HOW DID IT START?

    Two years and a few months ago... Do you know what? BloodyShade published his awesome guides to leaked DE server and started helping people, who were trying to run their own private servers. Like a lot of other DE fans I have immediately downloaded the image and started messing with it.

    It was meant to be just for myself, but I worked on it really hard and spent countless hours configuring stuff, discovering monster ids, figuring out how map files work, how to add / change stuff in INF files, how to get updater working. Then I realized I’ve created pretty neat server and felt like sharing it. To be honest I didn’t have any DE friends, I used to play alone or with real life friends who abandoned DE long ago. But … I have known one guy, whom I helped to play HellDK (Chinese private server, update procedure wasn’t easy and guides were only in Chinese) so I asked him to join me on my server – I even created simple registration script for him and my brother. That guy is [GM]Six, who rejoined GM team this year.

    We had fun, 3 guys with GOD privileges – summoning mobs, creating items … It gets boring and you think you can do more… Shortly after that I met Andre ([GM]Two (left looong ago)) and his brother Viktor ([GM]Five) who wanted to host their own private server, so I joined them with my work. At first we used to host it on my laptop / Five’s computer – just for us and a couple of friends and their friends and.. . We’ve paid our first dedicated server 50:50 and started TDE opened for everyone who wanted to play.

    Basic idea was – private server with all stuff available to non-donating players as well as donating ones, balanced game, caring GMs… It worked and we had more and more players. Oh yea, I have almost forgotten to list our first GM team:

    [GM]Zero – I don’t even remember how did he join us and how did he get so much power, but he was really nice guy, I liked him + he did a lot of work

    [GM]Two - already mentioned

    [GM]Three – If I remember correctly, it was friend of [GM]Two from Portugal – I didn’t really know him

    [GM]Four – same story, USA, made 2nd design of our updater

    [GM]Five – Vicke, let’s say we owned TDE 50:50 (and we still do)

    [GM]Six – it’s weird, but he joined the team as last GM before launching, even though he was first person on this server

    [GM]One - :)

    So yea, we were ready to launch TDE for public but we didn’t have any homepage… Sadly I was the only one capable of writing one, even though I never considered myself to be web designer (I hate it, it’s boring :D )Honestly… I suck at it, look in the HOMEPAGE section.

    11.5.2009 12:00 GMT … Server was opened! I knew how many players were registered in database, so I was sure we won’t have many players. But still I was amazed how they began to appear out of nowhere, gaining their first levels, talking with GMs :) It’s nice to see your work in action.

FORMER AND ACTIVE GMs

    My memory isn’t that great and it’s been 2 years ago, so I’m going to take it faster…

    [GM]Seven - Gunnar joined month after server was started, I really liked him, and we used to talk in-game a lot. So I made him a GM (One of my best decisions). He’s currently inactive, but he was one of best GMs – also one of the first to get DB access.

    [GM]Eight … Ummm… Let me remember. If I remember it right, he left us 2 times – 1st because he discovered some dirty stuff about one GM (don’t worry, it wasn’t that bad and he got punished ;) ) and he didn’t like the atmosphere in GM team overall. He rejoined our team when he calmed down and … Then he left again – this time because of his own dirty stuff. Nothing serious – it was partly my fault, since he kept donating although he couldn’t afford it, so I forbid him to do it anymore… He created himself money with GM command and bought points… But he felt like he had to go and … we all agreed.

    [GM]Nine – actually 2 guys, both failed. First one abused his powers to give money to friends and second… Just disappeared.

    [GM]Ten – really dedicated guy, spent a lot of time on server… His visions were different to mine so he left to create his own server – which closed shortly after opening. Also had some dirty stuff going on him, if you remember the exploit with free sapphs :P Aaaand abuse of GM power towards his friends

    [GM]Eleven – "NAJLEPSI GM VSETKYCH CIAS" - his own words :D The only guy in GM team, who speaks my native language. He’s the most active of all GMs, I still admire myself for making him a GM ;) Paradoxically he waited the longest to get GM powers of all other guys here. At first he got forum mod powers only. I don’t know why, but I still wasn’t sure about him, so it took really long time. But it was worth it, no other GM did as much work as he did

    [GM]Twelve - Honestly, you can’t hate this Finnish guy, he’s very likeable, funny and ... A troll :D He joined us like a year ago and since then he’s made many enemies and a few friends :)

    [GM]14 – latest addition to our GM team, she’ s really nice and hardworking. Every SHer banned in last 3 months is most likely her work.

SERVER HACKING

    Yup, we’ve been “hacked” multiple times, but we always survived, since we're doing regular backups. Once it was really funny, some players might remember server DK2INT. Well, they hacked our website, stole all scripts, crashed server… Anyway they never admit that they did it. This was funny since they stole my scripts with all their holes and bugs. They even used unfinished version of character deletion – it didn’t check if you were really owner of this char, so you could easily delete any character on the server. And that even happened, but I’m innocent here… Umm… A bit :D I just told one guy and he told another and… Next morning their server was pretty empty. They even used our market with … really neat bugs and exploits…

    Sometimes some asshole finds another exploit in DE server and crashes server… It’s boring and lengthy to fix them, but possible.

    I have to mention one name here, BloodyShade. From all the people I know - he is the one with biggest DE knowledge and always willing to help me.. Thank you very much! Without him we would be already closed, dead, ... (please don't try to contact him, he already left DE for good)

THE UPDATER

    I guess I was the first guy to use DK2 updater on private server based on this leak. It’s pretty easy, you just got to do some hex editing and you need to understand how it works. It had some bugs and limitations so I decided to write our Updater from scratch

DK2 updater TDE Edition :]


... with facelift by [GM]Four


Our Updater v1

THE HOMEPAGE

    As I’ve told you, I’m not web designer and I don’t like doing it. Even though we (me and Salaamek) created new web and on 18.7.09 finally launched our “alien” website with USERCP. Lately we improved design of our web to current state.

My first attempt, we used it for more than 3 months


"Alien" TDE web


Improved version (current state)

THE FUTURE?

    And here we go, one of the biggest private servers (I guess the biggest one based on DEv2). So what’s next? I can’t tell you now, it wouldn’t be a surprise then.

[GM]One