Research gaps and evidence needed
Research edition: 2026-10-28, incorporating archive round six. This is the work queue for completing the timeline, not a claim that every maintenance patch has been recovered. No emulator changes are authorized by this document.
The playable target follows original Thai Ragnarok Online from CBT through the state immediately before the announced 9 November 2010 Renewal maintenance. Alpha and international Beta are separately identified preludes. No Thai Alpha service has been established. Modern Classic, EXE, Revo, mobile versions and other regions cannot supply missing Thai dates by substitution.
What counts as closing a gap
Keep six fields separate: original publication date, archive capture date, announced test date, observed test availability, announced production date, and observed production availability. An article saying a feature is already present supplies an upper bound; it does not identify launch day. A manual patch download may precede activation. A later archive capture may preserve much older text.
For a historical rule, record region/server, effective period, exact quantity and units, rounding, prerequisites and exceptions. Prefer an original operator notice or guide with a dated version. A contemporary controlled observation can corroborate behavior. An emulator implementation, later recollection or foreign-region table is a candidate to compare, not sufficient proof of original Thai behavior.
For each recovered notice, save the original URL, actual resolved archive URL, title, publication/effective dates, source type, short evidence passage, retrieval status and content hash. Link-only records stay link-only until their bodies have been read. Failed retrieval is not evidence that a notice never existed.
Priority 1: establish the initial Thai rules
These gaps affect the starting experience and every later comparison. They should be resolved before selecting a historical beta implementation.
| Gap | Required proof | Productive sources and next action |
|---|---|---|
| Natural HP recovery in Thai CBT and OBT | Thai amount/interval measurements or specification identifying VIT, Base Level and MaxHP dependence; standing/sitting; timer resets; rounding and clamps. | The original Thai first-job guide is now recovered. Find earlier versions and contemporaneous Thai tests: its December 2003 capture cannot authenticate September 2002 rules. |
| Natural SP recovery in Thai beta | Exact interval or fixed-tick model, INT scaling and cap, sitting multiplier, weight/status suppression, and effective Thai date. | The March 2002 discussion and later March estimate disagree slightly. Recover the original calculation attribution through archives and seek an independent Thai measurement. Neither estimate proves Thai implementation. |
| Passive HP/SP recovery and potion scaling | Separate formulas and activation dates for natural recovery, passive skills and items; confirm MaxHP/MaxSP scaling, healing ranges and VIT/INT bonuses. | Recovered Swordman and Mage operator guides print 10-second passive tables, respectively 5–50 HP and 3–30 SP. Their effective dates and omitted scaling remain unresolved; the flat HP table conflicts with the BEEhive Beta 2 MaxHP claim. Do not resolve this from capture dates alone. |
| Weight cutoff and recovery exceptions | Exact >50% versus >=50% boundary; whether every natural/passive effect is suppressed; introduction date. | The Thai leveling guide and newly recovered interface guide both say weight over 50% suspends natural recovery. The latter also says items/skills can restore HP/SP and over 90% stops attacks/skills. Exact boundaries, passive exceptions and effective dates remain open. |
| Base/Job EXP requirements and award allocation | Complete versioned level tables plus first-hit, shared damage, extra-attacker, party, death, overflow and level-cap algorithms. | The same leveling guide supplies examples, not a complete allocation formula. Trace the conflicting party wording and the denominators behind percentage penalties. The early EXP-table URL is an unverified foreign lead. |
| Monster stats, AI, spawns and drops | Thai version-authenticated complete records, including map/count/respawn, attack timing, skill conditions, normal/MVP drop slots and probability units. | Reconcile existing RagnaDB and July 2003 Athena candidates against dated Thai tables. Find before/after tables for early rebalance notices; a statement that monsters changed cannot reconstruct their numerical endpoints. |
| Item healing, cards and shops | Actual healing ranges/scaling, card effects, prices and NPC availability tied to a Thai effective patch. | Compare the operator recovery-item table and card table with independently dated records. Their capture dates do not make all neighboring descriptions current. |
The fifth pass recovered passive-skill tables; round six adds original interface, basic-play and training guides. The interface guide corroborates weight restrictions, while the other guides add separately qualified death and tutorial rules. These passes did not authenticate the natural Thai beta HP/SP formulas or prove that the passive tables were complete live-server rules. A February 2003 discussion explicitly expresses uncertainty about HP; it establishes that discussion's uncertainty, not a universal absence of knowledge. A May 2003 reference to a Korean SP revision is a lead for the foreign antecedent, not the Thai transition date. High-INT behavior and congestion also confound remembered recovery speed.
