"I'm taking three days of paid vacation in March," I said to my supervisor during one of our Friday bi-weekly meetings. When she asked where I was going, I told her I was visiting Korea. "Oh, good shopping there," she said. "Uh, yes," I responded, "very good shopping..." I left it at that. While it's a little unusual for me to take time off from work in the middle of a work period, I wasn't entirely comfortable explaining that it was for personal hobbies related to online gaming. Nevertheless, I was motivated to make another trip to the Gravity offices in Korea since there were interesting things afoot in the state of the game at the time, as well as a need to update the information gleaned from my last visit there.

While I was unable to meet Peter Kang or Christy Kay in person (as they were leaving Korea for the US), I did correspond with them through e-mail and telephone calls to set up a meeting with either Rex or Kris Na. When I finally arrived in Korea, it was finalized as a meeting with Kris Na, the International Marketing Manager at the Seoul HQ office. At the time, the reasons for the absence of Christy and Peter, along with the temporary suspension of the International Ragnarok Online (iRO) beta testing service were shrouded in semi-secrecy - so I was on a mission to clarify the situation for the general fans, as well as put a stop to a number of vicious rumors in circulation. However, this was back in March, so despite the interview a number of issues were not cleared up so I was unable to write a sufficient article in good faith (not to mention I was busy with my real job as well). However, as time went by things began to clarify a great deal - especially after the rather painful growing pains that the iRO commercial service endured during the first few months of operation (most notably the plunder of user information from the game servers by hackers).

I cannot claim to be the most unbiased person to ever put pen to paper, but I do my best to be as even handed as possible when dealing with sensitive subjects. So without further ado, I present the information from the interview that took place on March the 23rd, 2003:

I arrived at the Gravity HQ office a bit earlier than the time that was agreed on, but it turned out that I would have to wait a bit as Kris Na was out getting lunch with a few co-workers. I had a passing meeting with one of the executives after I accidentally stumbled into the developer's office space (what used to be the main office floor a year ago) on the 6th floor and was directed to the new marketing office location on the 4th floor. I was very surprised to learn that the Gravity offices had expanded beyond two floors - the company pretty much had run of the entire building. There was also quite a bit of fancy advertising material on display: the 6th floor foyer alone had a 40-inch plus plasma monitor displaying illustrations of the second string jobs from the game, along with a glass cabinet filled with a variety of promotional goods (Poring bottled water, music CDs, boxed puzzles, art books, etc.).

The International Marketing Office was pretty much vacant when I arrived there, but I was able to take a few candid shots of various employees enjoying their lunch on the premises on the way there. In comparison to my last visit a year ago, there were a lot more people occupying the equally larger work areas. It was getting fairly obvious that the company had changed quite a bit over the course of a year. This made it all the more surprising that they set some time aside to answer a few questions from a lowly fan-site operator. I found out later that the HQ office regularly accepts visitors from the Korean version of RO all the time - they even have a conference room set up on one of the lower floors (more on this later). Nevertheless, when Kris arrived we exchanged a few pleasantries and moved to a conference/presentation room a few doors down and began the interview.

After setting up my equipment to record the interview, I began by agreeing to submit this article to Kris before I released it. This was done partly to allow him to speak freely about what he knew and to obfuscate any sensitive information that the company wasn't comfortable about releasing. We then moved onto updating the information gleaned from my last visit to the offices. First on the list was the overall plan for the English speaking market - a rather sensitive issue for may Gravity watchers. Kris responded by informing me that Gravity was in the process of sending personnel to their newly established US branch in Marina Del Rey, California. Apparently, the servers for iRO had been sent to San Diego previously without employees and had been administrated through tele-commuting from South Korea. While this was a bit of an "open secret" at the time, it was interesting to hear it directly from a company source. He then informed me that the people being sent were there to form the nucleus of a dedicated customer service and technical support team for iRO to help administrate new servers being installed for iRO.

