[mumphster]

People have pirated MMO backends since.. well a long time, mainly KMMO servers. Lineage 2 and Ragnarok Online had big servers running on leaked / hacked official server code for a really long time before emulators became more practical to update with more recent game content.

[MonkeyMalarky]

Playing on unofficial Ragnarok Online servers was fun as hell back in the early 2000s. Modded economies so you didn't have to spend months grinding, modded spawn and drop rates, custom monsters and items. Crazy unstable servers that could crash at any time. 4chan level of discourse. Admins who were barely older than the players themselves. Great times!

[braden-lk]

These were fun times. The RO soundtrack was great too.

[dyeje]

Bringing back some real fond memories.

[ircop420]

I can thank Rangarok Online and Lineage 2 for teaching me Unix administration and scripting at a young age. While the eAthena project has rested, there is a fork rAthena that is still surprisingly running. The truth though is that Aegis (the official software) was stolen by an RDP hack on Gravity's servers back in the day. That was a boon to the jAthena and later eAthena projects.