Priority 2: close rollout dates and server-scope conflicts
| Stage | What is supported now | What would close the gap |
|---|---|---|
| OBT, Lutie, 1.5, 2.0, Comodo | Dates survive mainly through notice mirrors. Original CBT opening has stronger evidence. | Recover the original operator bodies and post-maintenance confirmation. Start with notice titles and dates in the Thai chronological mirror and JNet mirror, then match operator captures. Keep notices of planned dates distinct from completion reports. |
| Turtle/WoE, Juno, Wedding/Super Novice | Conditional schedules, with numerical balance details incompletely recovered. | Find final deployment notices, any postponement and complete balance tables. The Thai date of the recovery revision is a separate question from the episode label. |
| New Payon | Mirror schedule: Sakray 21 February and production 7 March 2005. | Recover original notice and completion evidence; confirm exact replacement maps, warps, NPCs and any moved quest locations. Preserve this as a separate stage rather than silently bundling it with another town. |
| Einbroch 10.1 | Schedule recovered: original September 28 notice schedules Sakray 3 October and main 17 October 2005. The manual-patch body repeats October 17. | Find successful deployment evidence and complete card/monster/quest tables. The original promises no reset/rollback/item-property loss. September 29 preloading is not feature activation. |
| Lighthalzen 10.2 | Production scheduled 21 February 2006. Thai Sakray availability on 7 February is corroborated by the same-day firsthand report. | Find successful February 21 main-server deployment evidence. Do not leave the test-server date described as wholly uncorroborated or promote it into a production date. |
| Noghalt 10.3 | Promotional interview names 8 August 2006 but displays 7 September. The 8 August NPC guide explicitly describes Thai Sakray receiving 10.3. September 2 council minutes discuss 10.3 as current. | Find original test/production schedules and completion notices. Resolve publication and server scope before treating August 8 as the actual production day. Confirm cooking, class-2 quest skills and dungeon entry requirements on production. |
| Hugel/Ninja 10.4.1 | Already present by the 5 February 2007 Gunslinger notice. | Recover the earlier Thai Ninja/Hugel notice and activation report. Do not use Korean January 2006 or iRO December 2006 dates. Determine whether maps and classes activated together. |
| Gunslinger 10.4.2, Veins 11.2 | Main updates announced for 27 February and 18 September 2007 respectively. | Recover completion notices and final weapon/skill/drop tables. Check whether boss HP/VIT revisions were already present in Thailand instead of applying a foreign bundle twice. |
| Rachel 11.1 | Contemporary Thai editorial naming exists. June 7 and June 13 player guides describe access and monsters; neither explicitly establishes Thai production launch. | Find the Thai operator rollout notice and date the recovered official quest 373 and quest 380. Their URLs survive in a July guide. Both bodies are now recovered; their publication dates and Thai activation dates remain unknown. |
| Nameless 11.3 | Exact Thai launch unresolved. | Search 2008 operator indexes for “Soldier of Fortune”, Nameless and 11.3; recover Thai completion notice. Japanese/iRO launch days and the later EXE release cannot fill this field. |
| Ash Vacuum 13.1 | Present by 23 May 2009. Newly recovered March 15 operator index lists an Ep.13.1 ASH VACUUM notice dated 3 March 2009. | Notice 10139 is now recovered. Its March 16 capture says “coming soon” without a textual rollout date. Find the later activation notice; March 3 remains an index-listed announcement date. Confirm WoE2/Godly prerequisites separately. |
| Encounter 13.2 | Present by 30 September 2009, according to an explicit Thai aside in Korean-update coverage. This improves the older November 2 bound. | Recover the Thai 13.2 rollout notice at or before September 30. Do not import the Korean Renewal mechanics described in the rest of that article. May–September is a useful search window, not a proven deployment interval. |
The newly recovered Novice Guild War notice explicitly reports a 26 September 2005 main-server update. Its later captured text includes a September 30 amendment, so not every rule can be assigned to opening day. The war schedule notice gives an October 25 start but conflicting September/October publication dates. Those dates and missing rewards/map data remain separate questions.
The September 6 Multiple Client notice now establishes a required September 7, 2005 client patch for supported multiple windows. The July 18 High-Class client notice supplies four filenames, not a complete server snapshot. The August 30 Zeny warning states a rounded 2,147 million per character; the exact integer cap, overflow behavior and introduction date remain open.
Priority 3: recover missing notice bodies and the final state
The final pre-Renewal stage needs the intervening 2009–2010 maintenance stream: balance fixes, item and monster revisions, NPC changes, event removals and persistent cash-shop effects. Episode 13.2 is the last identified major pre-Renewal content stage; its label does not specify the complete final state.
Round six recovered 25 more notice bodies from the 30 missing entries. The register now has 41 recovered, five missing, and one image-only notice. Remaining missing bodies are 013 (Training Ground problem), 014 (character deletion), 006 (Renewal welcome roundup), 034 and 035 (website maintenance). Both Friendship images remain unread. Failed/error responses are saved separately from source documents.