Kris then went on to clarify that the iRO client was specifically geared towards the American gaming market despite the "International" label. He indicated that was the principle reason why the servers for iRO were located in the US - the most important market would supposedly have the best service due to proximity. Admittedly, while the users from other countries were important to the game in terms of the raw number of users (and the associated fees charged for the service), iRO is mainly Gravity's flagship entry into the US computer gaming market - a place where Korean MMPORGs have failed disastrously in the past (specifically "Lineage" - the second version of which - "Lineage II" - is now being co-produced for release in western markets with cooperation from Lord British of "Ultima" fame). So for now, survival in and of itself is a sign of success. Recent news indicates that Gravity is finally gearing up for their promised European service (dubbed "eRO" by fans), so it should become more obvious what the scope of iRO service was meant to be.

However, advertising is still something that is not necessarily a high priority for iRO. Perhaps learning from the fiasco of Lineage, Gravity Interactive (the "nom de guerre" of the US branch office) is keeping a low profile, preferring to spend its money elsewhere - more than likely to improve customer relations and technical support at the office. Kris indicated that both Kristy and Peter's main mission on their arrival in the US was to gather intelligence on what media outlets were available to promote iRO. Since they were still in the process of researching at the time, the HQ offices didn't have a concrete strategy planned. Nevertheless, Kris did say that they would like to use the existing computer gaming press (magazines and online news sites) to place advertisements. While this may or may not have been something they had planned to do once they determined if it would be possible to do so, now seems to be a moot point. IRO seems to survive and grow - albeit slowly - through a combination of word of mouth by fans, personal endorsements by online celebrities (most notably web based comic artists such as Real Life Comics creator Greg Dean and Mac Hall collaborators Matt Boyd and Ian MacKellen) and the occasional news article. While the crisis that evolved from the burglary of user personal information from the game servers by hackers damaged the games reputation among some of its more loyal fans, apparently the press generated by the incident inadvertently put the game on the radar screen of many potential users through the numerous news articles the mainstream press wrote about it. It was an extremely thin silver lining for a maelstrom, but a small victory nonetheless.

I asked Kris what he knew about the number of registered users at the time of the interview, but he wasn't exactly sure as he indicated Christy was in charge of that information. Luckily I had some data handy as I spoke at length with Peter Kang about it over the phone prior to my visit to the HQ office. Apparently the projected number of users for the closed beta testing period was 30,000 accounts, with the reality being a little under 20,000 users registering altogether throughout the entire closed period. Presented with this information, Kris was able to estimate that they had probably exceeded the 30,000-user figure, as it was part of the reason for the go-ahead on the US branch office plan. He then went on to assure me that whatever form iRO was to take from the creation of the US branch - whether another beta test, a commercial service or anything else in-between - that it would be open to all potential users. It was evident that he personally had very high hopes that this would increase the number of users well beyond the projected number (whatever the new number happened to be). Although it apparently did reach close to this number shortly after the commercial service started, it seems a majority of registered players no longer login to the servers - for a variety of reasons ranging from being ejected for bad conduct to quit to quitting for personal reasons.

We then spoke about what happened at Electronic Entertainment Exhibition (E3). While he didn't go into very many details about what happened at the event, he indicated that both the gaming press and the other publishers received them very negatively. Apparently the press' main condemnation was that the graphics used in iRO were not as impressive as those in fellow MMPORGs "Shadowbane" or "World Of Warcraft" which also exhibited at the show. A few noted that it looked interesting to play, but not worth paying money for. However, Kris stated rather flatly that the main reason was that the game's nature was geared more towards Asian cultural values rather than western or American ones. I can only guess at what the specifics of this difference in values can be listed as, but it apparently is as good a theory as any. It's very telling when the gaming press didn't even mention iRO in passing in their reporting of E3, much less the mainstream news sources totally ignoring all the games from all eastern countries other than Japan. Needless to say, this was very disappointing to the company so they decided not to attend future E3 events. Nevertheless, it didn't discourage Gravity from giving the go-ahead for the creation of the Gravity Interactive offices and the commercial iRO service. What it did do however was make them cautiously optimistic about a chance of success, so they planned accordingly and started very small. Expansion from that small foundation is completely dependent on how iRO continues to survive.

