I think certain people are trying to run some kind of business by running such private servers.Certainly, they are trying to profit through running the server, and it's quite annoying that there are indeed people who donate in order to be all powerful and mighty on these servers. I don't believe these servers will actually have such a large population, that will require donations to help keep the server up. As for the scenario, where the server has been online for a few days, and the owner is asking for money for ingame items, clearly tells me his goal is not to make a successful game server, but rather to make money out of it (which in a way defeats the point of playing a private high rate server etc).