how-toMMOpreservation

How to Build an Offline Archive of MMO Economies and Player Stories Before a Shutdown

UUnknown

2026-02-20

10 min read

Preserve MMO economies and player stories before a shutdown. Practical capture, legal tips, and tools to archive New World worlds.

Preserve the economy, preserve the stories: why you need an offline archive now

When a publisher announces a server sunset, the clock starts ticking. Players lose access to markets, guild histories, player housing, and the living economy that made the world meaningful. If you care about capturing a game's economic state and the communities within it — whether it's New World or any other MMO facing closure — this guide gives a practical, step-by-step playbook to build an offline archive that future researchers, players, and historians can use.

Quick overview — what this guide covers

Inverted-pyramid summary: first, the most important actions to take in the final months and days. Then technical workflows for capturing market data, screenshots and video, chat logs, and oral histories. Finally, community and legal considerations, storage strategies, and publication options that make the archive useful and durable.

Immediate priorities (first 90 days after a shutdown announcement)

Create a central preservation team and public coordination channel (Discord, Matrix, or forum thread).
Decide the scope: economy snapshot, player-created content, guild rosters, event logs, or all of the above.
Start automated price scraping and manual screenshot workflows immediately.
Begin oral-history scheduling: identify guild leaders, influential traders, and event organizers for interviews.
Confirm legal boundaries: check the game's ToS and consult community moderators about sharing anonymized logs.

2026 context: why this matters more now

Late 2025 and early 2026 saw multiple high-profile server sunsets and growing public debate about game preservation. Publishers are increasingly offering limited export tools — but not consistently. Meanwhile, decentralized storage and AI-assisted curation (automated transcripts, entity extraction, and price anomaly detection) have matured enough that communities can create searchable, long-lived archives with modest budgets. That combination of increasing closures and better tooling makes 2026 the year community archives become both feasible and necessary.

Plan and scope: what to preserve

Define the dataset and the narrative. Good archives combine structured data (market prices, auction history) and unstructured records (screenshots, videos, oral histories).

Core elements to preserve

Market and economy data: item prices, listing volumes, tax/fee rates, rare item trades, and merchant inventories.
Player records: character names, guild membership lists, guild bank snapshots (with consent), event calendars.
Chat and forum archives: public channels, announcements, patch reaction threads (anonymized when needed).
Visual records: high-resolution screenshots, raid videos, town/house snapshots, UI showing prices.
Oral histories: recorded interviews with prominent players, dev interactions, and community leaders.
Contextual files: patch notes, developer posts, press announcements, and timeline of server events.

Legal & ethical checklist

Before mass-collecting data, respect privacy and intellectual property. Legal issues vary by region and publisher; when in doubt, default to anonymization and consent.

Review the EULA/ToS for rules on data extraction and redistribution.
Request permission from the publisher if you plan to publish large-scale exports or monetized derivatives.
Obtain written consent for interviews and for sharing private guild bank or chat logs.
Anonymize private player data: remove passwords, account IDs, and replace personal names with pseudonyms if necessary.
Keep a log of permissions and release forms with timestamps and contact info.

Technical capture workflows

Below are tested, practical methods for capturing the main content types. Use open formats and document every step in a README.

1) Market & economy snapshots

Goal: build a time-series of prices and volumes for core items, with timestamps and metadata.

Identify endpoints: check if the game exposes market data via a public API or in the game client UI (e.g., listing pages, auction house panels).
Prefer official APIs: use them when available — they reduce legal risk and are more reliable.
Web-scraping UI panels: if no API exists, scrape the in-game market pages shown on community-facing web portals, or community tools that surface market data (many MMOs have third-party markets).
Automate snapshots: schedule hourly or daily scrapes depending on activity. Save raw JSON/CSV plus a normalized schema: item_id, item_name, timestamp_utc, price, stack_size, seller_id (anonymized), server_faction.
Record metadata: store game version, server time, and any economic modifiers (seasonal events, taxes).
Quality checks: run scripts to find price outliers, missing fields, and duplicate records.

Tools & tips: use Python with requests + BeautifulSoup for static pages, Selenium or Puppeteer for dynamic sites, and pandas for transformation. Export final datasets as CSV and compressed Parquet for large archives.

2) Screenshots and video capture

High-resolution images are primary evidence of UI, events, and economies (showing item tooltips, prices, player-owned housing, etc.).

Use OBS Studio to capture video and high-res PNG screenshots during market sessions and major events.
Standardize naming: YYYYMMDD_HHMM_server_region_event_actor.png
Embed metadata where possible: include the server time in a visible UI element or overlay timestamps through OBS.
For many images, create a compressed archive and store original PNGs in cold storage too.
OCR any screenshot text you want to make searchable. Tesseract and commercial services can extract chat lines and item descriptions; store OCR outputs as separate .txt or .json files with bounding box info.

3) Chat logs, announcements, and forum threads

Public chat and forum data provides the social context for economic behavior.

Screenshot in-game public chats during peak trading windows. For long threads, use paginated exports or webarchive snapshots.
If a community forum allows data export (HTML/Markdown), download it. If not, use webrecorder.io to create WARC files.
Anonymize or ask consent for anything that ties an account to a real person.

4) Oral histories and interviews

Oral history gives voice to market actors: top traders, guild treasurers, and event organizers.

Schedule recordings (use Zoom, Recorder apps, or local recorders). Record in FLAC or WAV for long-term fidelity.
Use consent forms and release forms; record verbal consent on audio if written consent is impractical.
Transcribe with local Whisper models or cloud services, but retain original audio for verification.
Timestamp and annotate transcripts with references to market events or screenshots.

