ / mo).


Summary: you need to buy stand-alone ddos protected network which will cost around 300-400$ / mo, Or And there is no warranties that your one ddos protected server will stay online without lags under ddos attack. So you need minimum 2 of them.  So, it will cost for you around 200-400$ / mo. This is just L3 - L6 DDoS Protection.

5. DDoS Protection for your website
-------------------------------------
It cost much more then simple L3-L6 ddos protection. Because ddos protected provider should protect their own network against large flood, and at the same time protect your application against attack. Average price for that is 100+$ / mo. Sure, you can try to use different CDN which protected against ddos attacks like Cloudflare, but you should to know, that Cloudflare do not protect you against L7 ddos attacks, even with captcha and cookies which they setting for your website. If someone serious will try to attack you, be sure, your website will be down.


6. Server for website
-----------------------
Why server? Because you should by yourself configure web-server env. Why? Because on shared hostings you do not have access to php / nginx config. You can't install naxsi, or you can't close all ports except 80 / 443 for visitors. Own web-hosting server with administrator is always better for security, then just simple cPanel hosting. 

Average price for web-hosting is ~10-20$ / mo. This is depends on your needs, and resources used by your website.
You need to know very good GNU / Linux to configure everything to be sure, that hackers will not hack you in 3 steps.
If you do not have these skills, you should hire a guy which know that. They will take from you around 100-200$ for one-time job.
If you do not have administration experience, you need to pay around 2x more for managed vpses or dedi servers. Which will cost for you minimum 30-60$ / mo.


7. Server for game-server.
---------------------------

First of all, you will have large community, you need good CPU & very good ssd in raid10 or ceph.
Average price for not bad server around 60-70$ / mo.
Sure, you can but s*** VPS with OVZ virtualization, for 10$ /mo, but you need disable logs, then you will lag because of another VPS'es at the same node.


8. Game Protection
--------------------

Okay, we have bought everything what we need for launching the server, then we need to buy some protection against cheaters.
Average price for that: 150 for core protection without too much protection, or around 250-300$ for full game protection.


9. Paid Features / Server Mods
--------------------------------

Average price for custom instance is 20-30$
Average price for simple script ~10$
Average price for very simple source mod ~10-20$
Average price for middle source mod ~100+$
Full server setup ~20-50$
Different Pallets ~70-100$
Different events ~15-30$
Different sprites 150$+
Different custom maps ~40$ / pcs
Patcher Design ~ 30$

Middle game-server usually have around 10-20 custom NPC's, around 3-5 middle source mods, around 20-30 simple source mods, around 3-5 custom maps, around 10-20 custom paid sprites, + patcher design.

10. Pay work for guy which will install everything for you if you do not understand at server-side & web-side.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Around 100 - 200$. Depends on your needs. People who is really skilled and know how to build for example proxy system, will ask for complete and secure server env. with monitoring, with regular backups, with advanced security patches and tips and tricks will ask around 300 - 400$ for their work.

11. Pay for sub-gm
--------------------

Usually it's depends on the gm's. If you have for example 5 gm's which working very hard, so you should give each of them 20% of profit.
More gm's less profit.



SUMMARIZE:

One Time Payment:
--------------------
1.) ~400-600$ Website Design
2.) ~200$ forum software
3.) ~200$ anti-cheap protection.
4.) ~400-500$ custom maps, scripts, npc's sprites.
5.) ~200-400$ One time payment for the guy which will setup everything for you.

Summary one time payment: ~1600-2000$ for just setting up good game-server if you have no knowledge about it.

Regular Payments / mo.
-------------------------
1.) ~800$ advertising.
2.) ~300$  DDoS Protection (website + game-server + different proxy servers)
3.) ~20-40$ managed website hosting
4.) ~60$ game-server hosting.

Regular payments / mo: 1400$
just for having good protected server with large amount of players because of advertising.


So, let me please know, if you will be owner of the project, will you make p2w items just to be in +?


Sure, a lot of people can blame me, and said i'm wrong bla bla bla.
But if you really wish to decrease the final price, you should have very large experience in everything like:
* Programming Languages & Algorithms.
* Photoshop / design / html / css / js / php
* Very large experience with administrating different servers.

If you know all of that, you can decrease price up to around 300$ / mo.
Or you can hold all eggs in the one bucket, and wait, when some hacker will come to your server and will destroy all of your eggs in the bucket, but you will pay around 60-70$ / mo. Not less then 60-70$ / mo.

[jacobo_bobo]

FDRO nipped it in the butt.

