So, Novaro is gone. What next?

[Felione]

It has already been a few good months since the closure, and no one has truly stepped forward to be the replacement. I have yet to see a comparable experience, a bustling community, a thriving market, and a heavily involved staff. I understand this takes years to develop, but it seems every server I look at, is trying to be it's own, but no one is actually working towards a balanced experience, with activities to perform on a daily basis, or something to involve the community on a mass scale. I just see a bunch of restrictions, some strange rates, and nerfs to items, which I assume is to stabilize the zenny value early?

A lot of server owners must've been leeched to the highest level, and hopped servers forever, because their lack in understanding of how to mold a community is deafening. I'm pretty sure we are mostly fully developed adults at this point, but it seems part of the social development was ignored for many of these communities. Why is this so common? and why are all the staff so unaware of how to structure an interactive society? It really does make me believe that all of these other servers were created as an earning device, and simply become rebooted once they fail.

As laughable as it sounds, Talonro, although mismanaged, HAD (not anymore) a handle on their community for a long time. I experienced it myself, and I dedicated time to this community, trying to involve what few I could, because I believed it was worth investing time into that current state of the server. So, how is it, that a P2W server, with literal MVP cards in their shop, succeeded to mold a better community than most of these other servers? Boreas was NOT a kind and forgiving owner, he was quite ignorant, and I'm sure not much has changed, but the community had something to do besides HATE their owner, and I believe this is the biggest problem right now. Servers are appearing, with nothing but basic changes, or some reconstructed settings which offer little to no coordination with anyone. We are being fed nothing but scraps, and are told to live with it, or rather, accept it as it is, because so much work is being put into it. It's such a silly statement to make.

Muhro, as close to Novaro as it is, is actually nothing like it. After much discussion, and having spent months there, I can see that they are least TRYING to keep people interested, and communicating with their community like no other server in our short history. It is probably the most acceptable alternative, and it saddens me to say, because I was excited for the closure of Novaro, I saw it as a new beginning to something greater. It's very hard to down tone their effort, but their staff is very small in comparison, so struggling to put out an update must be stressful on their part, but they are doing it, and along the way, the community is HEAVILY involved in their decisions. Unfortunately, it's still just a shadow of how great it can be, but it's their choice to be this way, and if people are happy there, then I'll be happy for them.

As for the others? I'm dumbfounded and lacking words to describe how my 12 year old self could succeed in what they can barely understand. It is far too shocking to realize that there is nothing better, and no one attempted to claim these players for themselves, KNOWING the server would close immediately after the first claim was revealed. They had months in advance, and it was a late closure for what it should have been originally, and not ONE person thought this was an opportunity to secure probably the most involved community since iro. Truly a disappointing reality.

If I can lend server owners some advice? it is to stop thinking about yourself. YOU, liking your own server will not convince anyone of joining. Talk to your communities, involve them personally, and implement what they desire, while keeping your overall idea of what the server should be. One thing that Nova did right, was actually make changes to content he released, simply to appease his community. He was not happy with the changes, but the reward was praise and loyalty, and most importantly, respect for being capable of toning down an idea for the sake of your community. It doesn't matter how much experience you think you have, or how many years you invested into your product, what matters is the response of your community, and your reaction. Do something great for them, and reconsider your original desire of what the server should be, or you'll just end up playing it alone.

If anyone has any thoughts regarding this, please share them, and pass this on, because the last thing we need is a google shop full of irrelevant and broken products, multiplying and congesting what is supposed to be the primary portal for our childhood activity, which we dearly loved and enjoyed.

Thank you for reading, and have a wonderful night.

[Sairek Ceareste]

If the solution seems so simple for you, why not try working on your own? Is there something stopping you?


You might end up liking working on one and it could end up being a big success. Or at the very least, grant you some insight on the difficulties behind making and running a server.

[2k2]

Like many people has said in recent topics here and Reddit: The RO community deserves this sh*tty limbo we're currently in with ZERO decent servers to play. The casuals blindly following or ignoring blatant corruption or toxicity/narcissism from server owners is what caused all this in the first place.

