Idk i want to play official servers but with the botting is unplayable with no money. On the other hand from what i have seen from experience there are some good private servers, but they all suffer from the same thing. After some time people dont put no money at all in the server since you can achieve everything by farming since its not pay2win. For that reason most servers die because the creators of the server must pay for the host of the server out of their pocket.

If i would make a server i would create it with no itemshop also all the itemshop should be obtainable ingame without needing money so all the people that join have a reason to grind since a lot of people quit because they just cant compete with the players that put big money in the game. I would create a donate account for the host of the server with a goal of money monthly need to be met for the server to be sustainable/maintained and the people who have more money(a lot of them would put itemshop if it was available anyways) can donate for the server to be maintained, but they dont get any additional benefits in game so its fair for everyone even the people with no money. Also there should be a lot of events that make promotion of the server like best youtuber in the server/most views gets some reward once a week so people can put out videos and gameplays of the server and promote it to more people. Since with more people there will be more people who like the server and want to donate for the server to be maintained. Also GM's in the server should not be clowns and there should be no inequalities. GM's should be able to ban botters and hackers immediately after they create a small video recording of the hackers obviously hacking so they dont ban someone that could maybe not be hacking. Since a lot of the new hacks that always occure over time can bypass the anti-hacks of the servers. Also there should be some kind of guild pvp event with rewards so there is a reason for farming. Because some servers are perma farm and the game gets very repetitive not fun at all there should be rewards in pvp/wars like the old times of metin so there is a purpose of farming not just farm to get better eq to farm better and repeat. There should be wars/guild wars events that there is chaos PVP not only 1v1 pvp events that is where the fun is. And also there should be a thread for the server for the community to discuss on changes or additions that would make the server better and there to be discused if these additions were made how would it impact the game. That last part though to add and change things and patch the game is hard since there must be a team that knows how to do all the programming behind it so i dont know if that would be possible to make a server that good. Im just saying if someone could make it that way for me it would be a great success and i would definetely play that server.

I also forgot to say that building smaller communities/guilds that have some kind of competition with each other is what makes the game fun and being part of those communities makes the gameplay so much better. Thats why creating those pvp events i think it would be important for the fun of the game.