Are Private Servers of Ragnarok Online LEGAL?
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- Опубліковано 9 жов 2022
- This video is about whether or not private servers of Ragnarok Online are legal. Long story short: in most countries, private servers are NOT legal. It doesn't matter if they use an emulator, if they refrain from using the name "ragnarok", or even if they use classic configurations. But something can only be legal or illegal given a constitution. In other words, private servers are illegal only in countries that respect and enforce copyrights from South Korea. So, maybe in some country out there, it is not illegal to have a private server. Laws vary according to countries.
- Ігри
Official servers are a cash grab. And player who still play ro are old now they have jobs. Private server specially mid or high rate server remove the grind burden a bit. Like you can do a 9 hours job and release some stress by playing an hour in high rate server. If private servers are gone so will ro to as not everyone has the time and strength left to play for longer hours
Private servers are a lesson on how monopoly over IPs ruins quality.
95% of Servers are back, they arent scared anymore because Nova doesnt give a damn either, they lost the Case but still run NovaRO so if they dont have to stop, nobody has.
Are you sure they have lost already? I haven't heard anything about that. Usually these cases tend to drag for months, especially if Nova's strategy is to change operations elsewhere. My opinion is that it doesn't matter if Nova goes down or not, because Gravity will give up going after privates very soon. It's a pattern in their actions. But, anyway, it upsetting to think that a big server cannot last longer than Talon did.
@@gamecitizen not showing up = instant loss, thats how it works. Gravity does that because they have to otherwise they lose their Copyrights to RO. they gonna do that again in 5-10 years (if the game even survives that long)
@@Mampfie Oh, I knwo what you meant. Yeah, Nova didn't show up, but that was just to get the default judgment aside. Most of what I know about Nova's case is from reading on RateMyServer. This link actually: forum.ratemyserver.net/server-discussion/novaro-lawyered-up!/msg204149/?topicseen#msg204149
@@gamecitizenafter a long time of battling the Gravity Nova Closed down
@@EnmaMusicProductionYeah, I saw. That's a shame. Many servers ended up closing at that time, but some have reopened, with slightly different names. But it harmed the private community!
Extremely interesting topic, thanks for making the vid. I'd definitely like to see more content regarding this situation. Out of curiosity do you have any numbers regarding the profitability of private servers?
I don't. The owners of these servers would have to share it with us. We can infer based on how much Gravity gets when they win a legal case, but the last information we have about this is from 15 years ago. I think the vast majority of private servers barely make a profit, but the big ones, like Nova, definitely make a good amount, given they have many employees. That would be a very interesting topic! Maybe I will try to get in touch with previous employees in these server, people who would be willing to share the information!
@@gamecitizen Indeed, that would be an interesting line of research. I see Nova currently has a Developer Application up on their site, I wonder how much they're offering.
Wasn't there a case where the courts already ruled that gravity has no right to shut down private servers. Years ago, gravity lost the case which is what led to the prevalence of psrvs
Wow, I never heard of that. If it's true, I would love to spread the world and encourage others! For all I have researched, Gravity never lost that type of case. Do you have some idea of where can I find that information?
@@gamecitizen I read this shit ages ago on RMS forum. It was also on Wikipedia. But they may have removed it.
Jesus. I used to own a private server in 2008. I had to close it after 2 years when Gravity opened servers in Europe.
Kinda crazy that 14 years later they're still witch hunting pservs, when this whole fucking game has only ever been popular because of pservs.
Some are saying, and I agree, that Gravity is going after the private servers now to reinforce their right to the intellectual property. If they spend more years without enforcing, it might create a legal breach where some server owners can claim the owners were not enforcing their copyright, so they forfeited their right. That is the optimistic idea! Maybe Gravity will soon stop the witch hunting... The crazy thing is that Gravity barely spends money on Ragnarok and they barely have classic servers. It is even crazier when we think of how Gravity treated Euorpean players. It is unforgivable, to be honest - this is why I will NEVER recommend playing on an official European server... (And also all the good ideas that were implemented by private servers and that Gravity copied. Maybe I should make a video just about that)...
no.. xd
@@gamecitizen I can't even play iro if I want. My Eu IP get istant banned.... while eu server is run by russian in a awful way... I wish for a server that isn't a money machine of micro transactions
@@niuniuita My IP is also European. I live in the UK. So I use VPN to access both iRO and bRO (the official Brazilian server). I don't mind that the owners of the European server are russians. I mean, their company is based in Luxembourg anyway, and for all I know, they might even be living there, and they might be against the atrocious war. But I can't forget, nor forgive, how Gravity treated the European players. What guarantees that this current Russian server won't be shut down suddenly? The only good thing about official servers is the stability. So, really, when it comes to a choice between playing in the official Euroepan server and playing in a private server, I'd strongly prefer the private one. But, well, it's very much possible to have fun in any server, including the European one. Maybe I've been holding a grudge against the European server! 😅
@@gamecitizen perm vpn on? cause I tried but I get a weird error about flash or java something
There were some posts that I saw about NovaRO, that they actually pretended to work for or as part Gravity, but I never saw solid proof of that.
