Dossiers · 14 verified stories

Each dossier is a story told through the documents that prove it. At the bottom of each one are the exhibits it refers to; within the text, the badges F T V tell how much each claim is worth.

• 1Two hundred and ten seconds: the leak's birth certificateSeptember 1, 2009The file that gave birth to the world scene of private servers carries a date down to the second, and the port written in its own header.
• 2The Mongkok sign: what LongJu means2007-2010For seventeen years European private servers called themselves "LongJu" without knowing it was Metin2's official name in Hong Kong and Taiwan, taken from the publisher's own building.
• 3Not a theft: a migrationMay 2009 – April 2010The scene tells the story of a heist. The documents tell of a publisher merging two servers after "many months of testing," an industry that rents all its own iron, and a file that is the byproduct of a move.
• 4The prehistory: a Metin private server in 20052005-2008The scene dates the first Chinese private server to 2008. A domain that was never re-registered preserves a 2005 gear shop priced in RMB, and inside a package from November of that year is the proof of how the game was translated.
• 5Dead of disinterest: the end of yt2.rar2009-2010The mother archive of the leak wasn't taken down by a legal notice. The architecture of the service that hosted it explains why it vanished on its own.
• 6Chinese Metin2 never closed2004-2013The scene believes the Chinese edition was shut down by a state order in April 2008 and that the leak is its consequence. The order is real, but it hit a different game.
• 7The Italians of May 2009May-July 2009Four months before rain published the files, an Italian private server on an OVH dedicated box was already running Run Up's database. Proof comes from a 677 KB archive that ended up, two months later, in the hands of a passing American.
• 8The Christmas that never was: dating the source code theftSeptember 2013 – January 2014The second leak, the one of the code, had no date. A forgotten tarball that preserves the original modification times, and an Easter event without its Halloween, narrow the window from ten weeks to two.
• 9The law has three geographies2009-2023In Germany, people were prosecuted for copying the code; in Turkey, the game itself was prosecuted; in China, convictions came for Metin 1 and never for Metin2. The first public act in the world against private servers was signed not by a rights holder, but by a prefect.
• 10The password that crossed three countries2009-2014Anyone who ran a private server between 2010 and 2011 worked inside the home folder of a man they never met. And in 2014 a Czech forum was still publishing his password.
• 11Forty thousand two hundred fifty: Ymir's numbers2003-todayThe scene calls its own copies "34k", "40k", "40250" as if they were version names. They are the internal revision numbers of the company whose code had been stolen, and the game still prints them.
• 12What the scene knows, what we know2024-2026The most serious public reconstruction of the leak is Exynox's, from within the Western scene (March 2024). It has the artifact, and guards it better than anyone. This archive has the story around the artifact. The comparison, point by point.
• 13The fan who bought the rights2016-2026In March 2026 Metin2 returned to China in an official edition, with a proper license and state approval. The publisher is a Xi'an company born around the old game.
• 14The 2004 client existsSeptember – November 2004For twenty years the scene had given up every 2004 Metin2 client as lost. The build of the second closed Chinese beta had survived on a CD bundled with a magazine for kids, and today it reads byte for byte.