Post: #12

My experience:

I played on servers for several years and made good friends. After Burstfire UO died I set up The UO Project with an old BFUO staff member. We were more than capable of handling everything to start with.

Domain names are not $75 unless you're getting royally ripped off. More like $10/yr.

I would suggest a VPS or Cloud server you can expand if you need it, it would cost you maybe $50/m then add as you need. Most big dedicated boxes cost around $120+/m and not as flexible. However, in most cases a high clocking CPU like dual/quad 3.2 would be enough, and 8gb of ram.

If you want a serious server, and more than 10 people, do not run a server from your house! You need upload speeds of 100mb to even begin considering that, and I can guarantee you won't have that unless you're paying more per month than a server would cost.

As long as you are happy writing scripts, you are all good, get a good strong base. Do not start a server without anything to do - dungeons and pvp are not enough alone these days, add a challenge or something unique for players to get involved in that will take time to complete.

Then as you go, slowly add staff to your team to handle player demand for events and help. We ran 100 players on 5 staff, some servers have 20 players and 5 staff, thats overkill, and players end up relying on staff or becoming far too close to them and not playing the actual game.

I've never hired outside of our server, and even since I stopped running server, there is now a 4th clone of our server being set up by past players (Imperial UO) so theyre all trying to do what we did and I do support them if they need it, but I think a lot of what counts is patience.

a lot of servers these days are made by old players, they modify the server they used to play on and make it how *they* want it, which will instantly lose you 50% of your past players. Always let the players *think* they are helping you build your server, ask for ideas and suggestions, put a couple of them in place. If a group of players detest a change, simply don't do it. Angry players will try to destroy your server, fact.

If you have the patience to put up with those players as well as provide for every other player out there begging for events, rp, pvp, better dungeons and new steeds or crying about dex healing, miners being killed, someone cheating, losing their newbied items or whatever else. Then go for it, thats what 60% of your time will be, 20% on forums, 10% coding, 10% dealing with staff.

You won't get to play. Just a warning before you start and then decide its not what you wanted to be doing every day (you dont get a day off by the way)

(03-10-2016 02:24 AM)Nachtmusique Wrote:  This post is for those of you with operational public server. I want to know your story. How did your team form? Or was your server the dream and hard work of one very focused scripter/administrator? I have always had aspirations of opening a sphere shard, but I get discouraged doing it all on my own. Did most of you start as a group of friends with a singular vision for your project or did you pick up team members over the internet? Or are any of you living proof and inspiration that it is indeed possible to do it alone? I just want to know.

Thanks
Jason