Maybe that was one of those triggers ?
Gravity could set some agreement with them, but I think it is not so likely. NovaRO operates iternationally, which means that Warpportal, in USA, would complain, and Warpportal has the rights to publish the game in many countries (supposedly international, as if we could consider iRO "international raganarok").
Honestly, i don't have a problem with classic or pre-renewal private servers, but can even see the good in renewal ones. The official ones have had such bad management, it's really sad to see for example iRO being so focused on cash grabbing to then make way less money than a private server that treats their players better, some will know which p.server i'm talking about. In any case, gravity makes most of its money from kRO and mainly the phone game when it comes to ragnarok, i don't think western p.servers are a real threat to them, specially when most of the popular ones focuse on classic and pre-renewal.
Yeah, I agree. Gravity sees the private servers as a problem for the intellectual property of the brand. That is the only reason. Gravity will always have iRO, because it looks nice in the documents for stock market.
the sad thing is close to all private servers that where taken down where pre-renewal a version grav not offers anywhere nowdays.as a european i have to say even the oficiel servers close down her a lot of time so there is not much differnts between ofi and privat servers
Oh, definitely, for Europe, private used to be far better than officials. The only official server I can’t recommend is the European one. Gravity treated the European players like trash. If Gravity does now what they did in the past, they will soon stop hunting down private servers, at least for a while (as long as they take NovaRO down, and they certainly will). There will be a spring after this winter for private servers!
@@gamecitizen i hope your right so i can get out of retierment and kick some butt at woe like in the good old days
I never played this mmo, however my favorite MMO was Dekaron. The first time I played it was when the company ACCLAIM had a US form of it called 2moons. It got shut down then I tried the original, Dekaron. It was a very fun experience for me and even had EXP events. Anyway, before I played the original Dekaron, I played one private server that had x10, x100, and x1000 exp servers. It even added stuff like Rebirth (prestige). It was a dead private server, but fun solo experience.
technically it isn't illegal anymore since the original source code was from the beta in 2002, intellectual property rights are only allowed to last for a maximum of 15 years (in some countries 5 to 10 years) before they are forced to become freeware, this is why games like Stalker Anomaly exist (a standalone game developed by a modding community based on Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl, Clearsky, and Call of Pripyat, which the developers of GSC Game Worlds were compelled to give their blessing to since that community was smart) and was developed a full decade after the first game.
right now all gravity (not actually gravity but rather samsung, gravity is a shadow of its former self) and warp-portal is really doing is saber rattling with empty threats and lawsuits meant to put them into bankruptcy through legal fees rather than trying to actually win the case, and samsung/warp-portal will absolutely drag this case on for years just to crush NovaRO with debts and force them to concede. i think NovaRO knows this which is why they dont seem fazed by it at all, noted by the fact that they're simply just hiring new staff & expanding to counter the legal fees.
i also have always had this odd feeling that it wasn't the playerbase who did the hacking attacks on gravity, i mean i can believe them hacking the developer servers to get a copy of the source code of the game and perhaps even the concept arts, ideas & plans, whitebox designs, gameplay features, etc. but i cant imagine them intentionally sabotaging gravity to the point of destroying everything they worked on out of spite, only for samsung to swoop in? i don't buy that. what i think happened is that samsung themselves masqueraded as one of the hacking groups that attacked gravity, corporately sabotaged them to a crippling level, then waited for them to go bankrupt before buying them outright for peanuts.
my theory for this is based on the fact that shortly after the forced acquisition the CEO and founder of gravity as well as a lot of the senior staff and developers were booted out and replaced with samsung's corporation goons. in a real-world scenario this would have never taken place since back then senior game developers were very rare and hard to find, especially online game developers, dont forget that this was in 2002 - 2003 when there were literally only a handful of mmorpg's anywhere in the world. there's no way in hell that the CEO would have allowed this to happen in the first place otherwise, gravity was his baby and ragnarok was his most ambitious work. i'm almost certain that there was some kind of foul play involved.
