Originally Posted by Zegridathes

regardless of what the ToS says... there is nothing 'illegal' about breaking a ToS, but if you cause them financial harm in your breaking the ToS, you can be held civilly liable (read: sued).

Regardless of what ToS say, reverse engineering something is neither illegal or infringing on any intellectual property rights. You just happen to write some code that does the exact same thing as their code.

Also, don't forget the way the server is structured... there is actually at least 3/4 servers: probably a login server (so logging in is separate from the island you eventually connect to), the actual game server, the communication/guild server and the myshop server. The trick becomes reverse engineering the way information is passed over the network and creating a program to act as the 'server' and sending the appropriate messages at the appropriate times to each user while maintaining the state of the world.

At least this is the way I see/understand it.

But, I'd totally be willing to help with something like this.