I quit ZooOnline after 6 hours because I got bored really quick. 6 hours and already Lv133? Crap armors, unbalanced trash grind fest.
I did make an x5,000 version of HellGate and opened it for 3 months and got over 2,200 accounts created. People were online and playing, but I didn't like how people leveled up so fast, they wanted more and more and more and then got bored (like zoo online). They stayed online even though they were bored, only because other were online. I was disgusted and wasn't going to allow yet another poop highrate server become alive so I did the responcible thing and shut it down but kept my medium rate server online.
Most I've had online on Hellgate (medium rate) was 45, but sadly people get sucked into high rates that are a Quick Fix like a drug. I refuse to create a Private Server OF a Private server. The people who play love it and even stay online when only 3 are online, on any other trash high rate, if only 3 were online they would leave, but on my server, they stay for months until they give up hope more will come. Defeated by poop vote hack and drug dealing high rates, but HellGate is strong, online since 5/4/2013 with more updates than any other private server in history.
Quality over quantity.
The kal armors have been unbalanced for years, it took me 5 days at 15-16 hours a day to invent original and perfect armor/weapon/mob formulas right down to the science. Removed all korean trash "kim-jong-un-gap" armors and translated the whole game into English. Removed all trash weapons from the game (g33,g50,g56, etc..) and kept only weapons that looked like armor (g53 diamond sword looks like g50 armor, so g53 sword is now g50) and corrected so many new things. I REMOVED all trash upgrade systems (Imperial, BOF, DSS, etc) and created my own (Royal, Blaze, Imperial, Rage, Violence). Every mob with now with true balanced calculated custom stats Lv1-140 like a real level progression, unlike x400-700 trash servers that use easy EXP calculators. A new armor system calculated down to the damn science for perfect balance. Lazy server owners that make high rates just add crap stats and retexture armors making new grades without calculation. g46 has always been lvl1, now g42 is g30 with lvl25-30 requirment, g46 is g40, g50 > g50, g55 > g60, g60 > g70, etc. All the way up to g120. Why did a g65 weapons look like g70 armor? I went ahead and made them the same grade cause they look alike. No server has done this. rebalanced and recoded 2nd job skills so that 2nd job skills stop upgrading at lvl120, 3rd job skills that dont stop upgrading at lvl90, but they upgrade from 70-150 so the skills dont end.
You can talk all the crap you want and worship lazy high rates, being good, but all a high rate really is, is a lack of content. Back before 3rd job was added, a high rate server would be lvl1-70 in 6 hours, now the Neo high rates are lvl1-130 in 6 hours. In HellGate it is still 1-70 in 6 hours. These year 2012+ servers are all Ultra high rates. When I add code to my website, even the top 10 server owners copy my code.
It all comes down to the taste of a player. Do you want to go to a chinese buffet where you get to eat all the trash you want? Or do you want to go out do a fancy diner, and dine on quality? I had a quantity server, but as a developer, I have higher standards, so I shut down my quantity server and chose quality. When TerminaOnline comes out, I expect that server to be a quality calculated server too, not some high rate trash with retextures crap.