You gave the perfect example of a server with such situation: TalonRO/Talon Tales; where both server owners (Seiren and Boreas) are dirty and corrupt as f***, getting exposed multiple times with their shady activities, protecting big donators, allowing a group to actively RMT, providing @item2 to this same group and trying to shutdown anyone talking or digging anything related to this. And just like you said, they're not good people either, they're both known for their toxicity, arrogance and passive-aggressiveness, all traits of narcissism. You can blame all this on casual players that just blindly ignore all this just to have a server they can call "home", despite knowing a lot of really bad things happens behind the scenes. Even worse when these blind casuals keeps donating to the corrupt narcissists. Seiren openly protected the biggest donator on Talon when he was caught using nodelay and banned dozens of players for exposing the videos and screenshots on discord (after being ignored on report tickets) just to not ban the cheater. The entire Talon community witnessed the drama at the time, the evidences (before their staff team desperately tried to erase everything), and still just shrugged it and continued to play like nothing happened and the staff was a bunch of good people. Threads were created on Reddit at the time exposing all the stuff regarding this and guess what? Seiren contacted the moderators of RO sub asking them to delete the threads to "protect their image" and the moderators obliged. This was when I saw the RO community in general deserves to get sh*tted on because the people in responsible roles are actively defending one another's dirty, also the reason why I never interacted with that sub.

Midgard Legends is another good example of this, where the entire community exposed that server's admin for his lies, previous history of corruption, ties with RMT guilds/schemes, and players still playing there despite all the drama with the ADM and p2w guild exploiting major bugs.

Origins' team is the only and last hope for this game and community.

[ADM Ornstein]

In my humble opinion, after 20 years of RO, I believe server staff has a good path ahead to properly develop a custom project. I believe this is the path RO should go for.

RO is a great game, but clearly flawed. Everyone knows its flaws and most people don't want to work on these issues. Sometimes the players themselves don't want changes as they are either afraid of whats new and different, or prefer to focus on nostalgia.

I started Return to Morroc with the idea of providing "new blood in an old game", new ideas, good or bad while paying respects for the original and attempting to modernize it. I 100% believe this path could be take by other ADMs/GMs to try and build what Gravity and others did in the past.

NovaRO was a strong server, regardless of issues, in providing high quality content, adaptation and changes. It was very distant from vanilla RO and was special in it's own way.

But maybe it's time for highly customized projects that have a vision and path to shine. For new ideas to be built and to improve/modernize upon the games flaws and respect the player's time (for example, Cards are a key feature of the game...and for some people spending 10+h farming a monster for it means difficulty...for me its a time sink that doesn't respect the player and makes most slotted lower level items/cards useless...while you could provide cards for them to gear up on the way to end game and try stuff out.)

While very few are currently trying to go for it (and only Return to Morroc is currently going for the full remake idea), I hope we can see more, -POLISHED-(Key word) custom projects with a strong sense of progression and ideas, as long as the game has a good vision and quality, it can be the next step in RO privates.

Or we can spend the next 10 years looking for WoE servers while killing thara frogs for 5 days so a card drops and we can actually try to have some semblance of fun.

[dahman]

Origins' team is the only and last hope for this game and community.

"Help us ObiWanKreuzBubi, you are our only hope"

but i guess oRo will not open anytime "soon" 

[Playtester]

I'm curious what you think it is that NovaRO had that the existing servers are lacking.

You wrote a long post, but the only information I got from it was "NovaRO was good at holding the community together and all other servers are lacking this feat", but this doesn't really tell me what other servers should do that they are currently not doing.

I will also mention a few things to consider here:

1. Even if someone had the abilities to create a server just like NovaRO, they would probably not want to face the same fate, so the motivation to invest effort into this is kinda low. The most talented are almost always also the most hesitant (they know what they don't know), especially since they could just use their talent for something else that doesn't risk them getting sued.

