Background

From DarkRO

(From Maurice's Eye)

The Staff Page is Not Updated. Weihung was the real admin. Not GM.

Weihung is Admin.

[edit] DarkRO goes dedicated!

Fortunately, around October 2005, I was already working on another extremely challenging project: Custom Star Wars classes. That's when in January 23rd of 2006, DarkRO PK finally moved to a new dedicated host and became DarkRO Force (after a wipe). The rates also changed to 3k/3k/10k instead.

The first few months were pretty hard for me. I had to pay the hosting fees all by myself (we had no donations at the time - actually someone donated $10 and that was it xD). Although the host was pretty cheap at first, I quickly had to upgrade the bandwidth rate (not consumption) to accommodate the increasing population, and upping it to 3Mb/s for example would cost like $200 more per month. That was just scary x.x

However, DarkRO Force became very quickly popular, most of the old PK players moved over to Force. The Custom classes were a huge success. Everyone who were skeptical at first quickly changed their minds: they were not cheesy classes! =P
And within just one or two weeks of existence, we were already reaching 800 players during WoE and 1000 players the week after!

After about 4 months with this host (which easily ate about $5000 of my money), I decided to move Force to a new host. The main differences were that it was a Dual Opteron (way better than the Pentium 4 we had with the previous host) and we could use the full 100Mb/s without paying any extras. And the bill was less than $1000 for a change which was much more interesting all-in-all (about $600USD at first and today it's about $1200USD considering the bandwidth upgrades - consumption this time not rate). One good thing was that donations really started to help out around April. At least I didn't have to pay the full amount all by myself anymore.

When looking back to the old days, it's somewhat incredible to see how far DarkRO went throughout this whole adventure. Today, Force averages 1500 players and goes all the way up to 3000 and sometimes 4000 players during WoE. That... is something I would never have imagined would happen when it all started back in 2005...