Any info on the history of Ragnarok and gravity-related incidents?

[Kolby]

So I've heard a short snippet about the story that files were leaked that formed the basis of the then RO emulator(eathena?) and there was another story that said if the files weren't leak then gravity would have gone the other way which could have been a better direction for the game I find it highly interesting imo it's just a fascinating story as I was too young back then to understand anything other than jellopy and killing porings in prontera filds.

TLDR; if you have any info on some RO history please do share them thanks

[distilled1]

I don't know much about data leaks forming RO emulators. However, I've read about some interesting controversy surrounding RO's development history, and about Samsung buying out Gravity corp.

You can read more about it here:
https://ragnarok.fandom.com/wiki/Ragnarok_Online (At the bottom of the page)

Towards the end of the closed beta testing for the original Korean servers of RO (kRO), it was announced that the game will be released as a subscription-based game, much like many other MMORPGs in 2002. Some of the beta testers were upset and made numerous hacks on the RO servers. The hacks crippled the game so much so that Gravity Co. pretty much went bankrupt. In an effort to save the company, Samsung Electronics offered to buy them out. To watch over their new investment, Samsung appointed a manager to oversee development on RO. This manager wished to reshape the game into his own idea. This caused many of the original developers and the lead designer of the game to quit mid-development in rebellion. As such, many of the original concepts for RO were never fully implemented into the game. The game continues to suffer issues from the games troubled development.
These problems continue to exist to this day, even after the implementation of the Renewal update.

here:
https://ragnarok.fandom.com/wiki/Kim_Hakkyu

and here:
https://www.neoseeker.com/forums/2910/t131670-everyone-just-loves-samsung/

It often makes me wonder just how spectacular of a game Ragnarok Online could have been had Kim Hakkyu stayed in charge. The game likely wouldn't have been so pay to win, and I imagine it would have been a lot more polished and balanced.

[Playtester]

The game being P2W doesn't have much to do with Kim Hakkyu. Granado Espada and Tree of Savior aren't exactly less P2W.

Kim Hakkyu probably wouldn't have allowed for RO to become as unbalanced as it became after episode 10ish, though. Renewal probably wouldn't have happened either. He's pretty good in game design, but I don't think he's very good in regards to marketing.

It's also not only Kim Hakkyu. A lot of the original developers left Gravity and joined Kim Hakkyu. It gets pretty obvious when you reverse engineer the server source code, because then you see how developers desperatively tried to fix skills with "bandaids", obviously not understanding how the existing code works (as they haven't written it).

Also I highly doubt that the Aegis files leaking really hurt Ragnarok Online in the long run. The leaks are what eventually formed the community, all the DB websites where you can look up stuff for example. Being able to know the drops rates and spawn rates and how all the mechanics work in detail up to the line in the source code strongly helped with all the guides. This is a luxury other MMORPGs never offer.

I'd go so far and say that the strong community formed around Ragnarok Online is what kept the game alive still 18 years later. While many other MMORPGs that never had any leaks and probably had less bugs, better controls and a fixed development team died.

@Kolby
eAthena is just based on jAthena and jAthena mostly got their data from packet capturing not from leaks. Of course there were some leaks, most notably the database files that are just lying around on the server and can be read by everyone. This helped to get exact drop rates, monster stats and spawn rates. Most of everything else was just a community effort. People actually went on official server, moved to all the NPCs, noted down there coordinates, wrote down the dialogues, etc.
There were even bots that teleported around just to count monsters for maps there weren't any leaks for, so we could conclude spawn rates.

The only true leak is the official Aegis emulator, which also resulted in several private server, especially early on, before eAthena got popular (long time after Kim Hakkyu already left). Of course Aegis is also used to run tests to figure out how things work. And it allows reverse engineering too, though only few people are capable of doing that.


I probably know a lot of Ragnarok Online fun facts, but it's hard to just grab them from my memory. I'm better at answering direct questions.

[Nairanduo]

So I've heard a short snippet about the story that files were leaked that formed the basis of the then RO emulator(eathena?) and there was another story that said if the files weren't leak then gravity would have gone the other way which could have been a better direction for the game I find it highly interesting imo it's just a fascinating story as I was too young back then to understand anything other than jellopy and killing porings in prontera filds.

TLDR; if you have any info on some RO history please do share them thanks

I was allowed to share some information by my friend who thoroughly investigated the history of Ragnarok Online(and by extension, Gravity CO). This will go into the company more than the game but it is related.

After the development of Arcturus, they were looking for ideas on how to expand the storyline from the main game. The very, very, very first draft of Ragnarok Online was actually Arcturus Online until they decided to shift direction into Lee Myung-jin's Ragnarok Online. They brought back Kim Hakkyu and the majority of his team from Arcturus to work on Episode 0(what we know as Alpha build).

Forwarding in the timeline, Gravity had a power struggle when a new management took over. There's some undisclosed information that I can't share but there were a lot of problems and a lot of fights regarding the fate of Arcturus, Ragnarok Online(in-house development at the time) and mentions of finances of Bosses taking company revenue to themselves. Among many other things. The company struggled with money. Decisions had to be made. So when the decision of Ragnarok Online were officially stated to have a subscription system it infuriated the players so much that a group of hackers went out of their way to destroy the game. Data leaks was mostly ill-intended to leave it open sourced for modding(something Korea takes extremely seriously) and for other Korean players to profit from opening their own servers. They partially succeeded with their plan and would(to this day) have the capacity to destroy the game completely had Samsung not stepped in to save Gravity. Somewhere along the line of this, Kim leaves.

It is never confirmed why Kim and his team actually left, other than a letter stating that it had nothing to do with the shift of the company, or about Samsung. He claims it was for his own personal reasons and mostly implicated that he just want to make games. And so the company were just left there. A lot of speculations and common theories was that Samsung pushed Kim out through work harassment but once again, nothing is confirmed. As someone pointed out, the replacers merely band-aided the coding without knowing what they were really doing. It isn't sure what exactly made RO into what we know today, whether it was Samsung or the new people, but something went down. And history repeated itself once again with RO2.1 where a lot of members that worked there simply packed their bags and left due to disagreements.

The blame is both on the hackers and whatever really went down during development that everybody keeps lip tighten about. If they had done things differently in-house, and Kim had stayed, then perhaps we would see a vastly different game from what we know today. Unfortunately I cannot say more. But that happened.