The US branch of Gravity - Gravity Interactive LLC - is a registered company in the United States. Kris stated that the offices are based in their own rented building in Marina Del Ray, California; near the relocated IDC (Internet Data Center) that was once in San Diego. Initial capital was spent on purchasing improved telecommunication hardware to support the new servers in an effort to improve the game play environment, with a priority on hiring customer support (Game Masters or "GMs") and technical staff. Surprisingly, despite this bold move Kris took the pains to inform me that in terms of Gravity's overall international operations, the US (and therefore iRO itself) is not considered a major priority market by the HQ offices in Seoul. The expectations of the company are actually rather grim: they don't expect to make much money on iRO at all. However, in order for Gravity to claim the title of "International Online Game Publisher," it is essential for them to have a stable base of operations in the US and furthermore, to have some form of name recognition in the English speaking market in general. Taking things a little further in detail, Gravity Interactive LLC is actually quasi-independent from the Gravity HQ office in Seoul. The point to this situation being that the HQ offices in Seoul would not provide any funds to support the operations of Gravity Interactive LLC - which means that sink or swim, the US offices are pretty much financially independent of the parent company. However, apparently internal decisions are left up to the executive staff located in the US led by Peter Kang.

A while back, there were many rumors floating around that one or several US game publishers were willing to take the reins and publish the game for Gravity in the US and other western countries. Kris stated that there were a number of proposals drawn up, but they were all dropped. Apparently the company felt that they already had sustained enough outside investment in the game and decided they didn't need the marketing windfall. The belief that iRO is not a game suited to the mainstream US game market weighs heavily on Gravity from all supporting evidence, so they shied away from joint offers from domestic US companies. Kris indicated that Gravity was thinking about soliciting more general western investors, but stated that plans were nowhere near concrete on the matter.

However, this line of thinking lead to more interesting channels of expression. While the International Marketing Office has decided to divorce the game's connections to the original Korean comic book "Ragnarok: Into The Abyss" by Lee Myoung Jin - now being published internationally in English by TokyoPop - they decided that an accompanying anime would compliment the game well and provide collateral advertising. Since Gravity doesn't have any rights to the International or Korean domestic edition of the original comic (although they have a good relationship with the creator), they have decided that it would be better to create a new storyline around the game itself. Once the television series airs, they also want to publish a comic book form associated with the new story arc. Since the main objective of this is to create an additional character goods market for Gravity, the target market is mainly Korea and Japan (their largest user bases). However, after an initial release in northeast Asian countries, they hope to be able to release them in the west. While apparently it hadn't been decided exactly who was going to be the director (although it was established that the person would most likely be a Japanese national), Kris made it clear that the series was to be similar to the Bandai Entertainment "Dot Hack" series. Although there were some rumors floating around that a small animated film featuring characters from the RO series was from a "pilot intro" episode, this apparently was a "one-shot" short film made to be a game presentation introduction for the Korean Amuse World Game Expo (KAMEX) a few years ago. An unnamed Japanese production company did the short film, but Kris assured me that a different Japanese company would be doing the proposed Ragnarok Online anime. Kris also indicated that despite the changes that the game was going though along with the proposed anime, that the game's "family friendly" lack of blood and gore would remain consistent for all versions of the game.

We moved the discussion back to the game itself and Kris talked about the customer support/GM situation for iRO. At the time (and for several months afterwards), Gravity Interactive was interviewing native English speakers to fill staff positions. Christy was intended to be the head GM and was supposed to train the newly hired GMs to do the job of in-game administration and support. It was hoped that it would be possible to speak with GMs over the telephone as well as visit them in person at the office in Marina Del Rey. The overall objective was to have the servers staffed 24 hours a day and allow users to interact much more closely with game administrators than was possible in earlier incarnations of the game. Because of this, the main priority for staffing of the Gravity Interactive offices was for customer support staff. Since the prospective pool of employees was the general job market as well as current and past registered users, they were hoping to give prior notice to certain individuals before opening a general call for applications (possibly for the volunteers from the E3 show).