Community workflows: building the archive with players

Scale matters. A single person can capture some data — a coordinated community captures everything.

Organize roles

Data leads — maintain the schema, run scrapers, and validate datasets.
Capture teams — in-game screenshot/video capture and timestamp verification.
Interviewers — schedule and conduct oral histories, manage release forms.
Archivists — prepare uploads to Internet Archive, create torrents/IPFS seeds, and manage redundant backups.
Wiki editors — build community wikis that contextualize datasets with guides, timelines, and player stories.

Community wiki: structure and tools

A community wiki is the narrative layer of your archive: it connects datasets with stories.

Use Fandom, MediaWiki, or a static-site generator (Hugo / Jekyll) with content in Markdown for portability.
Store wiki content in a git repo so it can be cloned and preserved (GitHub, GitLab, or self-hosted).
Export the wiki to Kiwix/ZIM for offline access and upload a copy to the Internet Archive.
Link each wiki page to dataset IDs and screenshots. Maintain a versioned dataset index file (datasets.json) listing each file, checksum, and purpose.

Publication and accessibility

Publishing the archive ensures discoverability and longevity.

Upload datasets and images to the Internet Archive with clear metadata and license statements.
Create a static search site (Lunr.js / ElasticLunr) that indexes transcripts, item names, and image captions for offline use.
Generate human-readable “economy reports” with charts and executive summaries: price distributions, inflation trends, and rare-item trade logs.
Provide multiple access points: compressed dataset download, web UI, and a torrent/IPFS seed so the community can continue seeding.

Long-term preservation: storage, checksums, and decentralization

Redundancy is your friend. A single cloud copy is not enough.

Create at least three geographically separated copies: local HDD/SSD, cloud object storage (Backblaze B2 or S3), and a tertiary copy with Internet Archive.
Generate and publish checksums (SHA256) for every file and maintain a signed manifest (PGP) for authenticity.
Consider decentralized options: IPFS with Pinning Services and Arweave for permanent storage of key artifacts. Understand costs and legal implications first.
Maintain a documented archive structure and README to help future researchers navigate datasets.

Protect identities and comply with privacy norms.

Anonymize player IDs unless you have consent.
Remove or redact financial account info and any external identifiers.
Limit downloadable data for sensitive logs; provide access-on-request with a vetting process.

Case study: timeline for New World server sunset (example checklist)

Use this example checklist tailored to a high-activity MMO like New World when a shutdown window of 12 months is announced.

12 months out

Form the preservation team and public coordination hub.
Begin continuous market scraping and weekly visual snapshots of major cities.
Start a public wiki and solicit volunteers.

6 months out

Scale capture cadence: hourly market snapshots during peak hours; daily for others.
Schedule interviews with guild leaders, economic influencers, and streamers.
Publish interim economy reports and gaps for community input.

Last month

Archive static copies of all wiki pages and community forums; generate WARCs.
Start long-form video capture of world events and town snapshots. Seed torrents and pin IPFS objects.
Run final integrity checks and publish dataset manifests with signed checksums.

Final 48–72 hours

Ramp capture to high-frequency for active markets and event zones.
Hold coordinated screenshot rallies and livestream oral histories.
Trigger a final archive push: upload best-of images/video and critical datasets to Internet Archive and your backup clouds.

Tools & resources (quick reference)

Capture: OBS Studio, Greenshot, ShareX
Scraping & automation: Python (requests, BeautifulSoup, Selenium), Puppeteer, Scrapy
Transcription: Whisper (local), Otter.ai, Rev.com
OCR: Tesseract
Archival formats: PNG, FLAC/WAV, CSV/Parquet, JSON, Markdown
Publishing & preservation: Internet Archive, Kiwix/ZIM, IPFS (Pinata), Backblaze B2/S3
Visualization: pandas, Plotly, D3.js

Pro tip: store both raw captures (screenshots, raw audio) and processed, searchable artifacts (OCR text, transcripts, normalized CSV). The raw files are your backup; the processed files make the archive useful.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

Waiting too long: start capture early — historical baselines are invaluable.
Poor metadata: every file must include timestamp, server, and capture method.
Single point of failure: avoid only one uploader or seed. Use multiple volunteers and services.
Legal overshare: redact private info and secure consent to avoid takedowns.

Actionable checklist you can start now

Create a public coordination document and invite volunteers.
Set up a simple scraper: capture the top 50 market items hourly and store as CSV.
Run an OBS profile for daily town screenshots and a naming convention.
Plan and record three oral-history interviews; transcribe and publish them with consent.
Upload a mirror of your first datasets to Internet Archive and generate SHA256 checksums.

Final thoughts: why your archive matters

MMOs are complex socio-economic systems. When a server sunsets, not only does code vanish — entire player economies and human stories disappear. A community archive preserves more than numbers; it preserves memory, rules of play, and the choices players made when economies inflated, crashed, or adapted.

In 2026, with better tools and community awareness, we can create archives that are both rich and accessible. Whether you're preserving a New World server or another community, the best time to act is now.

Get involved — call to action

Start your preservation project today: create that coordination channel, capture your first market snapshot, and schedule an interview. If you're building a New World archive or want to join an existing initiative, post a note in your community hub with your role and availability. Share manifests on GitHub, pin your datasets on IPFS, and upload a first batch to the Internet Archive — then tell the community where to find them.

Preserve the economy. Preserve the stories. Make sure the world you loved is not lost when the servers turn off.

Unknown

Contributor

Senior editor and content strategist. Writing about technology, design, and the future of digital media. Follow along for deep dives into the industry's moving parts.