Yeah, because monetizing your server so you can continue to spend most of your time working on it and having resources to keep it online is such a bad thing. Shame on all of you for not spending every penny from your wallet but accepting OPTIONAL donations (that are mostly a "thank you for letting me have fun") from your players!
Right, because you cannot do that in other ways.
You are talking to someone actually spending on average 15hours a week on voluntary work by the way. So yes, people do that.
Of course, you cannot expect everyone to do that.
And since attacks are getting a bigger problem in the internet, it does cost more, yes. But most people simply don't know what they are doing anyways and throw their money out of the window.
Anyways, selling stronger items or VIP only features though isn't the only way.
It is pretty ignorant to think that.
You can give people other incentives to do so.
And besides DDoS protection, hosting a server of that size isn't actually that expensive.
Putting the time into it? Yeah I can respect that point, but people do that all the time in open-source community. Why? Because they love doing it. Not for money. They got normal jobs as well. They just do it on the side. You guys seem to forget what communities like that stand for.
And let's talk about a serious topic then. Since you said spending time and resources.
So then how come, 99% of those people making this their job, actually ignore basically all laws about that stuff?
If you sell something online, you actually have to obey the law of the country you are selling to. Meaning it doesn't only depend on YOUR country, it also depends on who you are selling to. So if a Swedish guy buys VIP, you have to obey the Swedish laws, if a polish does, their laws, and so on.
On top of that, you are obligated to have an impress and privacy policy and follow the GDPR as well as the new cookie laws. Noone does that.
When dealing with any kind of private information, you are obligated to encrypt your website traffic as well, too many people here ignore that. Besides it being mandatory, it's really stupid not to do that anyways. I've tried to push people here in that direction, but they still live in 2005 technology-wise.
And now comes the big part: taxes. Since none of the above laws are being followed, I highly doubt most servers pay taxes.
There have been rumors about older big servers being sued by CipSoft. This makes no sense however because if they did do that, they would have made it to make an example out of them and published that. Them not saying anything, rather shows that they either simply lost interest and moved on, or actually got caught for fraud.
You wanna take down a big server? DDoS isn't the way. Just draw attention to them from financial offices sides.
Actually had that in mind for a topic here anyways...
You wanna make money with it? How about actually following the law then and pay taxes like everyone else does?
Is this too hard for you? Yeah actually that's why services like that usually outsource these jobs to third parties. Respecting the law of every single fucking country is a mess.
You still gotta do it...