Without the lobby server, people all over the world could only access the offline mode only. And since the PS2 was region locked, chances are anyone with an American, Canadian, European, South American, Australian, Indonesian, or wherever PS2; you could not out of the box play the game at all or even it's offline mode. You would either need a Japanese PS2, soft mod or hard mod your own region's PS2, or use a PS2 emulator such as PCSX2. This not sit well with the community, and work to reverse engineer the lobby server began with the Coldbird team; a group consisting of Coldbird, NCDyson, Mugi, Belldandu and many more. Each had a hand in the project including emulating the old lobby server, translating parts of the game, replacing the UI, patching the game to connect to their new static IP fragment.coldbird.net and working on building a website that would display area servers that connected to the lobby server as well as players online. This ran for a time from December 24th 2013 to August 12th 2016, due to complications between the fan base developers and the player base at the time.
(they had also tested on coldbird.net:49000 hack.ilp.moe:49000 at times)
Thankfully the lobby server emulator was made open source for awhile on GitHub and a community known as .hack//fragment Netslum Server, led by Alkalime and Bison at the time, stepped in to continue the basics of the emulated lobby server on a new static IP at a.dothackers.org. And soon later a community known as Fragment Resurgence led by Slyestral brought the player base back to the game. On August 13th 2016, the lobby server emulator was back online. After February 2021 Slystral would step down and hand ownership of Fragment Resurgence over to Alkalime. After September 2022, operations would switch hands from Alkalime to 1UP for the lobby server & website and continues to operate to this date!
A few things from Area Server are not functional i.e. password required servers, for the most part both the Area Server and the Lobby Server currently are fully functional. The Netslum community has even gone a step further and fixed the limitations of the Coldbird team and restored full access to the Guilds, BBS, Rankings, and Mailer that were absent since 2007 thanks to Zachmon and further improved thanks to formlesstree4.
Even though this game originally operated with the intent of selling only in Japan and keeping it's online service up for 1 year after release. The fan community has done amazing work throughout the last 16 years making this game accessible to the general public who still have an interest in this cult classic.
A game that enabled those who played the original quadrilogy of Infection, Mutation, Outbreak, and Quarantine to play with their own custom characters, hours spent grinding levels, and obtaining rare items and even building custom fields and dungeons for their friends to play to this day. Hours have spent doing the unthinkable so that everyone world wide can gather and play .hack//fragment
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