Yeah, I've looked on the cs.rin.ru thread and you used to be able to run hacked clients on private servers (I've done this, in fact - I couldn't convince my friends to actually buy the game so I had them pirate it instead and run it on my self-hosted server), but funcom fucked with the netcode to make clients phone home more or something. I think it may be possible to hack unlock the DLCs for singleplayer, but even there the newer shop and battlepass stuff is weirdly obfuscated and locked away.

Just absolute scum shit: if a company wants to sell cosmetic DLCs for use on their own network of servers, whatever, that's scummy but they're owning, controlling, and providing the ecosystem for that. But when you're talking about privately hosted servers outside that ecosystem they should have free reign to do whatever they please, and the same for singleplayer ecosystems.