2. People who join low-mid rate servers that are new are mostly people who enjoy the PVP competition to rush to the max. These people are naturally very competitive and are often perceived as toxic and/or rude. And thus the server's community might be perceived as "not holding together" too. And new servers who try hard not to cater to these competitive players exist by the way, it's just that they have only 5-30 active players max and so you probably don't hear much about them.

3. Communities change over time. It's not that now that NovaRO closed there's 2000+ players waiting for a similar server. From all the people I talked to I think that at least 70% quit RO altogether (for now) and a few (like 10-15%?) even felt forced to move to official servers now.

I suffered this realization already years ago when EternityRO closed. As a casual PVM low rate player who just wants to find new people, introduce them into the casual play style, and have some fun killing goblins with a level 40 party together, there was simply not the community for this anymore. Not enough casual players remained, many already saw everything and were not interested in such an experience anymore, and not enough completely new players started playing the game to fill the gap. It's not like no server owner was able to make a server with the structure of EternityRO anymore and more like there was simply not the community anymore to make such a server.

[Tokeiburu]

Yeah I wouldn't praise NovaRO too much if I were you. No one in the staff had the same vision you're referring to. GMs were fighting over literally everything and disliked one another. All the time was spent on useless suggestions that only catered to a single player and we'd spend several hours discussing it. Nova kept taking bad decisions after being told on multiple occasions it was a bad idea, so much drama could have been prevented.

What custom changes did you like? I recall numerous forum threads complaining about those changes and the staff ignoring them, creating even more drama on top. Thankfully players never saw the first drafts of those custom changes because they're stuff of nightmares.

You mention a bunch of weird restrictions... NovaRO had that too? Every new reward system had a weird gimmick to it. Party share system with drop rates adjusted by party size. A party drop system with a different drop rate system that I can't recall, and I believe there was yet again another party drop system on top. Think about the Shadow Gear system... what a mess. And then there was the infamous Purified Knight Shield system, good lord. It's just as bad as everywhere else, if not worse actually.

Custom content? Well, if you can call Monster Hunter releasing a new boss fight every 2~3 years good custom content, then this is a lost cause. And those bosses weren't even fun, it was just annoying after the first time. The mechanics were being spammed so much that you couldn't even deal damage to the boss.

Custom instances? Those were fun, but *apparently* players preferred field maps instead. So the original plan of releasing a custom instance every one to two months was cancelled in favor of more field maps. Don't worry, this makes as much sense to you as it does to me.

Dedicated staff? Err... maybe in the beginning of the server, but it definitely wasn't the case later on. We had three meetings a week, and everyone would disappear the moment those meetings were over, not to be seen until the next meeting. The Sunday meetings were also dedicated to player suggestions, so in reality we only had two meetings. And for clarity, people rarely worked outside those meetings so that's why everything was moving at a snail's pace. The same behavior happened for the GMs in-game. They had a quota for running events, so once that was done, they couldn't log off any faster. I wouldn't call that very dedicated. Plus, the regular GMs weren't exactly allowed to take part into the real discussions anyway.

The community? Well this one is bitter sweet for me. It's good of you to compare the community with TalonRO because when I was interacting with my GM, I was copying what I liked from my experience on TalonRO after all. I was just goofing around in-game, had fun interacting with players, ran events on the spot and talked with players some more while answering their questions. Honestly, I was just having a good time, I was even actively playing the server with my silly named characters. There were other GMs following this pattern and together, we all had a blast with the players.

But behind the scenes was a different story altogether. We were being told to "be more serious/professional", that our events should be made into bot-like automated events instead, that we shouldn't resize players anymore, that we shouldn't run more than X events per hour, that we shouldn't give too many rewards, etc. Meanwhile, those GMs were being treated poorly (me included) by the other admins in the staff Discord. Most of them left after fighting/arguing with Nova. Those fights were quite ugly too. I still remember consoling and trying to stop them from leaving the team.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, it's probably best to keep most of it hidden from the players to keep the "good image" of NovaRO. In my opinion, it would be quite easy to make a better server (and I most certainly don't want to take any part in this anymore, never again).