Because of the slim financial situation at Gravity Interactive, Kris stated that all promotional and marketing materials (if any) would remain as in-house production - from the Seoul HQ offices and then shipped to the office in California. However, they do plan to hire people to the job at the office in the US - possibly along with a professional writer - but that remains to be seen. Kris understood that the website and the game itself suffered from a large number of grammatical and spelling errors, but apparently they would get around to it in due time. I discussed the effect on credibility that the spelling and grammatical errors had on the game, but he assured me that things would be different in the near future. This has proven to be more or less true, as the website is now sporting more natural English (apparently thanks to the hiring of native English speaking customer support), but the game still suffers from a fairly large degree of error in the text.

After a brief pause, I asked Kris about the obvious changes to the offices - mainly about how much they had expanded since the last time I was there. Apparently, the overall plan is that Gravity Company would take over the whole building. The situation is rather simple really: the Chairman of Gravity (Jung Byung Gong) happens to own the whole building. He was renting out other floors to different companies, but the overwhelmingly positive response that the Asian market had to RO (specifically Japan, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia) convinced him to expand Gravity Company. This expansion included working on new projects to expand Gravity's markets. For example, Kris stated that they are already in the developmental stage for a new MMPORG. While it may or may not be "Ragnarok Online 2," apparently there are a significant number of people working on it. It became clear later that the game being developed was actually a step in a different direction. The new game, titled "Requiem: Prelude To Blood," is apparently geared more for adults and has a darker brooding style. Requiem is set to go commercial in early 2004 in Korea and supposedly is said to be a "Diablo" style game that was developed with help from "Revenant" developers formerly from Eidos. There is also a mobile phone games department that shares the same office floor as the International Marketing office, which apparently has two or more games already on the Korean domestic market. Finally, Kris informed me about the Overseas support office - since the RO is licensed in Japan, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand, there was a lot of technical support that the HQ office had to give since the local companies that handled the licenses had little experience handling online games. He also indicated that they also did the technical support for iRO. For example, one of the members (Jung-jeh Kim: Team leader: Overseas Tech Support Dept.) is in charge of the iRO client.

I them moved the discussion onto the sensitive issue of private servers. At the time of my visit, there were already a few of them operating more-or-less out in the open (ApezRO's possibly being one of the more famous ones). Kris stated that Gravity was aware of the issue and also that they wanted to prevent them from operating, but indicated that there was no realistic way to prevent people from providing unauthorized private versions of RO. He also stated that from their information that the private servers hosted a very small number of players at the time, so it wasn't likely they would take action since it wasn't too serious an issue. However, he went on to say that if any of them became large - possibly a thousand users or more - they would definitely take action. Nevertheless, Gravity hoped to draw away potential private server users by providing better service in iRO using better equipment and bringing upgrades from kRO (the Korean version of the game) faster into the service.

However, Kris indicated that other than the missing upgrades, the primary reason that individuals were playing on private servers (as well as on other national servers that still were not taking payment, such the Chinese service, "cRO") was that they didn't require any form of payment to play. Despite all this Kris indicated that the Gravity was choosing to ignore the private server issue until it was big enough to threaten the official commercial service - which apparently it did eventually. It was reported that one of the allegedly larger private servers named, "Asgard Online" was neutralized recently (at least as of October 30th) along with a few others. Since Gravity Interactive took the pains to register itself as an American corporation, they were finally able to take advantage of US intellectual property regulatory (IPR) and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) laws and go after US based private servers (apparently where the majority of private servers are located - or at least where the operators of private servers are based). While this is a step in the right direction, apparently the remaining private server operators are doing their best to remain in operation by attempting to ban Gravity Interactive associated IP addresses from their websites as well as to further cloak their operations in secrecy.

