It's a known but little-remarked fact that most multi-player worlds eventually spawn rogue versions. While this was very common in the early days of MUDs (see Bartle's book, chapter 1), it may be surprising to learn that one of the current crop of pay-for-play graphical worlds, Ultima Online, apparently has over 300 rogue copies in existence. That factoid has emerged in the course of a debate about a recently-launched rogue shard that implements a four-year-old rule-set (basically, full nonconsensual PvP), and is free to play. Unlike many other emulators, this shard has rapidly grown, and now has over 8,000 accounts and 1,200 simultaneous users, numbers that compare favorably to UO's official servers.
For more, see this thread on the UO official forums, and this interview with the rogue shard's designer.
Questions for Terra Novans: Once again, we appear to have a behavior that is forbidden by the EULA yet tolerated by the company. And this one, unlike eBaying, quite clearly represents a threat to the profitability of the entire official service. Is server emulation as hard to control as eBaying? If so, why don't people emulate EverQuest and Sims Online? Or do they? I'm guessing that the answer is: it's not the server software, dummy. It's the customer service. You can't emulate that; but, with full-on PvP, you can effectively obviate the need for it.
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