March 3rd 2020 archive

Referencing my last entry about this…

One of the first real “problems” with the server (at least that I knew of, because I knew some of the people that ran this server) was the fact that the GM that this server was named after was actually caught embezzling money that had been donated to the server and using it to finance his drug habit. Some people in the years that would come would turn this into a joke, but I can attest to the fact that this actually happened. In the days and weeks that would follow this being confirmed, control of the server would be wrest from this individual, and he would no longer have access to the money that was being donated to the server for what I can only describe as the most obvious reasons in the world. He would never again have access to the money that was being donated to the server. All of this happened when I was a teenager, but I knew enough of the people that were “at the top of this server” to confirm that this actually took place. And as the years went by, his interest in the server actually appeared to… wane, as did my own. I was just never comfortable with the actual knowledge that someone that had built what became one of the most popular “low-rates” private servers for Ragnarok Online had actually gotten away with making it so popular that so many people regularly donated to it that they were able to finance this individual’s drug habit, and that they actually did so for awhile. That’s the kind of “black market” stuff that I desperately want to stay out of, heh.

That wasn’t the only reason that I actually reported that server to Gravity, though.

At that point, that was water under the bridge. It almost became text meme with how often people who were into private servers would joke about it. “Oh, that’s the server where the GM used donation money on drugs”. Never mind the fact that it had a good player base and a lot of good players actually played there at some point in time (since it wasn’t their fault that the corruption started from, and stayed with, the top). To me, it was just the fact that a lot of corrupt things kept happening with that server, and that was what the server seemed to be the most known for. Some people still actually remember that server for the corruption.

If it had started and stopped with this, well, I honestly don’t think I would have reported it to Gravity.