But, I'll give you that, NovaRO was a great server in its first ~5 years.

[Blinzer]

In my humble opinion, after 20 years of RO, I believe server staff has a good path ahead to properly develop a custom project. I believe this is the path RO should go for.

RO is a great game, but clearly flawed. Everyone knows its flaws and most people don't want to work on these issues. Sometimes the players themselves don't want changes as they are either afraid of whats new and different, or prefer to focus on nostalgia.

I started Return to Morroc with the idea of providing "new blood in an old game", new ideas, good or bad while paying respects for the original and attempting to modernize it. I 100% believe this path could be take by other ADMs/GMs to try and build what Gravity and others did in the past.

NovaRO was a strong server, regardless of issues, in providing high quality content, adaptation and changes. It was very distant from vanilla RO and was special in it's own way.

But maybe it's time for highly customized projects that have a vision and path to shine. For new ideas to be built and to improve/modernize upon the games flaws and respect the player's time (for example, Cards are a key feature of the game...and for some people spending 10+h farming a monster for it means difficulty...for me its a time sink that doesn't respect the player and makes most slotted lower level items/cards useless...while you could provide cards for them to gear up on the way to end game and try stuff out.)

While very few are currently trying to go for it (and only Return to Morroc is currently going for the full remake idea), I hope we can see more, -POLISHED-(Key word) custom projects with a strong sense of progression and ideas, as long as the game has a good vision and quality, it can be the next step in RO privates.

Or we can spend the next 10 years looking for WoE servers while killing thara frogs for 5 days so a card drops and we can actually try to have some semblance of fun.

it's been 10 years and i still don't think the world is ready

it might never be

[charlielovesu]

As a server owner who can be fully transparent about some of your complaints about the scene, I'll try to give as much insight and honesty as I can.

The reality is, that running a server's community is the most taxing part of it. 1 to 5 people cannot manage this and its not even remotely possible.

People want the following:

1.) New Content or events pumped out constantly
2.) Bug Fixes promptly since it hampers their experience
3.) Community driven activity and engagement.
4.) Proper moderation of cheating and toxicity both in game AND in discord.
5.) Server stability
6.) Ideally, good server balance in terms of managing the economy and players feeling good about logging in.


And they want you to manage all these things out of the kindness of your heart while you make sure the server isn't P2W in any aspect. You WILL be criticized even for tradeable costumes, and god forbid you even consider anything beyond that.

NovaRO (and TalonRO) are extremely successful because they had predatory financial models and were treated like a business. You can't have your cake and eat it too basically.

In order to do all of the above you need a very large staff of extremely skilled people and you need to know you can trust ALL of them. Because even a single corrupt person and it starts to get dicey. Speaking from experience, any time I even give someone new I don't know that well a chance it never ends well and I end up regretting it.

Finding talented people willing to work for basically nothing or next to nothing who are also trustworthy is essentially impossible to near impossible. Those that ARE trustworthy and extremely talented (they exist) tend to be spread out over their own servers.

The people who are talented in this community are few and far between and tend to (righfully) be invested in their own projects.

This means the people who are left who are talented enough to help you manage the server are likely either not trust worthy or are not going to work for free. (which is absolutely fair, no one should have to if they aren't willing)

NovaRO made a s*** ton of money and Nova could afford talent like Tokei to help run his server for him in a top notch way.


If you aren't willing to have a predatory or p2w model though its extremely difficult to make enough money to really pay everyone. I personally can afford to pay my partner and fund the server myself as a hobby, but expecting much more than that is unlikely. I could probably afford one more top tier dev if I felt it was really worth it, but I would probably be going into the red at that point for the sake of the server. (which isn't a bad thing, it would be worth it for the right dev)

At the end of the day, I think every server admin group really wants to have a bustling community. We'd love it. We all know what it takes, we just don't have the resources without selling out. And many of us just aren't willing to. I'd say our server is actually really successful compared to the vast majority, and even I'd say we don't make that much money at the end of the day. Not to warrant the kind of staff you are talking about that Nova had.