You can't expect to host a server with a "Thriving" population on a 11$ a month VPS 

You can probably handle 30-50 players on that thing but as your database and user base grows, the game will run slower and your VPS will not be able to handle the load. Database will lock up and will cause long disconnections until you move hosts.

Even a 100$ "DDoS" protected server will not host more than 100-200 players. As soon as your server hits 200 players it will become the target of massive DDoS attacks. Most of those cheap hosting companies offer up to 1-2GB DDoS protection, which...is useless..considering most attacks now-days are consistent 20GB and burst of up to 40-50 GB.

If you are on a VPS (meaning you share the machine with other users) then the hosting company will have to "let you go" because you are being targeted by DDoSers and you would be causing other users of the machine to lose access and be affected as well.

In order to be able to host a decently populated server with 300-600 players online you would need at least 250-400$ a month. Not to mention, it is not wise to host the website on the same machine as the server, so you would need another DDoS protected server for your website. (This one doesn't need to be as good as the one hosting the server what so ever, but you still need it do be DDoS protected or bye bye forums/downloads/CP/donations etc)

I don't think you can host a THRIVING private server for less than 500$ a month. With that being said, as Blue mentioned, not many people are going to dedicate 2-3 years of their life, dealing with noobs and ungrateful users for free...

Donation free server might seem appealing at first but it will end up dying after a few months..as soon as the admin loses the initial hype or finds our his server's population did not reach the levels he/she was expecting.

[blame20]

Donation free server might seem appealing at first but it will end up dying after a few months..as soon as the admin loses the initial hype or finds our his server's population did not reach the levels he/she was expecting.

How can you explain Origins RO? It's been running for years and it is a donation-free server?

[EclipseToo]

One Time Payment:
--------------------
1.) ~400-600$ Website Design
2.) ~200$ forum software
3.) ~200$ anti-cheap protection.
4.) ~400-500$ custom maps, scripts, npc's sprites.
5.) ~200-400$ One time payment for the guy which will setup everything for you.

Summary one time payment: ~1600-2000$ for just setting up good game-server if you have no knowledge about it.

Regular Payments / mo.
-------------------------
1.) ~800$ advertising.
2.) ~300$  DDoS Protection (website + game-server + different proxy servers)
3.) ~20-40$ managed website hosting
4.) ~60$ game-server hosting.

Regular payments / mo: 1400$
just for having good protected server with large amount of players because of advertising.

If you know what you're doing, and every server owner should, then it shouldn't cost nearly that much at all. I'll admit that I did forget about advertising costs which can be expensive.

Initial payments should be at most $300 for some advertisement, anti-cheating software, and IPB (optional). The rest is completely optional since many servers and players prefer not to have custom sprites/maps and scripting should be done in-house by you or your dev team.

Spoiler

-Website doesn't need to be on the level of TalonRO to get players. ggRO, LegendRO, LegacyRO, and EternityRO all had thousands of players with a pretty non-spectacular website. The goal here is simply "don't look awful, don't have grammar issues, and don't use a pre-made theme" Hell, even pre-made theme servers still sometimes have a decent population. Paying $400-$600 for a site is ludicrous, unless you just feel like wasting money.

-Forum Software can be pricey if you want to use a paid one like IPB. But then again, most pservers end up using a nulled IPB for $0 anyway. Other great forum software is free anyway. You don't have to go with IPB.

-Anti-cheat protection is a one time purchase for Harmony. All anti-cheats are pretty much not being developed or have bypasses anyway. Better off to get some custom work done here.

- Custom maps and sprites aren't really necessary for most pservers. A lot of players seem to be content with what RO already offers and there's always new kRO/iRO headgears to implement. Scripting should be done by your dev team anyway. You shouldn't be paying any third parties for work. What if something goes wrong? Will you be able to fix it yourself? Scripting is best done by your own servers devs, which may or may not require payment.

-Paying someone to set everything up for you? Again, if your server's admin is incapable of setting that stuff up, the server can't possibly last long. What if things go wrong or players ask for something new to be implemented? You don't want to be in a position where you need to keep paying people to do that stuff for you unless you just have extra money to spare.

[close]

Regular monthly payments shouldn't be more than $100 for a separate web and game server. Anything past that is optional. You can spend $15 for some RMS advertisement or $1,000's on facebook. It's too variable, but I will say that a majority of servers aren't going to be spending crazy amounts on advertisement here.

Spoiler

VPS for website that has DDoS protection: $3-$11
Dedicated Server with DDoS protection: $70-$100
Advertisement: $15-$1000 (loads of factors)
Management: $0
Again, you shouldn't be relying on a bunch of third parties to handle everything for you. It's inefficient and will cost way more than it would than just having a semi-competent admin.

