Great discussion!
As most of people on here, we all have had at least one project during the long life span of MuOnline it's a good idea to do a community survey before even starting, good man!
I have a team of two, me and one another great and very capable friend, we have been running servers since.... 2007 with fair interval breaks in between then and now I could say we had maybe 5 projects, so you can see that 5 projects in 13 years isn't a lot.
Out of those 5 only the current one I can consider as a ''the serious one'', purely based on how many hours, love and work has gone into it.
There is this Mu private server paradox going around.
People want newest season everything for free, easy and fast, however once they progress and achieve that maximum they will get bored become toxic to you and your community and quit your server eventually, so for you as a project owner these kind of people are high maintenance with 0 returns. After ''dominating'' and getting tired of your setup these players then move to something more stable and older, usually low XP setup s3-s6 servers, they would spend more time on these, but then again at some point it gets too hard and they will start demanding you to tailor your game to their needs and quit soon after if you say no to them. Unfortunately that is your common Muonline player and it has evolved to this stage only because of poor private server management culture during all these years.
This reason above is why you see 90% of private servers who run servers without even changing configs inside serverfiles, they just download the files, set it up, hype it up and hope that people will stick...very rarely they do.
So ask yourself, do you want to pay for latest premium serverfiles, cover all other expenses, invest time into testing, customising, advertising, managing, communicating and everything else that comes with it, just to be dealing with people who don't care and will move on in 2 weeks. Of course! if you have come up with something fresh(saying new/unique is a little bit ignorant so please never use ''unique'' as long term players have probably seen it before).
You can always go down that older season route, but you will be overshadowed by latest seasons initially to beat that you would need to do a lot of work and invest heavily into advertising-like a lot.
Does it make money? As any game that has micro transactions for in game goodies and boosts- I will say it does, however you will need to find a balance between ''I DON'T LIKE PAY TO WIN SERVERS" army- which is your common MuOnline player. Sadly without your common player your online count will be low and that will damage your rep.
Not so easy isn't it?
I can say one, I hold MuOnline quite dear to me, nostalgia is one of the reasons. On top of that I love to work with configs, make map reskins,come up with fun gameplays and even fixing bugs- I enjoy it, my player base knows that and I still have x amount of good,supporting(even financially) returning players every time I launch a project. I don't focus on making money, but I do have ingame purchases and VIP options. Currently my server is online, but we decided to go on a little break and without ads you don't get any traffic.
But before you go super heavy on advertising better have it all top notch as your common Muonline player will take an extra step to find even smallest things to take a bite out of you....
Be prepared xD