Back in 2008, after having failed to find a PW me and some other players (and dm's) from TFR liked enough to play, we had some brainstorming on a big "what if"... making our own server.
The brainchildren behind the project was myself, Mr_Otyugh and Shyntree, with plenty of other input and help from many others, including (but not limited to) Pelhikano, Eandril and Pashan).
Shyntree left the project pretty early, and from the first real meeting we had back in november 2008 I quote her saying (we still have the transcript in dm forum): How long has NWN2 been out? And how much *longer* is it likely to have an online shelf-life for?
It's funny to look back at now, over 3 years later, with ups and downs in the life of SCoD, and I felt like doing some looking back at history with my 5000th post on the forum. (Mr_Otyugh already have 5000 posts, but since he didn't mark it with any sort of epic post, I decided I should post this for both of us).
Back then we weren't sure we'd be able pull off making the server work at all, even less getting a playerbase. When autodownloader arrived it made things alot more simple for players atleast, it didn't exist back when the project started.
I recall our first alpha versions, very different Sigil Main, and Gray Waste was our first adventuring area, Ice Plane came early too, and others. Some of those alpha screenshots still can be found on our promos:
http://vnmedia.ign.com/nwvault.ign.com/ ... ullres.jpg
(and yes, this was old version of Gol Dero I was using back in alpha... I decided not to play special race in beginning, rather have dedicated testers for that in beginning before we had a generic system up and running)
We asked Roguedao for permission to use some of all the epic planescape content they were making, and they agreed (I still urge people to check out their single player module if you haven't http://www.roguedao.com/ - although they still aren't finished with it). Getting Modrons and Dabus meant that making a planescape pw was alot more feasible, and later the razorwine was also a very nice addition.
The alpha of the server I ran on my old desktop computer, an old AMD from 2003ish, so barely able to run at all... it did force us to think performance though, and I think that philosophy in scripting have helped us alot to allow expansion without it being needlessly slow running.
Same machine was the one we were using when we went beta, oh how I remember that nervewracking time of going online and wondering "will anyone play here at all?". When we had a peak of 12-16 or so the release night, I just knew that we had did it, that we would be able to build a playerbase.
And we did... the playerbase has grown and shrunk many times, and many of those who have at some point left has come back... while we were rarely the most popular rp server, that we were in top 3 more often than not was very impressive to me.
The open beta was improved to a "full version", and the full version had a major reworking to "2.0" since then, and a change of computer to a more modern one has helped a lot as well (although with a few hd breakdowns admittedly).
Much have changed over the years, but I just wanted to take the time now to say how proud I am of my team who helped make SCoD possible (I won't name you all, for fear of forgetting someone important), and say that when we started work on this server I had realisticly low expectations of being able to make a working PW at all, and I didn't think we'd have a active server life beyond 2 years or so, considering how late in nwn2's lifetime we started.
So every day we stay alive, is a pure bonus to me now, so I want to thank all the players that help keep the server up