TLDR = to build a great community you need people, people do not often work for free, and servers simply do not make enough money.

[Zulf]

If I can lend server owners some advice? it is to stop thinking about yourself. YOU, liking your own server will not convince anyone of joining.

Yeah, nah. Motivation is needed to work on server development (unless you treat your server as a business, and that will also burn you out quickly).

Origins' team is the only and last hope for this game and community.

The amount of hate we get for just existing doesn't show us that.

[Seb]

In my humble opinion, after 20 years of RO, I believe server staff has a good path ahead to properly develop a custom project. I believe this is the path RO should go for.

RO is a great game, but clearly flawed. Everyone knows its flaws and most people don't want to work on these issues. Sometimes the players themselves don't want changes as they are either afraid of whats new and different, or prefer to focus on nostalgia.

I started Return to Morroc with the idea of providing "new blood in an old game", new ideas, good or bad while paying respects for the original and attempting to modernize it. I 100% believe this path could be take by other ADMs/GMs to try and build what Gravity and others did in the past.

NovaRO was a strong server, regardless of issues, in providing high quality content, adaptation and changes. It was very distant from vanilla RO and was special in it's own way.

But maybe it's time for highly customized projects that have a vision and path to shine. For new ideas to be built and to improve/modernize upon the games flaws and respect the player's time (for example, Cards are a key feature of the game...and for some people spending 10+h farming a monster for it means difficulty...for me its a time sink that doesn't respect the player and makes most slotted lower level items/cards useless...while you could provide cards for them to gear up on the way to end game and try stuff out.)

While very few are currently trying to go for it (and only Return to Morroc is currently going for the full remake idea), I hope we can see more, -POLISHED-(Key word) custom projects with a strong sense of progression and ideas, as long as the game has a good vision and quality, it can be the next step in RO privates.

Or we can spend the next 10 years looking for WoE servers while killing thara frogs for 5 days so a card drops and we can actually try to have some semblance of fun.

Rtm was definitely fun, but for some players (me included) it strays too much from what ro was, and from what I expect from a mmorpg. There are no real support classes (kingslayer might be the closest to one), so almost every class focuses on dmg, and 95% of content is done with the mindset of it being soloable, trying to emulate darksouls type of games.

While thats the cup of tea of some people, and what seems to be "popular" nowadays, with many games copying dark souls formula, some people still enjoy games with defined classes and strenghts (like vanilla ro,wow,ffxiv) where you have classes centered on support,tanking,debuffing,disruption,etc.

[Seb]

As a server owner who can be fully transparent about some of your complaints about the scene, I'll try to give as much insight and honesty as I can.

The reality is, that running a server's community is the most taxing part of it. 1 to 5 people cannot manage this and its not even remotely possible.

People want the following:

1.) New Content or events pumped out constantly
2.) Bug Fixes promptly since it hampers their experience
3.) Community driven activity and engagement.
4.) Proper moderation of cheating and toxicity both in game AND in discord.
5.) Server stability
6.) Ideally, good server balance in terms of managing the economy and players feeling good about logging in.


And they want you to manage all these things out of the kindness of your heart while you make sure the server isn't P2W in any aspect. You WILL be criticized even for tradeable costumes, and god forbid you even consider anything beyond that.

NovaRO (and TalonRO) are extremely successful because they had predatory financial models and were treated like a business. You can't have your cake and eat it too basically.

In order to do all of the above you need a very large staff of extremely skilled people and you need to know you can trust ALL of them. Because even a single corrupt person and it starts to get dicey. Speaking from experience, any time I even give someone new I don't know that well a chance it never ends well and I end up regretting it.

