[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.