Use the recovered 7 October 2010 homepage and 10 November homepage as inventories of original link targets. The latter capture is after the cutoff; only explicitly earlier dates establish earlier activity.
| Official record | Recovered evidence and remaining work |
|---|---|
| Kafra Shop Update — recovered body | Published October 5, 2010 at 12:30; updated 13:30. Pegasus Scroll: 2,000 P Main / 3,000 P Free; sale ends November 2 before maintenance. Recover image-only products, exact reward probabilities and any extensions. |
| Special IP Bonus — recovered body | Published October 4. @Cafe only, October 5–November 2: EXP +50%, drops +30%, death EXP loss reduced 50%. Stacking and boundary times remain unknown; keep separate from base rates. |
| Trader Live — recovered body | Published September 14; named-realm sessions September 15–24 at 16:00. First ten qualifying players per round receive Rabbit Scroll. Actual session completion and random probabilities remain unverified. |
| RO Infinity Story — 17854 | Body recovered: October 18 at 16:00–November 17 submissions, with 2× EXP/drops conditional on 100,000 pictures and a later announced time. Neither completion nor bonus activation is established; do not carry post-cutover effects backward. |
| Class 3 manual patch — recovered body | 140 MB preparation download for November 9 Class3/Renewal. Body has no publication stamp and capture is after cutover. Download availability is not activation. |
| RO Retro — recovered body | October 11–November 10 contest; results scheduled November 12. Do not move post-cutover rewards backward. Sample nostalgic chat prices are not historical database evidence. |
| Infinity Friendship — wrapper recovered | Substantive body is image 1 and image 2. Neither image has been recovered/read; exact-image retrieval returned 404 in round six. Do not mark the notice complete or infer its contents from the title. |
| RO Meeting Guild — 12965 | Footer lead for operator meeting records; classify current behavior, requests and planned changes separately. |
| News index, news list type 1, news list type 3 | Recover dated index pages, follow their actual notice links and inventory maintenance gaps. Do not manufacture detail URLs or assume sequential IDs imply dates. |
The original Renewal notice calls its new client EP13.2.1 and schedules November 9. That is an excluded boundary. A complete last pre-Renewal snapshot still requires the preceding successful maintenance state and any server-specific exceptions; the notice alone does not establish every server's completion time.
Next research passes
- Recover Thai beta mechanics and their first documented changes. Log competing candidates instead of choosing a convenient modern formula.
- Work from the remaining bodies in the notice register and log each new retrieval result. Many earlier targets were recovered in round six; do not repeat the old missing count. For 2005 notices, use the actual CDX-discovered
/newscms/docs/…aspbody URLs; the originalStat.aspxtracker can have no snapshot even when its body survives. Preserve redirects and resolved capture dates. HTTP 429, 403, 404, 503 and timeouts remain retrieval outcomes, not historical conclusions. - Confirm the recovered October 17 Einbroch schedule actually completed, resolve the 10.3 test/production conflict, and recover the missing 10.4.1, 11.1, 11.3, 13.1 and 13.2 launch days.
- Recover image-based numeric tables for monsters, drops and quests. Retain the original image and a checked transcription; do not infer missing probabilities from prose such as “rare.”
- Build a dated inventory of smaller maintenance and event notices, then attach each confirmed change to its stage. Track coverage by month and evidence type rather than claiming completeness from an episode list.
Research inputs: round-six date/notice packet, round-six beta packet, round-five date/notice packet, round-five beta packet, timeline ledger, recovery evidence, beta round four, middle dates round four, and late dates round four. Research records and software verification remain separate gates; no stage becomes historically authentic solely because an emulator test passes.
Local extraction gaps now closed
The wider AEGIS search adds an archived rAegis community patch/data package, a reconstructed component/hook source tree and preserved RagnarokHQ import/data context. It does not establish an original Alpha/Beta server or a complete authenticated pre-Renewal installation. The rAegis zone code is a small patch of an existing ASB2 family; the 2009-named source tree contains Renewal-related identifiers. A distinct readable Abyss script remains a candidate rather than an authenticated replacement. These additions narrow local file/context gaps without closing historical applicability.
The follow-up recovered records from all 83 LDF variants and validated 8,226 exact row images against candidate MDFs. Log replay, active-log selection, checksums and SQL-engine reconciliation remain local tasks; the ASB5.5 card count discrepancy remains unresolved. See LDF validation.
The internet search adds a retained Alpha client whose 41 payloads agree across two endpoints, with 27 decoded GRFv0 carriers and 37 complete map triples in a nominal static overlay. This narrows the client-material gap but does not authenticate an official build lineage, matching Alpha server rules or every intermediate release. The later search found accessible Renewal bundles and a mirror matching existing Keldon paths/sizes; it did not verify a fuller historical pre-Renewal AEGIS chain.
The downloaded-material appendix supersedes earlier “not yet inspected” status for the Alpha GRF, readable MDF catalogs/primary rows, full loose spreadsheets, nested archive data and old-Morroc RAR payload. The Alpha carrier has 31 complete map triples; it does not identify the exact active 2001 map set or matching complete client. The extracted database profiles do not authenticate Thai beta formulas or the final Thai maintenance state. Eleven loose EP10 script paths contain palette bytes; other packages offer candidates, not proven same-era replacements.
The outside-evidence register identifies eight unresolved historical needs: Alpha build identity; early numerical rules; the complete patch/completion sequence; Thai applicability of conflicting profiles; matching client/patch lineage; realm/event/final-cutoff settings; actual wipes/conversions/bug lifetimes; and engine behavior for missing periods. Local decoder limits, binary analysis and release implementation remain separate work, rather than automatically becoming requests for outside sources.