When Ragnarok Online first launched in 2003 it was many people’s first step into the MMO genre, including mine. Something about the mix of art, music, setting and character the game seemed to have drew me in and didn’t let me go for a year. For me the game was never about the endless grind - it was about the pursuit of hats, meeting interesting people and setting challenges for yourself. I never managed to max level a character, I made my own fun.

Sometime when I was still playing the pay-to-play version of the game some people I met in the game told me about another version of the game that was totally free - that’s right, free! Not only was it free, but it had several changes to the game that made it easier for players to get started. The drop rate was higher, some items had more slots than normal in them, and leveling was much faster. There was an official server that had a higher drop and experience rate but it wasn’t nearly this high, so I assumed it was a testing ground. After coming back I was raving about the double slotted novice armlets that were hopefully going to be on the official servers soon. I was quickly pulled aside and told to shush in case a Guild Master was hiding nearby. They told me these servers were a legal grey area and I shouldn’t speak of them in the official server.

As interest in the core game waned, most of my friends started to splinter off into different private servers because they didn’t have to pay a monthly fee, or they were unhappy with some aspect of the main game that could be alleviated by the private scene. At this point there are a lot of private servers, many of them run on eAthena - a very powerful emulator based on the official Aegis server infrastructure which had been leaked even in Ragnarok Online’s beta period of development.

Due to these leaks, eAthena was a very complete emulation even in its infancy. Not everything was perfect - a lot of the numbers for drop rates, skills etc had to be estimated for example - but it was close enough that it was hard to tell the difference for most players. There were some other games that had private servers as well, but none of them were nearly as complete. You could play on a private World of Warcraft server but it was basically a shell of the full game: most of the quests were missing and the game was kind of buggy and broken, leading to a hollow experience that wasn’t nearly as satisfying as playing the real thing. This speaks either to the power of the eAthena emulation or the bare-bones nature of Ragnarok Online, I can’t tell which.

One of the great things about eAthena is how easily moddable it is. Someone running a server could change the rate of leveling, the drop table for monsters or what the max level was very easily. If you dig a bit deeper you could add custom maps, custom NPCs, custom classes and do other things like turn PVP on for every map, something normally reserved for special areas. With these scripts you could add a lot of depth to the game though many just wanted the classic experience with boosted rates. Servers were getting so specific that sites like RateMyServer opened up to let you advertise your version of the game, letting you write a description and the leveling rates for all to see and vote on.

Even though it was fairly easy to maintain a server with a small population, some servers ballooned to sizes that matched an official server and had to find a real host. Many people probably didn’t see this coming and suddenly had server costs to pay for, so two new systems were born - voting and donation. High population servers still saw a fair amount of turnover, so voting became important to keep new people coming in. For voting, a server would often give you a special currency that could be used to purchase items in game. Some of these items couldn’t be found in game normally, giving you an incentive to keep voting every day - not only to help the server you like, but to get you closer to that exclusive hat that was more powerful compared to regular equipment.

Usually the other way to get that equipment would be for donating. You could pay from $10 to $100 on donations, and for your donation you would be given special items that could trivialize the standard game. Often, the server owner would stress that you’re not paying for the items, you’re donating to help the server and being rewarded with stuff in return. These things would usually be the shiniest and would stand out due to their rarity so you could easily admire and desire them. Only 200 more days of voting to get your own - or for $20 you could own one for yourself!

This is a fairly common tactic in current free to play games. The free currency is drip-fed to you and spending real money will rush you to the endgame, whether you’re ready or not. These hats were in the pay-to-win tier before such terminology ever even existed. Spending money on a free game makes you more likely to play (and spend) more, so these hats were a fairly effective feedback loop to a new player - start playing, start voting on their free system, see some people with endgame gear and take a look at that donation page and maybe for $10 it’s worth it… “I’ve had $10 of fun out of this, right?”

The one thing that current free-to-play games have that Ragnarok didn’t was the whale tier of customers. There were only a finite amount of items you could buy and I personally never played on a server where they rotated out exclusive items on a limited time basis. That would have been a good way to keep players playing and purchasing as we now know. Certainly there were people that spent a lot on the server they liked the best, but they may have run out of reasons to keep spending money, making them lose interest. Official Ragnarok Online servers eventually took to the free model too, but in exchange of being free to play they stripped the game from a lot of its original functionality and put it behind a paywall. Instead of asking for donations in exchange for hats, Gravity made a special server exclusive for paying customers that had all those features in tact, which quickly crumbled. They never did the business end quite as well as private server owners could; it became an emulation of the emulation.