[close]

So yes, if you are incapable of doing anything to set up or manage your server, it will be pricey. If you can at least understand some basic aspects of running a server, it's relatively cheap.

Even a 100$ "DDoS" protected server will not host more than 100-200 players. As soon as your server hits 200 players it will become the target of massive DDoS attacks. Most of those cheap hosting companies offer up to 1-2GB DDoS protection, which...is useless..considering most attacks now-days are consistent 20GB and burst of up to 40-50 GB.

I don't think you can host a THRIVING private server for less than 500$ a month. With that being said, as Blue mentioned, not many people are going to dedicate 2-3 years of their life, dealing with noobs and ungrateful users for free...

If it really took a minimum of $500 a month to run an RO server, then why are there so many of them popping up all the time? It's because anyone can open one and it's extremely cheap to do so. Not saying they are going to be amazing servers, but it is cheap to open a server. Making an amazing server has more to do with who is on the staff rather than how much money someone is willing to throw at contract devs. The actual resource usage of an RO server is also fairly low. You won't need ridiculous amounts of ram or processing power for 99% of servers. Even some popular servers like EternityRO ran on hardware from Soft Layer (IIRC) which would be considered weak by today's standards. You don't need anything crazy to host a server of 500 or so players. You just need to know how to properly manage storage and databases so you don't max out storage space from logging every single frivolous item used.

It's true that DDoS attacks are more common, but they've always become easier to mitigate attacks from (for the most part). I've seen attacks against OVH dedicated servers and it doesn't even phase them.

How can you explain Origins RO? It's been running for years and it is a donation-free server?

That's pretty impressive. I had forgotten OriginsRO was donation-free. I wonder if that was ever a draw for players at one point or if it's just something that's glossed over because most players don't mind basic donations. I thought at one point a donation-free server would be a huge draw since so many people complain about MMORPGs having cashing shops and micro-transactions. I guess that might not apply to RO.

I think overall, you might as well have donations since it seems most players don't mind them and, as Bue mentioned, you incentivize the dev team working harder on improving the server.

[jacobo_bobo]

The topic is referring to "Thriving population" servers...There are a lot of servers, you are right.. but only a handful with over 500 players online, which is what I consider a thriving server.

I checked out originRO and i saw it only has 30 players online +33 auto traders, IMO that is not a thriving population. The server has been alive for over a year if I'm not mistaken and still doesn't have a large population. The content of the server is all, as the server name claims, original...which means there aren't a lot of customizations done to the server. A server like this can be hosted at a minimal monetary cost and I don't see the owner coming up with extensive customizations either. So the time-dedication is probably not that high either.

Anyone can make a mediocre server for a low cost, or even for free..I was under the impression this discussion was for a "Thriving" server population.

[Minabe]

Doing Tripper's job.

[Bug]

The topic is referring to "Thriving population" servers...There are a lot of servers, you are right.. but only a handful with over 500 players online, which is what I consider a thriving server.

I checked out originRO and i saw it only has 30 players online +33 auto traders, IMO that is not a thriving population. The server has been alive for over a year if I'm not mistaken and still doesn't have a large population. The content of the server is all, as the server name claims, original...which means there aren't a lot of customizations done to the server. A server like this can be hosted at a minimal monetary cost and I don't see the owner coming up with extensive customizations either. So the time-dedication is probably not that high either.

Anyone can make a mediocre server for a low cost, or even for free..I was under the impression this discussion was for a "Thriving" server population.

Because servers with such large populations (500+) are the exception nowadays, let's call these "Booming" populations, and redefine "Thriving Server Population," just for the sake of this discussion. Say, the average number of online (non-autovender) players is always above 100, the majority of players are likely to stay because they're happy playing the server, and as a result the server population is in a state of growth.

I also agree Origins is not thriving, but disagree about the time dedicated to developing it.
"Just like official servers did, we'll be adding features and content little by little..." They have to manually implement each Episode every couple of months.

Like said there is no way to change the emulator to run episode 1, 2, 3 etc... It doesn't have settings to switch which Ragnarok episode you want to use. If you want to set a certain episode on Renewal of the New World, you would have to edit out the NPC's/quests/skills/everything just to match that episode, if you're using something below the New World/Renewal you'd have to make your server settings PRE-RE and take out the according NPC's/quests/skills/everything to match the episode you want to use. A lot of it is as simple as commenting out NPC's/items.

Simple, but still a lot of work.