note that later in the future samsung through gravity would endlessly accuse the private servers of destroying ragnarok online long before any of the private servers even had the staying power to compete with the official servers directly, at ragnarok onlines peak it had hundreds of thousands of players across the world while the private servers had at best a few hundred with the best private servers having a few thousand players. its obvious that they were shifting the blame away from themselves, but what isn't obvious is that samsung likely orchestrated it to use the community as a scapegoat to allay any suspicions away from themselves.
it wasn't until the shuttering of official ragnarok servers across the world that the private servers started to grow in size, and only because the playerbase had nowhere else to go, the renewal update destroyed the foundations of the game and began the beginning of the end for gravity as the slow exodus started; and then the development of ragnarok 2 spelled the end for the franchise since it signaled to the community that development and support for ragnarok 1 was ending. with the closures of servers around the world every few months, the future looked bleak. the most hardcore communities tried their best to keep the strongest ragnarok servers alive with Ragnarok Singapore, Ragnarok Malaysia, and Ragnarok Philippines being some of the last servers to shutter in 2021 despite still having strong communities due to gravity (samsung) blindsiding their publishers on the contract renewals. in the end the private servers didn't do anywhere nearly as much damage as gravity itself did, and i believe that samsung is the culprit behind it all.
of course for any of this to be proven someone would have to sue samsung for corporate sabotage, but there really is nobody left who can, since gravity today isn't even a shadow of its former self, its a thin veil in the aether of its former self. i have a very strong belief that the community would have never done such a horrible thing to the OG gravity since we love this game so much that we still think about it fondly after more than 20 years since its original debut.
Well, we have to consider the difference between a patent and intellectual copyrights. Patents usually last a short period of time. Since some private servers are based on a different algorithm that emulates, this means the protection would be, at most, in the form of patent. But the actual lines of code don't matter. There is the artwork, which is definitely protected by copyright. The guy who made the manwa still gets some money from Gravity, every year, royalties. There is the music too. But, like I said in the video, any law depends on the state. There is no such thing as universal law. Even international laws, they only really exist where the governments enforce them.
About Gravity, I read your other commentary, and maybe it is true that Samsung was behind the hacking attack. But Gravity now belongs to GungHo, not to Samsung. That is why the japanese server is so different from all other servers!
I'm pretty sure Gravity will win over Nova since they do own the material even if it is technically an emulator. But I doubt they will go after smaller servers since a lawsuit takes time and they would need to be in the US or somewhere where they are established
I wonder where Talon was. Maybe they were in the USA. But NovaRO was way too crazy, they even started a company, and in California, the same state Warpportal is based!
@@gamecitizen Talon is up and running, actually. But I do believe the server location was moved elsewhere since all this started.
@@TheAkrab Yeah, they opened a new server. I don't know if it's exactly the same admin, but it seems to be. Talon Tales is the name. By the time I made the video, I hadn't heard of their new server! But, still, they did shut down the 15 years old server, which was very sad.
@@gamecitizen Yeah, same everything basically. Just a new server location and slightly altered client. Feels good to see familiar faces again. =)
@@TheAkrab The phoenix rises from the ashes!
didnt talk once about "fair use" or the actual implications of copyright. the only reason why private servers can be illegal in the usa is because they chose to provide and externalize the copyrighted files. the Legal way of making a "private server" in the usa would be to simply have the server act as an exoskeleton almost like an add-on from World of warcraft. using the active files sourced though the people who own them and using your extension to modify the game is 10000% legal to do
Well, “fair use” would be something like using a picture of a Poring to make a satire, or to talk about the art in Ragnarok. Now, if you run a server like you said, even though the person responsible for the server wouldn’t be providing copies of the files, that person would still be providing a ‘service’ of the game. That person would be, in effect, ‘publishing’ the game. The whole spirit of “licensing” is precisely so that the creator can keep the rights over their product, especially if it involves money.
I feel like any company that's trying to fight modders is playing the wrong game. Modders are willing to put in thousands of hours of work for free just because they want to make your product better. It's literally not possible to compete with that. Even if your own staff has comparable talent and dedication, you still have to pay them. The key is just to make money off of them. Sell the Ragnarok Client for like $50, and if you buy the client, you can play on any server you want. Heck, maybe we even give out some server hosting tools. Most people would probably pay, certainly at least far more than are paying now.
Of course, many modern games operate using exactly this model, and unsurprisingly they generally tend to be pretty successful.
Exactly! I mean, look at Minecraft. They fully embraced the community making the game better, and it did very well for the game. Not to mention mods in Warcraft and Half-Life. Some of these mods became games of their own, some even started new genre trends! Dota from Warcraft, Counter-Strike from Half-Life, battle royales from minecraft mods. Not only would Gravity make more money, they would make their intellectual property stronger, and thus make more money out of their mobile cash-grabbers!
