I've just heard of something i find a bit strange...
According to some ppl, there would be some "legal" private servers out there, some sort of Java servers built under the GNU General Public Licence ?
Do you know some more about this, or are all private servers illegal like i think they are ? :eek:
Even when game companies go out of business they still defend their IP(Intellectual Property) rights. NCSoft is not out of business, nor does it appear that they have an financial incentive to have their game licensed or administered by another entity.
If they did, and they were doing so, it would be advertised here. It isn't.
With that disclaimer, I don''t think they are legal. NCSoft has copyright law and international treaties on their side. The Illegal private servers have nothing but immaturity, lack of ethics, and idiocy on their side. I suspect that they are blowing smoke to convince themselves that they aren't breaking the law and ripping off the software developers.
According to some ppl, there would be some "legal" private servers out there, some sort of Java servers built under the GNU General Public Licence?
Their server code might be legal, but their item/mob/skill database is hardly legal, and the ways to connect NCsoft-owned game client code to these servers definitely aren't legal.
Nevertheless they do exist. They are buggy and many things simply don't work. But they are free and maybe even more important they have adena/XP multipliers. So you can go to lvl 75 in couple of weeks and collect 2 millions of adena daily. This is kind of a cheat, but well - many players have not the patience or the skill to level without cheating.
I've just heard of something i find a bit strange...
According to some ppl, there would be some "legal" private servers out there, some sort of Java servers built under the GNU General Public Licence ?
Do you know some more about this, or are all private servers illegal like i think they are ? :eek:
the only one i can think of thats actually CONDONED by NC is L2SEA which is for south-east Asian communities ONLY (much like L2KR which req's KR citizen number to play)
L2Japan and L2NA both do not require anything more than English (or Japanese) font settings and OS settings to run. the L2KR and SEA versions actually require (as i said before) proof of citizenship to play which essentially makes them private servers.
Well, no, it makes them regional servers, but both L2KR and L2SEA are run directly by NC-Soft or a licensed, contracted business partner of some kind.
As Krissa said, the server code that these so-called "legit" private servers are running might be open-source and legit, but the core code and IP of L2 isn't open-sourced. It's akin to running an emulator, in a sense. Sure, the emu might be open source, but the ROM you're attempting to run on it isn't.
No private server is a legal private server, no matter how much they may claim otherwise. Your initial assumption was correct. The only legitimate, legal North American and European servers are ours. :)