So, Novaro is gone. What next?

[Sachimi]

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.

Receipts? I missed this drama.

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.

I'm pretty sure a lot of servers had corrupt owners who stole donations, but okay.

Wake up. RO is not a job. Stop seeing this game with money eyes. This is the problem with greedy and corrupt admins like you, Seiren, Boreas, [ADM]Loki/GM Cronwell/Rebelo, Lord J, Cookie etc.

It takes as much time to do (as an admin or owner) as a real job. Sometimes more, depending on your level of involvement. When I was an admin on Eternity, I would spend an average of about 12-14 hours per day online doing my job. Granted, I was doing admin AND regular GM work due to someonewhoshallnotbenamed causing the staff to leave, but still. I was not paid, and didn't ask to be until the players themselves brought it up.