You're not wrong per se, doing a collab with another server would definitely bring tons of issues on its own. I just think that opening a new server with no history will require some major thinking outside of the box if it is supposed to be successful, I don't think just having good files and taking good care of the server is going to be enough - players these days don't trust the claims of a long term server for projects they never heard of before. This is why having some known name (from a collab with older server owner) would give much of a headstart imo.

Makes sense, and I agree. I am not sure there will be any collab, not from lack of want but just due to the way the scene is. If you guys have any ideas on possibilities I would be happy to hear them.

One of the big things I want to tackle is making the server attractive for casual players and try to minimize the gap and need to rush because of the hardcore guys. Many of us have kids, work... lives, so the days of hardcore are far behind us.

I think Rebord has done some good things to combat this, and I have some additional ideas to help with it.

I am happy to hear any ideas you guys have there, the people on these forums are some other the most OG L2 guys and girls out there.

If you want to hop on Discord and chat you are welcome as well: https://discord.gg/QuZTw8pn3E

I'm so glad to see that PMFun is still alive and kicking.

To the topic at hand, i don't mean to be a party-pooper mate but i'd say no, it doesn't worth it.
The game is almost 20 years part is prime and i doubt that there are enough active players remaining to make a project like that worth it, if i had to guess i say that currently L2 have 6k-10k players max. (Again, players, not characters.)

Of course the next question is what kind of project would actually worth the effort.
Assuming you got the top notch hardware, files, software, advertising funds then comes the actual hard part, connections.

Now, lets say that you got the connections to whatever big clans remain, you got to give them a reason to join your server, if you catch my drift. And no just offering them premium account's or some donation currency will not cut it, it maybe enough for smaller clans that you want to attract down the road to boost your servers pop but you'll want to attract some bigger names especially at launch to make your server look legit. (It goes without saying that other servers will not sit idly, especially established ones.)

So its either that, which again imho it does not worth it since it'll not guarantee that you'll make even your investment money back or a hobby server, that you fund completely out of your pocket without any donations or anything that might attract some casual players.

Again i don't mean to deter you or anything, its your decision and everything just throwing my 2 cents.
I see where you are coming from and can see your love for the game but unfortunately its just too late for that.
With a strong machine and the files you currently have, you would had a really good chance ~15 years ago, that was the name of the game back then. :/

Anyway, best of luck on whatever you decide, i'm glad to see that there are still dev's who are passionate about the game and not just money.

The kind of playerw he wants are almost 50 or older and no longer put in 12 hours a day playing. Now you get a lot of young capable griefers.

I also wish you luck with the server.

I'm fairly sure it is significantly more than that. Reborn x1 at its start (which was sometimes in Fall 2024) had 10k at start, and mind you that was no dualbox server. The starting location were absolutely crowded (I mean, significantly more than any of the 2-5k servers from mid 2000s) and out of curiosity I was PMing random people and I was getting normal replies, so I do not believe there were any significant amount of bots. At the same time, Asterios has been peaking with 10k during CS hours too - the latter does have dualboxing, but even the the overall playerbase from just these two servers comfortably exceed this estimate

Maybe he's talking about the English-speaking community; then I would say it's pretty high-end of the estimated.