Minimizing the risk

Hi

Lets say this straight, MUOnline servers are illegal to host.
However, financial and other possibilities that private server brings with it seems to be fair enough to take the risk.

I want to take the risk also, but i think some amount of self-protection is healthy, and so, here is my question.
How do you minimize the risk of legal actions being taken against you?

Hiding company identity? What about the payments, is there a way to be anonymous payment receiver? (lets skip the cryptocurrencies, they're not very popular) Do VPN's make any sense while hosting a global server?

Let the discussion begin.

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I nearly forgot.

How do you do it?

Having a VPN for players to connect to your server and eventually seeing the website, I guess that's not a public server anymore and it's a huge headache, but yes, in other words you'll be having a private server under a private network.

Once your server is public, you can't hide the identity of your server. Hiding payments worked a few years ago, but not anymore. PayPal and any other payment gateway are asking additional information which they will verify sooner or later.

More or less, usually private servers (in any other MMO) DMCA takedowns and notifications are usually on the servers where the host is earning money through donations. There's unlikely to be taken down if there are no donations and your server is free to play and play to win, but not always true, of course.

The ones who can take you down are the 3rd party publishing company and licensed by the development company and ofc the development company.

The question is, does Webzen actually act against private servers? Never heard of such a case and never hosted one myself, so IDK. There are private servers which exist many years and nothing happened.

I can imagine the problem is actually the distribution of the (modified) game client. On the server side - how could they prove which kind of server software you run? ;-)

To answer your question: VPN doesn't make much sense, as it would increase network round-trip time significantly. Same for offering your server in the tor network. Hiding your identity when hosting is probably not as hard as receiving payments. I have no actual experience, but I assume crypto is the way to go here.

Lets talk straingth!
mu online gain populary by the private servers
no one gotta fro mthe webzen side will judge you for that you gain more popularity on their game ... just like the cs 1.6 servers ... thats what i think it isn't illegal if you put the right to the webzen for making of the game ... i think the webzen releases (leaks) server files to have private servers to gain popularity of the game!

You shouldn't really worry about Webzen or illegality. Just do your thing mate.

If you're paying license for your files then the first responsible person in case of a lawsuit from Webzen (which, never happened in 20 years lmao, won't happen now) is your license provider. You are authorized to use the files he provides so that clears you of any liability.

All you have to do is open a company, run the payments through your company and pay your taxes. Using VPN doesn't even make any sense. Just write a decent ToS & Privacy Policy and have everything in order and you will be fine :)

If you guys remember there actually was raids, takedowns and legal action against MU private servers in the past. It ramped up around 2005 - not sure if they still care today. Back then nearly all servers were running on leaked server files, luckily now you have more of a legal grey area because many of the server files are emulators. As far as client, you can stay in legal grey area by not hosting the client directly on your site (i.e. using third party client download or even official client) and only supplying patch.

if webzen took down PServers Mu Would've died 10 years ago. But if u still concerned, there are plenty of ways to hide ur identity, but all of them are illegal in many ways and would require you to be a cold blood dude.