Finding talented people willing to work for basically nothing or next to nothing who are also trustworthy is essentially impossible to near impossible. Those that ARE trustworthy and extremely talented (they exist) tend to be spread out over their own servers.

The people who are talented in this community are few and far between and tend to (righfully) be invested in their own projects.

This means the people who are left who are talented enough to help you manage the server are likely either not trust worthy or are not going to work for free. (which is absolutely fair, no one should have to if they aren't willing)

NovaRO made a s*** ton of money and Nova could afford talent like Tokei to help run his server for him in a top notch way.


If you aren't willing to have a predatory or p2w model though its extremely difficult to make enough money to really pay everyone. I personally can afford to pay my partner and fund the server myself as a hobby, but expecting much more than that is unlikely. I could probably afford one more top tier dev if I felt it was really worth it, but I would probably be going into the red at that point for the sake of the server. (which isn't a bad thing, it would be worth it for the right dev)

At the end of the day, I think every server admin group really wants to have a bustling community. We'd love it. We all know what it takes, we just don't have the resources without selling out. And many of us just aren't willing to. I'd say our server is actually really successful compared to the vast majority, and even I'd say we don't make that much money at the end of the day. Not to warrant the kind of staff you are talking about that Nova had.


TLDR = to build a great community you need people, people do not often work for free, and servers simply do not make enough money.

Most of ingame corruption is easily solvable, hell, a server i gm'd for solved it easily. It showed on the control panel, in live time,  every command done by a gm (so it could be audited). Also gm accounts had a restriction (couldnt trade nor drop items).

[KickStart]

Yeah I wouldn't praise NovaRO too much if I were you. No one in the staff had the same vision you're referring to. GMs were fighting over literally everything and disliked one another. All the time was spent on useless suggestions that only catered to a single player and we'd spend several hours discussing it. Nova kept taking bad decisions after being told on multiple occasions it was a bad idea, so much drama could have been prevented.

What custom changes did you like? I recall numerous forum threads complaining about those changes and the staff ignoring them, creating even more drama on top. Thankfully players never saw the first drafts of those custom changes because they're stuff of nightmares.

You mention a bunch of weird restrictions... NovaRO had that too? Every new reward system had a weird gimmick to it. Party share system with drop rates adjusted by party size. A party drop system with a different drop rate system that I can't recall, and I believe there was yet again another party drop system on top. Think about the Shadow Gear system... what a mess. And then there was the infamous Purified Knight Shield system, good lord. It's just as bad as everywhere else, if not worse actually.

Custom content? Well, if you can call Monster Hunter releasing a new boss fight every 2~3 years good custom content, then this is a lost cause. And those bosses weren't even fun, it was just annoying after the first time. The mechanics were being spammed so much that you couldn't even deal damage to the boss.

Custom instances? Those were fun, but *apparently* players preferred field maps instead. So the original plan of releasing a custom instance every one to two months was cancelled in favor of more field maps. Don't worry, this makes as much sense to you as it does to me.

Dedicated staff? Err... maybe in the beginning of the server, but it definitely wasn't the case later on. We had three meetings a week, and everyone would disappear the moment those meetings were over, not to be seen until the next meeting. The Sunday meetings were also dedicated to player suggestions, so in reality we only had two meetings. And for clarity, people rarely worked outside those meetings so that's why everything was moving at a snail's pace. The same behavior happened for the GMs in-game. They had a quota for running events, so once that was done, they couldn't log off any faster. I wouldn't call that very dedicated. Plus, the regular GMs weren't exactly allowed to take part into the real discussions anyway.

The community? Well this one is bitter sweet for me. It's good of you to compare the community with TalonRO because when I was interacting with my GM, I was copying what I liked from my experience on TalonRO after all. I was just goofing around in-game, had fun interacting with players, ran events on the spot and talked with players some more while answering their questions. Honestly, I was just having a good time, I was even actively playing the server with my silly named characters. There were other GMs following this pattern and together, we all had a blast with the players.

