[Shenglong]

Not entirely the same thing, but somewhat related: I used to run the largest Ragnarok Online private server for its time, and this AMA is really nostalgic. Well, except how great their community seems to be.

All throughout running a server, I asked myself whether the community was unbecoming (not just towards us, but towards each other), or whether we (and the servers before us) were just doing a terrible job at fostering a positive environment. A few years after we shut down our server, I heard a rather famous League of Legends player had started a private RO server, and a few months later, heard that he flipped out and told the community to f--- off, shutting the server down.

It's hard for many people to imagine a community more "toxic" than in League, so I had just figured, perhaps the failure wasn't our fault. Reading the comments in this AMA really makes me think though, that there was actually a solution, and we had just failed in community management.

My words of wisdom here: lots of people focus on product development, but the community is often just as, if not more important; don't neglect it.

[clevernickname]

I played on Nostalrius for a bit. The sense I got was that the community was mostly populated by older people (by internet gaming community standards, at least) who quit WoW years ago and wanted to relive the experience. So the baseline of maturity was a bit higher than average, and people got along well. On top of that, while there were various 4chan/reddit/insert-notorious-community-here guilds, they mostly kept to themselves outside of world PvP.

I played a tiny bit of RO back in the day, and instead got the impression that the community was mostly populated by teenaged anime fans, so of course the baseline for maturity was lower. And with the way the web was so much more fragmented back then, most of the kinds of people that today would make a thread in a notorious community saying "hey there's a new private server launching, anyone wanna start a guild?" would instead have to be obnoxious in the in-game chat until they found like-minded people.

I wouldn't beat yourself up too much wondering about how you could have done things differently, because at the end of the day the intrinsic appeal of certain games to certain demographics has by far the greatest effect on what kind of community will develop around it, and if you're making a direct clone of an existing game, your hands are obviously tied. In all likelihood, it was out of your control from the moment you turned the server on.

[giancarlostoro]

I ran a Private Server for another game, community is definitely key. If your community has respect for your team they will overlook issues that arise so long as they are handled properly, and of course even better than that, they will invite their friends.