07-15-2023, 08:24 AM
Like you said yourself, let's get real here.
Marketing Woes/Neglecting Newbies/Don't play the "Old Game" Card/Lost and Confused
This reality is that you will barely be able to attract new players to this game. I don't know how you sold these guys to Last Chaos, but you probably sugarcoated it by a lot to get them interested.
You can't market LC like it's your own game that you made from scratch, LC Private Servers are by default illegal and this fact didn't change over these last years. How do you expect this game to be marketed? Saying it's the best of the best technology? That would of course be a lie and not the truth. Great community? Not really. A lot of players? Nope. The Server has been running for a while and will be running for a while? 99% of the times that's a no too.
There isn't a thing for you to advertise and actually hook people with except for that this game has a very "loyal" community to the game itself, but not for any specific server. The closest thing to a loyal community for a specific server would have been GN02 by wizatek. But even wizateks server wasn't newbie friendly, even for people experienced with the game. It was a very customized Server, to such a extend that it actually hurt the server because people would have never even bothered playing it.
Attracting new players to the game is very hard and making them stick to game is even more, no kind of marketing will land you that many people if they actually know the reality of Private Servers, the Community, the Game etc.
Embracing Change and Innovation
This won't work because of two reasons.
The community:
The community is very firm about what they want a server to look like and what it should do and shouldn't do. If you stray too far you simply won't be able to get any players at all. One good example of this would be "Ash Last Chaos". They actually did some new stuff with the game, for example you had more of a "skill tree" instead of just learning all the skills and so forth. They made some changes that no one else tried before them. Did it work? nope. Why? It was too much for the community and barely anyone gave a damn about it. They had a relatively big teamn from what I remember but their server still failed in the end. Making it even more customized wouldn't have helped them out either because that's just how this community is.
The developers/teams behind the server:
The amount of people that can actually develop a Last Chaos Private Server is already very slim. If you now only count the people that actually know what they are doing, except for all the wannabe devs like Joker and such, then you barely have a handful of people that can create something. To create whatever you are dreaming of you need actual professionals that can improve the game and it's flaws but you won't find these people making anything like that with the game.
Why? It's simply not worth it. This all goes back to this all being not legal at all and the community being as small as it is for private servers. I myself am a software developer that learned the basics because of this game and actually made developing stuff my profession. Back when I started I also always thought "oh man if I could do my own Servers they'd be so great and I'd put in so much work!" but the realtity is that there is not a single reason to make a private server for people like me that are as innovative as you want them to be. This isn't something you can put on your portfolio properly, but something you want to hide from the world.
The money you'd recieve is also not life changing, especially if you have a team that you are sharing the income with. Doing it for the sake of creating a server that the community likes is of course a reason for some, but your soul will be crushed as soon as the first people finished most things to do on your server. By then you essentially have to work full time on this illegal thing you created and need to neglect everything else, otherwise your server will be empty when the 15th Server by Joker arrives next week.
Finding a team that can actually cover all of this and actually make sense of it all is basically impossible. This game isn't large enough to attract people like that anymore either, you'd have to look at other games like Metin2 for this. There you'd find skilled enough people that actually are risking their livelihood for a illegal private servers.
Also, barely anyone in LC is "pouring their heart" into a server. A bunch of people just create a server, change a few things here and there and call it quits. Server opens, they get like 10k from it and then it's rinse and repeat. Why innovate when you can literally just do this and have a "infinite money glitch"? You won't find that many pure hearted people in this "development community" as you might think. People just buy a few system from people like RomeoST, Russian, Gustavo and then buy maps from people like Revenge or Sickness. Put them into the game, change some stuff and add a few items and that's most servers these days.
Fostering a Welcoming and Inclusive Environment[/b]
I don't know how you want to even accomplish that if even multi-million companies can't do this lol. Take for example League of Legends. It's one of the most toxic communities in gaming and even riot can't do much about it. Sure, you can get banned for saying some bs, but this won't change anything. You can get muted, it won't change anything.
In LC you also can't just get rid of "cliques". What you are essentially doing with this is removing 1/4 of your server if you remove just a single "clique".
I tried my best not to say stuff that /index.php?/profile/394-sickness/&do=hovercard" data-mentionid="394" href="/index.php?/profile/394-sickness/" rel="">@Sicknessalready mentioned here, but this is just the reality of the game. Your "ideal" private server is a fantasy that you can only dream about but not achieve. You won't be seeing these things on private servers, what you want is not feasible because of all stuff we just said and there is probably still so much we haven't covered yet. All of these things are just facts that you can't change in this environment.