I then broached the subject of former Gravity CEO/President Hakkyu Kim's voluntary resignation from Gravity, along with the former marketing department representatives Richard Yang and Ji Won Kim and apparently a few others. At the time, a majority of the fansites were worried that the situation was grave due to the belief that a "majority" of the executive staff left in a mass exodus due to a rumor that Samsung Corporation was taking control of the game's development. Kris assured me that the situation had been blown out of proportion due to the fact that only a few people from the company were well known by fans outside of Korea - and that those well known people happened to be the ones to leave. He did claim that there were some personal issues involved, but that there were no hard feelings as the departing employees were now employed in other endeavors and the replacements were functioning just as well. Furthermore, he indicated that Samsung Corporation had no bearing on the operation and policies of Gravity. While he admitted that they provided some investment early in the project as well as some marketing assistance in the domestic market in Korea, he stated that Gravity had already repaid Samsung Corporation for their early assistance. At this time, Samsung Corporation's only action in regard to Gravity is in marketing efforts in Korea - due to their earlier association through financial investment, Samsung Corporation feels that if Gravity does well, their corporate stock will increase in value.

Changing the subject, I asked Kris about the situation that iRO was laboring under shortly before the departure of Peter, Rex and Christy for the US. While I had a general idea of the situation at the office, I was dealing with some conflicting information between the conversations I had had with Peter Kang and online discourse with Christy Kay. Kris was nice enough to clear up this information for me. At the time, it was unknown just how many GMs were handling the iRO servers during the open beta period. Peter had indicated that Gravity hired two native Korean nationals to support Christy in day to day operations, but Christy had indicated that she was handling all the GM operations by herself (in-game patrolling, answering all the e-mails, etc.). Apparently both had happened, as well as a little bit more... There were two new GMs hired for iRO, but shortly after they were brought on they were shipped off to other countries to assist in operations for new servers (Thailand being one of them). Because of this, Christy usually had to take care of all the customer service activities by herself - although she did get some assistance from other GMs from other national versions of RO if she was overwhelmed.

Nevertheless - once the US office of Gravity got the green light - Peter, Christy and Rex all left for the US in order to set up the offices. While Kris mentioned earlier that they may have been looking for advertising outlets while they were there, the idea of finding a domestic US publisher for assistance was out of the question. As far as Kris put it, "I think at this time, we will not have any plans to give our games to any other US company at this moment. We have decided to do completely it on our own." In order to achieve these ends, the Seoul office gave a small amount of capital to the US team in order to establish Gravity Interactive, but would not provide any future financial assistance. This meant that Gravity Interactive was forced to survive through its only source of funds: user subscription fees. In order to encourage the spread of the game through word-of-mouth channels, as well as bypass any associated drains on finances through retail packaged sales of the client (as the contracted offices do in Japan, China, and other countries), it was decided that the iRO client would only be available through online download. Furthermore, in the beginning subscription fees would only be accepted through online credit card payment, then in the near future through online payment systems (possibly PayPal) and eventually even money orders through the mail.

As for the location of the offices themselves, Kris wasn't aware at the time exactly where the offices would be located as Peter and company hadn't found a suitable office by then. However, he did state that Internet Data Center (IDC) was being relocated nearby and that it would definitely be in Los Angeles County, California. It was later independently established that the offices were located in Marina Del Rey, California. However, Kris indicated that there was some apprehension to making a public announcement as to where exactly the office was located - mainly because they didn't want people who were angry at Gravity to show up. While I found this idea to be humorous (I had a surreal vision of demonstrators picketing the front door), Kris indicated that angry players had a tendency to show up at the offices of the other versions of RO - especially the Korean one. He cited a specific incident where one individual came to the Seoul office complaining that all the items in his account had been deleted due to the game's software being corrupted:

We searched our databases and saw what happened - his items were in his inventory (at one time), but were unloaded to a different (person's) character. We had no idea whether he did it, of if he was hacked. But he just claimed that his items were lost due to our program (being) corrupted. He actually came to beat people up in our office... So we called the police. So now we have a guard on the fifth floor.

Kris then went on and talked about how many of the people playing the game took it very seriously; citing rising online game addiction as a real problem in South Korea. While I assured him that it was unlikely that such a scenario would unfold in the US, Kris indicated that an incident similar to the one in his anecdote would not have a chance to happen.

