Pokémon World Online
History
When the game had first launched back in December 27, 2007 - it was created and worked on by Kyro, alongside with childhood friend Zammbi. With the first beta release in early January 2008, the team saw their online game prosper. Within the first year, the game was getting nearly 500 connections per day. By the end of the second year, that number doubled. In the later stages of Pokemon World Online - Kyro had left in order to focus on his other projects including Pokemon Battle Arena and Monster Ranch. Zammbi took over as project manager in his place.
On September 26th, 2011, the server experienced unexpected and prolonged downtime due to issues with Paypal. Paypal had frozen Kyro's account (which was used to store PWO's funds) and would not explain the situation when initially asked about the problem. In response to these events, the staff planned on integrating a new, cheaper server to host the game on. In addition, Zambii (the project director of the time) contemplated finding a new payment system in order receive donations to fund the server. He resorted to receiving the donations on his own account for a time.
Following the C&D order, on 23rd April 2011 it was announced that Pokemon World Online will start up once again alongside CodeCore Entertainment. With Zammbi inactive, Shane and Xanatus assumed the role of project leaders after reviving the project, who decided to host the server in Sweden, due to the copyright laws in the country that are suitable for PWO to be hosted in.
On July 18th, 2011, a newly appointed PWO developer, Zidonuke (promoted July 14, 2011), deleted PWO's data and server-side coding. The issue began when he became frustrated with criticism from the community through the IRC, and attempted to delete the channel. He also attempted to enforce a rule that prohibited staff from joining the channel lest they be banned from all facets of PWO. [1] However, due to great opposition from the community, he revoked his actions. As consequence to his behavior, he was banned from the chat room. However, he continued to communicate with the channel through other means, even though it was unwanted by most of the channel users. This constant, negative communication continued to put a strain between Zidonuke and the community.
After Zidonuke hacked into the IRC accounts of Vetle, Zammbi, and Xanatus, a log of a conversation between an admin of the channel, Zukiedo, and Zidonuke was posted on the forums. The log contained evidence of Zidonuke being corrupt, and after noticing the posts Zidonuke altered the contents of Zukiedo's threads and banned him from the forums. Several users, angered by the cover up, posted the logs as well which ended up with several of them being banned and their posts removed. Soon after, Zidonuke announced that he would delete the game and its database and proceeded to do so [2] [3]. In response to the actions that took place, Crenel (Another staff member) created a blog post which discussed the future of Pokémon World Online and explained Zidonuke's history. Zidonuke was immediately removed from staff, and the game and Forums were restored by August 15th, 2011. However, Zidonuke had released game data (such as usernames and passwords of all members) during the down time, and every registered user had to perform a password reset in order to be able to use PWO's services.
PWO was able to recover from those various situations despite the occurrence of later DDOS attacks. As of this writing, no other notable instances have occurred and the game continues to thrive.
Helpful information
Useful links
- Pokemon World Online Website
- Forums
- Playerdex
- Discord Chat
- Serebii
- Bulbapedia (Our very own article)
- Complete Pokédex of All Pokémon
References
- ↑ http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/683/zido.png/
- ↑ Zidonuke's server message before the deletion
- ↑ Zidonuke's chat message before the deletion
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