This makes me stop playing private server and stream it because they (gravity) said that they will sue the content creators as well who promote the ilegal server. Why now? Ragnarok Online is dead already, only private server can make them alive again.
Gravity cannot actually sue you for streaming a private server. Gravity can take your streamming down, and they can sue the private server. Playing on a private server isn't illegal. But they can certainly take your whole channel down based on copyright - but even then, it would only apply if you were simply playing the game, and not if you were talking about the game (criticism, parody, etc). I think official servers are still very much alive, but it's undeniable that the private community is/was healthy!
RIP NovaRO
nobody cares ifits illegal, we playing private servers because they aren't p2w and they are fair and fun.
Link download?
Look for Atlantis Ro in really old
You can try ragnarok origin SEA server. It's good
I could definitely try! Could you share the web link?
@@gamecitizen hope you like it
whats the official ro now sir? plan to play
There are many official servers. The official server for your area will depend on where you live. For many countries, it's iRO. For Europe is the euRO prime. For Brazil is bRO. For Japan is jRO. So on and so forth :)
@@gamecitizen imma try iRO and Alfheim private server.
Some servers are just attacked by DDoS.
if we are talking about the EU region, I prefer to play and pay on the pirate servers rather than pay money to the Russian company 4game they are official owners of the EU Ragnarok server (also the ping matters)
I mean, what is the main disadvantage of private servers? I think it's their instability. We simply don't know when they might close. But what is the reputation Gravity has dealing with European servers? How can we trust this current European server won't be shut down at any point? My main problem isn't with 4game. They are based in Luxembourg and, who knows, they might be against the war. I mean, I don't blame all Americans for any wrong thing the USA did, and the same goes for any country.
i know talon is back not to long after this was posted
Yeah, I also discovered some weeks ago. It is a new server, but good news nonetheless! No news about the situation regarding Nova, but it seems the "Gravity tsunami" is falling fading away! :)
wth 9 minutes?! yes or no thats just 3 secs!
Hahahah!! Well, the short answer is in the thumbnail (No), but the long answer is that it depends on the circumstances, and I explain the circumstances in 9min :)
any links for this Ragnarok Online?
Well, there are many different servers. I mostly play on bRO, the official Brazilian server. But, for most people, I recommend iRO, which is available for more countries. Just google: warpportal iro ragnarok online :)
@@gamecitizen okay, thank you.
Belo inglês. Geralmente eu reconheço um br falando inglês no youtube a kilometros de distancia, não foi seu caso
Obrigado! :)
Going after private servers is the worst possible thing gravity can do aside from their shitty updates, private servers are the only thing that has kept ro alive and somewhat healthy over the years.
The overwhelmingly majority of players dont wanna log in and deal a trillion damage in a skill then fuck off for another day, what made ragnarok ragnarok was the partying and the somewhat grounded experience.
Now if gravity REALLY REALLY wanted RO players to go play their officials servers its kinda easy, we saw how popular RO:START was when it launched, literally a rework after the trans jobs and a tone down of the 3rd classes would do wonder for the game, and the cash shop needs to be severely reworked, items that track MVPS? Straight up cards? Semi-gatcha refining? theyre just looking for whales and people who are addicted enough to keep spending their salary on that shit, sad part is its probably working since their official servers are still up.
Personally im a fan of how the 3rd classes and everything beyond look and whatever, but the scaling theyve done is just stupid, theyd literally be better off just adding a second rebirth or an option to either play a 3rd class or your transcended class instead of piling it up on top of old ones and making everything ultra zoomer big number damage based.
It's exactly what you said: they are after the whales. And people at Gravity have given no sign of goodwill. What is bizarre is that classic ragnarok is just 17% of Gravity's total income. This means that classic Ragnarok does not need to bring profit. They could decide to not have profit with the classic game, clean it from overpowered cash shop items, which would enhance the brand, which in turn would bring more people to the mobile games. But Gravity doesn't care...
The only fix is open international server for JRO. that server is based af
@@cypherusuh I heard it's both pay to play and pay to win. I heard that they still charge monthly payment, and on top of that they have one of the most aggressive cash shop. I have been told that jRO is a healthy server. It's good that they can modify the game the way they want - GungHo owns Gravity! But they don't let other regional servers have the same freedom. Gravity isn't so nice with other official regional servers. I really think the solution is for Gravity to allow regional servers to be free as they want, allow private servers, encourage private servers! And then they can milk as much money as they want in the mobile games, since there is where they get most of the income anyway.
To be honest if they did their job properly and stop being so greedy, people will still play in their server
@@MascrisSensei Exactly!