Finally, I asked Kris if there was anything he wanted to announce to the iRO community in general. He had this to say:

Well, I know that the service... the quality of the service has not been so good in the past... and since we are tying to do our best, we're trying something new now, because in the past all the time that we tried the network was out, now we're giving it a different try. So we are having our own office there, we're sending our people over there to publish... and the iRO servers will be more stable and I hope we'll be able to give better support and services in terms of quality. I'd like to ask to the users to give us one more chance.

Our interview concluded, so Kris conducted an abbreviated tour of the offices for me as I took some candid photos. As the company had grown quite a bit since the last time I had visited, the company's internal policies had also changed. For example, I was not allowed into the developer's room, the web team room, or the mobile games division room and was not allowed to meet with any employees from those divisions as well. I did however meet Gravity's company pet (mascot?) "Vity" who lives on the roof of the building and revisited the old "GRAVITY" office foyer (now in disuse) that now plays host to a life-sized Wormtail and Muka plush instead of a Poring and Poporing. Kris was also nice enough to wrangle a few promotional items left over from the KAMEX show that year for me - a very large coffee table puzzle of the winter promotion poster, a copy of the official "FanArt" book and two corporate desk calendars.

Shortly before leaving, I also had the opportunity to ask Ree Kwon-Il - the main client programmer for iRO - a few technical questions about the game that were posted by Library of Prontera forum residents:

1. In terms of the client, the security features (such as data encryption) are currently already circumnavigated by hackers, what are the plans in terms of preventing such occurrences from happening again in the near future?

Currently we are not concentrating on Data encryption, as I think it can be broken again. First of all, we're concentrating more on packet encryption rather than the client itself. It's been delayed because we have a lot of other work to do at the moment. We do plan to address it in the future.

2. Since the game is in beta at the moment, does that mean that the server and client side code not optimized?

The code is all optimized, as is the Korean RO and other versions. There is no 100% optimization, but it will be optimized more. The client and server data (for iRO) is the same optimization level as the other versions.

3. In terms of the lag that the game suffers between players in other countries as well as within some locations in the US, what is specifically causing those lag issues? Is it hackers bombarding the servers with packets or is it a benign technical issue?

First, there were many hacker attacks (DDoS), so the servers were getting slower, slower and slower. Second, our bandwidth use went up 100% (from 30% for normal service) so the DDoS attacks were drowning out the actual users. For the players outside of the US, the distance between the server and their computers may have been the main issue. Check the ping rate to see how the connection speed is. In the future, we're moving the Internet data center to LA and we're trying to increase the capacity to at least 10X the current capacity. Now there will be server managers right beside the servers watching the servers 24 hours to prevent hacker attacks (Denial of Service of "DoS") and other hacking attempts (breaking into the database, sending trash packets to overflow the server to gain control of the servers, etc.). All these hacking attempts make the servers slow. The number one issue for the lag is hackers. In short, it will be very different when we re-open service.

4. For the client, what determines what kind of patch will be released and how often?

All patches go on the same timeline as the kRO version, but the iRO version will be always behind as it follows the improvements. It's the company's decision rather than any iRO manager's opinion (Peter Kang, etc.), although their opinions are taken into account.

Once our question and session answer was over, Kris indicated that he had some business to attend to so he left. I left shortly afterwards and spent the rest of the day shopping.

So now, 8 months after my actual visit I finally finished the writing of this article. Considering the length of time it took me to write it, I doubt I would be much of an asset to a professional magazine. Nevertheless, it was a kind of a blessing in disguise as I was able to see certain elements that were obscured at the time unfold slowly over the course of time (specifically the naming of the "mystery game" and actually seeing the private server issue being dealt with). As I stated in the beginning, I may not be the most unbiased writer to have ever put a pen to paper but I do my best to try and present a fair and balanced view. However, considering my personal opinion on how things have gone so far... I'd say pretty good considering the obstacles that had to be surmounted. Other than the one widely reported disaster, it seems that pretty much everything is going to plan. At the least, I admit I'm curious to see what comes of the animated series.