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Is it legal for unofficial servers to charge a fee?


Jemcrystal

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Personally, if you are asking me a professional, i'd say no, charging on private servers isn't going to be a successful venture. The fact is, most servers don't charge you anything at all, and why would someone want to pay outlandish costs to play on a private server when there are so many regular non-pay servers available? You would be better suited to start a server hosting company with about 5 nice workstations, lease servers and then wait for the services to pay for your equipment so you can start making a small monthly profit.  I did this about 10 years ago with CSS, Half life, Battlefield , Call of Duty and Teamspeak/Ventrilo server leasing and after 8 months my business paid for the equipment. Kept the business alive about 5 years before I shut everything down and moved back into the real workforce. ( I got stir crazy).

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27 minutes ago, Rio4201 said:

why would someone want to pay outlandish costs to play on a private server when there are so many regular non-pay servers available?

Lots of unofficials are by donations only, or have a perk list. Like a fixed cost for recolor dinos and other things.

It's not typically outlandish or no one would contribute.

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It’s free market.  Players can choose to pay or not and go to a competing server that doesn’t charge.   You are gonna have to make a compelling reason to convince people to pay you $20 a month when they can go somewhere else for $0.  What is the reason we are going to give you money for the service?  Whats special about your server?

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i am surprised this discussion went beyond the second post because it was answered correctly. it is not illegal and it's not corrupt.  The fact this is even a question makes me scared for future generations.

to go further i could very well request that people on my server give me their SSN and nudes, still not illegal.  just kind of disturbing and gross.

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Think of all the requests for subscription based higher quality official servers. While these might have money for better support, still dosen't fix the underlying issues of the game.

 

Servers aren't free.  You either have to rent (managed or unmanaged) or buy/own physical servers and pay electricity and internet bills. I would say that most unofficial servers accept donations.

 

Plus if you want will run servers you might have to play for things like plugins.

Here is an example of an excellent PvP plugin (paid plugin). I am just taking at face value that it works.

https://arkserverapi.com/resources/no-more-undermeshing.138/

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On 11/27/2019 at 2:20 PM, Rio4201 said:

I'd be interested in hearing from someone at Wildcard on this, because it would be highly abnormal that Wildcard would let others profit off their IP without some sort of expectation of a share of the profit from whoever is monetizing their private server. 

The fact that there are legit companies like Host Havoc making their income renting dedicated ARK servers kind of blows up your claim. I'm pretty sure the invoice they send out each month doesn't 'ask for a donation'. 

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This just enforces my general rule on unofficial servers: Only join a server with active admins and a Discord server. Read the rules and know what to expect from the admins before playing or investing much time on the server.

When you join a server where you don't seem to know who is running it and that they want to charge you fees, is just asking to be surprised by something like this.

If you had done the research up front on the server, you would have never played on it.

What I am surprised by, is that apparently they do not have a password. Normally a server that charges fees would have a password so that only those that join the Discord and read the rules and pay the fees could play on the server.

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