The golden rule

The archive documents facts, dates, names, fingerprints and addresses. It does not redistribute, mirror or link to stolen material. A fingerprint (MD5, SHA-1, byte count) is documentary data, like a book's page number; an archive is another matter. This rule is what makes the whole body of work publishable, and what tells a museum apart from a dump.

Corollary: for every exhibit, the showcase states whether a copy is physically kept in the private archive. Stating it is an act of responsibility, not an offer.

The hierarchy of evidence

1. Dated period document: a post with its timestamp, a ruling, a press release, an archived web page. An address containing a typo or a datable structure dates itself. Marked F.
2. Metadata: the gzip header, the modification times inside a tar, the TimeDateStamp of a Windows executable, an image's EXIF, the last-modified date declared by a server. They cannot be backdated without breaking the file. Marked F.
3. Multiple independent testimony: three unconnected accounts that agree.
4. Single testimony = a lead, not a fact. Marked T. A testimony must be processed: who is speaking, when they registered, what they get wrong within the sentence, who cited them afterward.
5. Rumours and legends: recorded as rumours, because they are part of the community's history. Marked V. When a rumour is proven false it becomes a debunking, S, and stays written down: debunkings are worth as much as finds, because they keep the road from being walked twice.

An inference drawn from several converging pieces of evidence, without the direct document, carries I and declares itself as such.

The new danger: slop

In 2026 the top search results are infested with AI-written pages that summarize other pages, without primary sources. These are circular sources: two sites saying the same thing may have copied the same hallucination. Confirmed case: an "encyclopedic" page inventing a lawsuit that never existed; a Metin2 GM tutorial on a Taobao domain with commands that do not exist. Rule: if a claim does not trace back to a document, a dated post, or a signed article, it does not go in.

Dating an object

The techniques that produced the dates in this archive:

• The gzip header carries the moment of compression. That is how game0901.tar.gz has a date to the second.
• The modification times inside a tar date every file it contains, and the last of them sets a terminus after which the archive was closed.
• The PE TimeDateStamp dates a game binary; but it dates the packer's stub in installers (Inno Setup → 1992, WinRAR SFX → 2006): it only holds for real binaries.
• EXIF dates artwork better than file names do; a Korean .swf from 2003 contains no text, only images.
• Internal dates (a VERSION.txt, a changelog, a memo in the code) are worth as much as metadata, when they agree with it.
• Fingerprint comparison: two objects with the same MD5 or SHA-1 are the same object, whatever name they carry. That is how the "2004 Beta Client" turned out to be the 2005 Chinese client.
• A national archive is not needed: WARP, OASIS and NCL-TW are public-sector legal deposits, never extended to online games.

The passerby

The copies that survived did not come from those at the center of the scene, but from those who never deleted anything: this archive's three central copies had passed through the hands of a Pole, an American and a Brazilian who had nothing to do with the scene.

The words

The wrong word costs years. In Korean, "private server" (사설서버, 프리서버) returns nothing; "Chinese Metin" (중국메틴) returns everything. In Turkish, metin means "text". mt2.5.zip is a music tracker. The walls move both ways: a site closed today can reopen tomorrow, and must be rechecked every pass.

What is closed forever

• yt2.rar as bytes: lost, with proof. It does not reopen without a new fact.
• Period copies of the 2009 leak kept by third parties: none exist.
• The official Hong Kong clients as bytes: lost.
• The "second witness" for the VPS-lease thesis: sought in five languages, does not exist.
• The "Metin2 2004 Beta Client": it is the Chinese client from September 2005.
• The national archives of Korea, Japan and Taiwan, for this subject.

Where the rest is

This archive is the public part of a private research undertaking: nine campaigns between August 15 and September 6, 2026, more than thirty internal dossiers, over two thousand documents and eleven hundred period pages. The codes in the "ref." column of the timeline (q3, g0, k6, i5…) are the internal reports backing each line: the public dossier cites them, the private one keeps them in full. Anyone who wants to verify a line may ask for its report.