Such a shame

[wontonese]

I have been RO for over 8 years and have played on iRO for several years before i made the transfer to private servers. Luckily i came upon nlRO and stayed there for a very long time making good friends but alas like all servers one day, it shut down only because the Admin got married and had a baby and such haha. Now i am one of the people who linger from server to server searching for a good one to stay and i must say i am afraid it will not happen again. There are just too many servers that have imba items or to low of a pop. rate. It is a pity to see this and i wish these servers would die so that they would stop wasting money and the little amount of players that they have can find a different server to hopefully form a big one. Although variety amongst us is always good. There are just to many servers that are waiting to die. I don't see how the Admins of these servers can put up with such a dead server. For that i feel sorry for you and hope you become wise to shut down your server and join the ranks of those looking for a good one, because truthfully 90% of the servers i see are either going to die, or have a small population but the players are GM supported. This is just my rant on the shame of what RO servers has become to me.

[yC]

I think a 50% cut to the current number of servers will not even do the job.  There's about 1 server opening when 1 is about to close.  Plus the amount of "zombie servers" those that you refer to as "waiting to die" the number isn't decreasing from the look of the current trend.

This should be in server discussion.  We don't have a solution though, just hope they die if you are hopeful.  Ask yourself what do you think you will see in 5 yrs?  Will there be fewer servers? more servers? or no server at all?

[wontonese]

Haha my apologizes i didn't realize i put this in the wrong section. Well in 5 years i think the number of "zombie" servers shall be reduced but only slightly as there are many people who still love and play RO and hope to form their own server making it the way they dreamed of. Even then, i wouldn't so called say that the number of dead servers pose as a problem i just the admins would understand that their just wasting their time running it and that the low number of players that they have should simply go to a different more lively server.

[Saru]

I've been having the same issue as you.  For every one server that has a decent population and some history of stability, there are tens of servers that have a population that consists mainly of staff and maybe a few of their friends and all they have to promise is, "If you join, then maybe we'll get more people!"  Fair enough, but if I join I could also be wasting my time like I did on many other servers.  It's nice to see certain servers not trying to do "something different" and they have a respectable population to show for it, but those populations are drained by the amount of "I REFUSE TO DIE" servers.

Heck, I even have had the urges to make my own server just because the hunt for something nice is such a pain, but then I can't play and lets face it; my server would just be another worthless server waiting to die, as well.  This is also ignoring the fact that my knowledge of Ragnarok is vastly limited (despite having played since iRO Beta) due to always preferring the social aspects.

[Smoke]

Maybe if rAthena becomes less 'noob' friendly they'll die out.

[aluze]

On new servers, owners realise that theres not enough players on their server and shut them down in a month
Theres just not any enough playerbase to keep the servers worth running.