Flashbacks: My Experience of Hosting a Game Server??!

9:40 PM experience , gaming , personal 0 Comments

Banner I would have used if I had my current skill set back then.

     While I was about to fall asleep today, I thought of how I was spending my teen years and why I had only a vague memory of what happened during those years. Suddenly it hit me that when I was 14, I hosted a Maple Story private server on my cheapo desktop computer over a 1mbps internet connection. If you have any knowledge about web hosting and stuff, you know how pathetic the specifications I had to run that server. But that isn't the important part.

     It's probably safe to assume that most people were and still are crazy over the MMO Maple Story. I was one of those kids too. Having played the game since I was 12, over the years I have been going back to the game for short periods of time but soon it got even more boring to me over the years of changes. Another claim I can confidently make is that, every player at one point of the game would think to themselves, "I wished I was a GM (Game Master).

A scene in SAO where Kirito gets admin privileges

     That amount of control over a game, if you have ever watched Sword Art Online (if you hadn't, please do yourself a favour and go watch it), you would sort of understand the power of a GM. The desire to have this much control over a game had me doing a bunch of research, trying to find out how I would go about to attaining this amount of power. And there I was, stumbling upon a forum thread titled "[Guide] Hosting your own Maple Story server" 14 year old me was ecstatic, this literally meant I had the rights to dictate how the entire game works on my server!

how old school C++ code looked like

     To host the server though, one must go through the difficult *for 14 year old me* set up process. The server files came programmed in Visual C++, where you have to run Visual Studio to compile the files in order for the server to work. That entire line might have sounded like alien language to you, because I assure you, I literally didn't know what I was doing too. After you had the server up and running, you aren't done yet because you need people to be able to connect to it! So you either had to make your IP address a public IP address or use some ghetto LAN emulator so people can connect to you as long as they used the LAN emulator and are connected to your designated network. Me being a lazy ass, opt-ed for the LAN emulator solution as it was the easiest to do.

how old school hamachi looked like. cr: pcmag

     So that's the boring explanation part done. Let's get into the aspect that makes everything in life more interesting; People! Like any sane person's thinking, I need to promote my server over a form of media in order to get people to come play at my server. What better choice than to promote it on YouTube. The saying "Once on the internet, always on the internet" couldn't be more relevant. So here's the video I made for promotional purposes of my private server, MyStory.


     So the video redirected people to my forums which was http://mystoryhome.freeforums.org/. Sadly, it has been abandoned for so many years that the forum is now removed :( All my memories.... But fright not, because the forum is on the internet, we can totally salvage it back. Let me introduce to you, the savior of the internet, WebArchives! You can check out the snapshot of my forum here! You can browse through the captures that slowly show the growth of the forum and in terms the growth of the players on my server.

     In the short time of hosting this private server, I have met some very silly people. If you browsed through the forum archives, you can see how informal and silly the conversations are. Shoutout to Skittles that I have long since lost contact since the closure of MSN IM.

     How has this entire string of events affected me as a person? Hosting this server has exposed me to a lot of the different things that I would gladly say had improved upon. The first time recording and editing a video, the first time I touched the C++, Java and HTML language and of course the first time I interacted with random strangers over the internet, trusting them with my server and so on so forth. You could even say I'm into technology this day due to this incident.

     Today, I wish I still had that tad of recklessness, being able to dive into interesting things without thinking about the next step. Being able to not care about what other people think of me as a person. That's the advantage of being a dumb kid isn't it.... What are some of the stupid things you've done in the past? How has it affected you? Do you have any regret after doing said stupid things? Well for me, I have no regrets as I value the things I learned from hosting a private game server more than the short span of a few months I wasted on it.