I've heard of this, but always wondering: how can these reverse-engineering based private servers be accurate?
Like, reverse engineering the communication protocol is easy, or at least pretty feasible. But how do you acquire server-side data? Like raw probability tables for certain event? Not to mention the game logic itself. Some of them obviously can be fetched or guessed by using the live server, but it can't be comprehensive.
I've (superficially) involved in certain private servers like WoW 15 years ago, but AFAIK they just used leaked server-side software (usually from a foreign agency) than reverse engineering.
In the absence of hard data you just have to guess - take a look at the SWG Emu project. They had to have historians go through decades old archived threads to try to reverse engineer how the game actually worked, I’m not sure the status of the project now but it did indeed take many, many years to even come close to a compareable experience to the original.
You cant tell if they are accurate really if you do not have sources.
You can tell however, if the game plays nicely and accurately when connected via such a server. fyi, a lot of servers, and it looks like this one too, mainly serve to authenticate do license stuff and then do matchmaking or discovery for players to find other players. they dont actually host a game session.
Like, reverse engineering the communication protocol is easy, or at least pretty feasible. But how do you acquire server-side data? Like raw probability tables for certain event? Not to mention the game logic itself. Some of them obviously can be fetched or guessed by using the live server, but it can't be comprehensive.
I've (superficially) involved in certain private servers like WoW 15 years ago, but AFAIK they just used leaked server-side software (usually from a foreign agency) than reverse engineering.