But behind the scenes was a different story altogether. We were being told to "be more serious/professional", that our events should be made into bot-like automated events instead, that we shouldn't resize players anymore, that we shouldn't run more than X events per hour, that we shouldn't give too many rewards, etc. Meanwhile, those GMs were being treated poorly (me included) by the other admins in the staff Discord. Most of them left after fighting/arguing with Nova. Those fights were quite ugly too. I still remember consoling and trying to stop them from leaving the team.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, it's probably best to keep most of it hidden from the players to keep the "good image" of NovaRO. In my opinion, it would be quite easy to make a better server (and I most certainly don't want to take any part in this anymore, never again).

But, I'll give you that, NovaRO was a great server in its first ~5 years.

Tokei knows what he's talking about.
Hi Toks! (Lazarus)

The behind-the-scenes with GM work was a bit of a slog - lots to do with little reward other than donation points (In-game cash shop) as payment.
I got burned out after a few months between 2016-2017 and dropped from being a "Helper" (Sub-GM, basically, forum assistant and in-game helpdesk stuff), then came back and got dragged into being a GM for about three months in 2018 - and again got burned out almost immediately, quitting the game after.
The "Meetings" we were allowed in were few and small-scope, most discussions happened between only the owner, and a few of the admins, Tokei, etc from what I saw. We felt alienated, and when we were "included", it was for the menial tasks, like fixing script translations, NPC text, etc. Nothing we felt involved in.

My best experience on that server was playing, not being on staff - the staff scene was a mess, for sure.
Staff was also allowed to take part in WOE, iirc (Correct me if wrong) - which I was not a huge fan of, regardless of whether or not there was any shady action going on with that. Too much room for corruption and favoritism.

This is easily noted in the actions Nova took as the owner, and the eventual consequences and fallout from those actions.
He developed an all-star team administratively, no lie, but I wouldn't exactly say NovaRO was the pinnacle of private servers...

[betwixtbetween]

Emulators deserve NOTHING. kRO, jRO, twRO enjoyers eating well.

[Xellie]

Like many people has said in recent topics here and Reddit: The RO community deserves this sh*tty limbo we're currently in with ZERO decent servers to play. The casuals blindly following or ignoring blatant corruption or toxicity/narcissism from server owners is what caused all this in the first place.

You gave the perfect example of a server with such situation: TalonRO/Talon Tales; where both server owners (Seiren and Boreas) are dirty and corrupt as f***, getting exposed multiple times with their shady activities, protecting big donators, allowing a group to actively RMT, providing @item2 to this same group and trying to shutdown anyone talking or digging anything related to this. And just like you said, they're not good people either, they're both known for their toxicity, arrogance and passive-aggressiveness, all traits of narcissism. You can blame all this on casual players that just blindly ignore all this just to have a server they can call "home", despite knowing a lot of really bad things happens behind the scenes. Even worse when these blind casuals keeps donating to the corrupt narcissists. Seiren openly protected the biggest donator on Talon when he was caught using nodelay and banned dozens of players for exposing the videos and screenshots on discord (after being ignored on report tickets) just to not ban the cheater. The entire Talon community witnessed the drama at the time, the evidences (before their staff team desperately tried to erase everything), and still just shrugged it and continued to play like nothing happened and the staff was a bunch of good people. Threads were created on Reddit at the time exposing all the stuff regarding this and guess what? Seiren contacted the moderators of RO sub asking them to delete the threads to "protect their image" and the moderators obliged. This was when I saw the RO community in general deserves to get sh*tted on because the people in responsible roles are actively defending one another's dirty, also the reason why I never interacted with that sub.

Midgard Legends is another good example of this, where the entire community exposed that server's admin for his lies, previous history of corruption, ties with RMT guilds/schemes, and players still playing there despite all the drama with the ADM and p2w guild exploiting major bugs.

Origins' team is the only and last hope for this game and community.

Small correction - Threads were removed on Reddit because no private servers should have been named while all the legal hoohaa was going on.