| A Brief History of RagnarokHQ | ||||
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RagnarokHQ.com was formed in April of 2002. Nuke and Fuse both real life friends got together in early 2002, and begun work on the MMPGaming.com website. Several months had passed, to which produced several designs. In March, they finally decided to register a domain name. Since MMORPG websites were a new exhibit to the internet at the time, the idea seemed very broad. Fuse had started playing the game Ragnarok Online. At first it was innocently enough a leisure amount of time invested until his whole spring break was blown away playing it. Nuke decided to get involved and made a character. Soon a friend of both Nuke and Fuse, MrKillington, joined the force. Even a few people from that original spring break grind joined in. Dialtone/Tornado, and Eva/Zan joined into the HQ and were appointed as staff members. Responsible for mostly news postings they helped enormously when the site had first opened. A set of friends from Florida, Fermin and Leo produced what was probably one of the first english beta two maps for the game. They also provided lots of translated information, such as the card information which launched. Fuse soon gained access to the newly released beta 2 (korean version) several months before it was to become available to english users. Not only did this prove our popularity, but it made RagnarokHQ and leader among it's peers. In late August of 2002, our forum was hacked, which resulted in a mass prune of all of our posts. From here on our community took a hit that would take time to recover from. At the time we had over 10,000 members, 15,000 threads, and over 100,000 posts that had been made onto our forums. The second blow came from the iRO GMs inadvertently removing us from the official fansite list. They could not access their FTP to make any changes to the site because the server was on lockdown due to the recent hackings, which resulted in the aegis server software being leaked (aka. official server software, private servers begun cropping). According to sources, the people responsible were not from Apezro as many had thought. Instead it was from a secondary RO hacking site, called the-gleek.com. Supposidly gleekers got together and bruteforced the password. For some reason the GMs never decided to change the password to something difficult, it was cracked within days. That's when the downfall of official RO had begun. For months players had been playing for free, then they switched to pay-to-play. Right around that time the private servers were being created and people were working on figuring out how to run aegis successfully under a myriad of environments. Fall of 2003 rolled around and two new administrators - gn0me and Ikarius came to town. Noteably one generous stranger as well, Antialize. Ikarius came first, and tried improving the ROHQ2 site design, and worked with fuse on the site. This was right around halloween. Also during that month, Antialize had emailed Fuse his creation, dubbed the 'Reverse Skill Toolkit'. Which was basically the first ever skill simulator in english. The second instance RagnarokHQ was a pioneer among its peers. He gave Fuse and RagnarokHQ.com exclusive rights to use it. At the time gn0me had created the version 3 site design. Several months passed... Finally in May of 2003, commerative of RagnarokHQ's first anniversary, the official fansite status was reinacted. We had once again reached a cornerstone in total number of registered users, and total concurrent number of users online at our forums. Over 50 members active on the site (not including guests), and over 300 users active on the forums. With Pak0 closing it's doors, we were in trouble. But just in the knack of time, we had someone offer to dedicate host us. From here two problems occured. First problem is a contributing member of RagnarokHQ ran a private server. Fuse was accessing this server to retrieve information about comodo to share with fellow ROHQers. A disgruntled ex-member of the site, decided to get back at the site by submitting a falsified report about not only fuse's involvement, but her own involvement in the matter. Her name Kalicia. This immediately resulted in our blacklisting on the official fansite status, our fear is that our numbers would lower. The second problem is word came from our host notifying fuse that he could not longer host us because it would cost him too much. To our suprise we had become that popular. It was unavoidable that RagnarokHQ would have to close down until the recent issues could be resolved. No estimate time of arrival on the new site was given, and to most users it appeared we were down for good. In August of 2003, fuse contacted Antialize. He was more than generous with time and effort being placed into the new site design fuse had created, rohq4. Taking all the previous problems into account (mostly bandwidth consumption was too much to handle). Through series of javascript, and iframe attributes, it cut the amount of bandwidth a considerable amount (nearly 70%). The site was entirely recreated. Taras, the man that ran the private server, and the one that Fuse was accusedly running, came along with the latest leaked aegis information. Since aegis was leaked it was undeniable that this information would be the most accurate. A site was created around this information. Our key features placed into this version was immersive. We had 5 main groups, and below that dozens upon dozens of subgroups. The main features were: News, Forums, Database, Gallery, and Downloads. All sections of the site were complete. The site remained in this state for a long time. In April of 2005, gn0me contacted Fuse reclaiming a leadership spot among us once more. The design of ROHQ5. This design and planning that took over a year, for over a year, but it just never happened. Fuse at the time didn't want to spend any time on the site due to the fact he was done with RO. Finally in August of 2005, gn0me agreeed to join fuse on working on the site. Unfortunately, gn0me then took up a job that required him to work more than full time, because gn0me was exceptional at his job working for a subsidary for eBay. Several months, it just came down to Fuse again. The site finally launched, completely unfinished November of 2005. In March of 2006, Antialize returned and got the databases up in running. He was solely responsible for it, aside from aquiring the database information, provided to him by Fuse. Fuse had made some leeway with the database, but not much due to the fact PHP's lack of support towards unicode. Even though Fuse's script mapped item names with korean data. It didn't solve the problem with mapping out the korean item names into the korean item pictures, and renaming those to english, it worked in only a small fraction of the instances. Antialize came along and showed the power of python. Not much later Antialize put his finishing touches on the datbases, and begun work on a backend for the DB mods, so they could modify this information in the future. And here we are today, several hosts, several site designs, several transitions of administrators and communities later. Fuse can only account for the fact that he started this site at the tender age of 16, and now is currently 21. The amount of knowledge learned from this experience has honed-in Fuse's skills into an intermediate programmer that knows all the basics and some advanced queries to make this and future sites tick. Something you may not know about RagnarokHQ: RagnarokHQ has always taken pride in it's diversity. We've had people from Europe, China, Japan, Malaysias, Americas, and Canada become regular members and actually work in staffing positions. Most recently in the past two years, since it took a while for RO to hit the southern asias, philippinos run rampant. Most others have learned to move on. | ||||
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Date: May 10th, 2008 | Online: 20 Guests, 0 Users
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