The Enlightened One is correct, let me expand on what he is saying. The game is an MMO and a single universe, and on top of that they want items to be of value and traded. So this pretty much rules out people running their own servers that are connected to the universe, because there will have to be a database backend to keep track of the items for players to travel between servers, and they can’t leave the door open to trusting information sent to them by third party servers, IE dupped items. And the game state can not be run locally for the same reason, data integrity. So we have to play in their environment to make this work.
Now for each player to have their own environment this would require cpu to render the chunks of the world, RAM to keep track of the world around the player, and storage for the chucks to be unloaded into as the player walks around, and logs off. Server resources cost money whether you pay for them or not. The problem is the amount of resources required to give each player their own starting environment will not make business sense. That is why if you just buy the game you will have to play on public servers or on someones that is paying for it, because all of the players being on the same servers helps to reduce the cost maintaining them per player. However if your willing to shoulder the ongoing cost they will provide you with your own environment.
