Not entirely the same thing, but somewhat related: I used to run the largest Ragnarok Online private server for its time, and this AMA is really nostalgic. Well, except how great their community seems to be.
All throughout running a server, I asked myself whether the community was unbecoming (not just towards us, but towards each other), or whether we (and the servers before us) were just doing a terrible job at fostering a positive environment. A few years after we shut down our server, I heard a rather famous League of Legends player had started a private RO server, and a few months later, heard that he flipped out and told the community to f--- off, shutting the server down.
It's hard for many people to imagine a community more "toxic" than in League, so I had just figured, perhaps the failure wasn't our fault. Reading the comments in this AMA really makes me think though, that there was actually a solution, and we had just failed in community management.
My words of wisdom here: lots of people focus on product development, but the community is often just as, if not more important; don't neglect it.
I played on Nostalrius for a bit. The sense I got was that the community was mostly populated by older people (by internet gaming community standards, at least) who quit WoW years ago and wanted to relive the experience. So the baseline of maturity was a bit higher than average, and people got along well. On top of that, while there were various 4chan/reddit/insert-notorious-community-here guilds, they mostly kept to themselves outside of world PvP.
I played a tiny bit of RO back in the day, and instead got the impression that the community was mostly populated by teenaged anime fans, so of course the baseline for maturity was lower. And with the way the web was so much more fragmented back then, most of the kinds of people that today would make a thread in a notorious community saying "hey there's a new private server launching, anyone wanna start a guild?" would instead have to be obnoxious in the in-game chat until they found like-minded people.
I wouldn't beat yourself up too much wondering about how you could have done things differently, because at the end of the day the intrinsic appeal of certain games to certain demographics has by far the greatest effect on what kind of community will develop around it, and if you're making a direct clone of an existing game, your hands are obviously tied. In all likelihood, it was out of your control from the moment you turned the server on.
I ran a Private Server for another game, community is definitely key. If your community has respect for your team they will overlook issues that arise so long as they are handled properly, and of course even better than that, they will invite their friends.
I loved Blizzard when I was a kid, playing Starcraft for hours on end till my parents told me to go to bed. Then I started playing Wacraft 3 oh boy was I addicted. Sadly the Warcraft 3 phase died for me with Warcraft 3. World of Warcraft just didn't cut it for me, it really wasn't the same type of game and I couldn't see the creativity of players with custom maps anymore. I loved the maps of Warcraft 3 like "Life of a Peasant" and on Starcraft I loved "Evolves" and similar maps. I bought Starcraft 2 but I never really got back into it, not yet anyway. I'm currently on Linux so it'll be complicated for me to play any Blizzard games anytime soon.
I haven't dug for remakes of some of my favorite StarCraft 1 and Warcraft 3 custom maps in StarCraft 2 yet(and I probably won't as 10 years have changed me preferences), but the few "Arcade" maps I've played in StarCraft 2 make the custom maps seem pretty versatile.
Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3 were something powerful, that we haven't really seen since: A platform for distributed game design and testing.
You could play mods as easily as the game itself. Designers could fork each other's maps. This spawned incredible numbers of games. In addition to the MOBA (League of Legends, DotA) genre, Starcraft 1 mods also popularized the Tower Defense genre (Plants vs. Zombies, Desktop Tower Defense).
It was frustrating to see Blizzard's designers drop the ball with Starcraft 2. The original discovery model -- Host a game with a mod, or see hosted games -- was simple and imperfect, but effective. Blizzard failed to understand why the original system worked, and "fixed" what wasn't broken.
There's also DOTA 2 which was a mod of Warcraft 3 as well. Valve decided to make a sequel to it, I think they hired the guy who created the mod if I remember correctly. They did similar with some other games, I guess since a number of Valve's own games were made out of mods for their own games.
Dota 2 was not a mod, Dota was the mod. And Blizzard did not hire the guy that created the mod. Valve hired Icefrog who maintained the mod after the original creator(s) left to go create LoL/Riot. Icefrog went on to create Dota 2 at Valve, while the actual creators of the moba genre (the original Dota mod) created LoL. Blizzard not hiring either the creators or the maintainer (Icefrog) of the Dota mod has to be one of their biggest mistakes imo.
All throughout running a server, I asked myself whether the community was unbecoming (not just towards us, but towards each other), or whether we (and the servers before us) were just doing a terrible job at fostering a positive environment. A few years after we shut down our server, I heard a rather famous League of Legends player had started a private RO server, and a few months later, heard that he flipped out and told the community to f--- off, shutting the server down.
It's hard for many people to imagine a community more "toxic" than in League, so I had just figured, perhaps the failure wasn't our fault. Reading the comments in this AMA really makes me think though, that there was actually a solution, and we had just failed in community management.
My words of wisdom here: lots of people focus on product development, but the community is often just as, if not more important; don't neglect it.