The MMORPG ArcheAge is closing in a few months. That’s big booty for the pirate servers for the game, which offers naval combat anyway. Events start on privately run servers and you attract professional visitors with a page that explains the differences to the pirate server to official players.
This is the situation:
Pirate servers sense an opportunity and invite ArcheAge players
What do the pirate servers do at ArcheAge? As massivelyop writes, the two best-known and largest private servers for ArcheAge will start immediately when the official servers end:
AA Classic ran a boost event over the weekend and is soliciting donations to run the servers. With your own site (via wiki.aa-classic) you want to attract players who want to switch to you from the official server.
On their own site, retail players can find out what is different in the Classic version. Some purchase items can be crafted here and the game is generally based on an older version of ArcheAge: The pirates know their customers and lure them with freely available building spaces. But you also warn: If new players come, they could be gone quickly.
The ArcheRage server has now announced a “launch event” where players can hunt a dragon. The server has 150,000 registered accounts and over 1,000 guilds. So there’s something going on.
And the pirate fights forever
Is that legal? No, not actually. Of course, such servers violate copyright laws and copyright laws, but the logic behind it is: They won’t do anything to us if they no longer offer their own game.
For many years, such servers actually tried to stay under the radar in the hope that nothing would happen to them if they didn’t advertise aggressively or promote an overly commercial orientation.
However, for some games the server providers feel so safe that they advertise and clearly have commercial intentions. Some even with the consent of the developers, although not necessarily with the blessing of the current rights holders.
In the past, however, there have been repeated attacks against private servers. The end of a large private WoW server is still legendary today:
World of Warcraft: Blizzard closes “Classic Server” Nostalrius – 150,000 active players lose their home