That's a very interesting topic.
First about GM playing their own server. Well I play on my server so I think that gives you where I stand on that, but I'll say that it's not easy. It is very hard to appear fair (and appearing fair and being fair is not the same thing, obviously both are wished for). If you join a guild you are exposing yourself to accusation of favoritism. If you party with people you may make other players jealous. Players will treat you differently because you're gm, either hate you because you're the 'authority' or try to befriend you because of what you are and not who you are, both are bothersome obviously. If you punish someone you are friendly with and punish someone you are enemy with, even if it's the same punishment for the same crime, both will appear very differently to players. They are quick to draw the wrong conclusions, to blame bias or favoritism, etc. So I think a gm can play on their own server, but expect drama, expect that you'll have to put up with players bugging you, expect that you'll have to do self-sacrifice sometimes for the better good of the server.
Now regarding playing on other servers, I think that's fine in itself. Over there you're just another player, so you can't be accused of doing anything corrupted/unfair so in that regard there's no problem. I've had players come up to me and tell me they are GM on other servers. It weirded me out a little at first honestly, but if they were there to steal stuff I guess they wouldn't have told me who they were, plus they are from high rates and my server is low rate.
About your concern of "inspiration" and "plagiarism", now comes a tricky line to draw and everyone in this community may come to give their opinion but there is no real 1 good answer, I certainly don't claim to have "the" answer either, but I can give my opinion on the matter.
Well, the first thing one could do is talk to the admin/gm of the server they play on. Explaining who they are and from what server, and asking nicely if they could inspire themselves from X idea and make something of their own with X details. If worded maturely and precisely, chances are the admin of the other server might agree. If it's something they care deeply about and very specific and original they might not however. Example: I have a mining system on my server. I did not copy this from any server, I wrote the script myself. If someone comes and ask me if they can inspire themselves from it and make their own mining, I'll tell them to go right ahead. I didn't invent the concept of mining, there's mining in many other games outside of RO. But if they wanna copy a really deep unique storyline quest, then I'll be more reluctant, but asking is still always better than just stealing, worse you can get is a No.
About copyright, I think I read somewhere (on eA actually I think) that you have to modify over 30% of something to call it your own. You have to make enough modifications so that it becomes something new, and not just something copied. That's probably kinda hard to rate however.
About EDP from 400 to 300, I'd say that's fine personally.
Mini-game is more icky, if it's very unique I'd say its NOT ok to copy without permission.
Custom class such as Jedi/Sith, I'd say it's ok to make new classes of Jedi/Sith, but you'd have to make your own sprites (unless one is publicly released) and give them skills/bonus stat that you thought of yourself, not go on the server and copy every single aspect of their custom class.
Personally, I'd say that yes, I did inspire myself from other servers I've seen before. But I wouldn't say that I'm guilty of plagiarism. On the top of my head things that were taken elsewhere...
- Fishing system I had seen on other server I played before (xero), but I created my own script, with different types of fish and my own quest and such.
- Rewarding donation with chance items I had seen on a previous server (ultimaro), but it's not something that I would deem "copyrightable".
- "4 knights" quest, something I read about on Rune, made for Usako's server, I didn't go read up on what they actually made with the concept, I'm writing my own stuff from that general idea (it only mentioned something about monster with knights in their name).
- "Minesweeper event", (from xero too), it's an event they hosted often, where novices have to avoid marine sphere, I'm tweaking the idea and I'm making my own script for it.
I'll admit I surf other RO server's page on regular basis, I read on what other servers offer, their custom feature, I look at their donation rewards and gears they have, I check what makes them unique and try to ponder if I could derive any interesting ideas for my server from what I see. I do that with other games too actually, I've seen an interesting feature in another MMO and I'm in the process of adding it to my ro server in my own way. I think inspiration is a fine thing, very few people have truely original ideas, most are derived from other things, transformed, improved, evolved but still not completely new.
The problem is that some people are just thief, unwilling to do their own work, just taking and copying. How many topic have we seen on this forum regarding website theft? At least 5 that I can recall, some noob had just stolen a whole website and changed the name of the server, talk about lazy.. >_< I think most people can draw the line over what is stealing and what isn't, and if not we usually hear about it in drama threads here XD
