Kyp

No but to be fair, there are plenty of situations where Windows is the right tool for the job, and others where a version of linux, freebsd or something entirely custom is the best approach. That said we use both Windows and Linux, and a custom solution or two.

Appreciate the vote of confidence. Simply put, game is not gone away, nor will stay gone. It'd be nice to have all the skill sets we need at the ready but people move on, and as C Del says, sometimes those skills are hard to come by and the infrastructure behind all this is more complicated than would be expected but it's necessary to protect your data/accounts/game experience. Right now it is as I last said, we're working through some differences with code to bring ourselves up to a current version of Microsoft's visual studio because we were using an older version for development and our code base is not currently compatible/able to be compiled and run. Once we solve those issues we should be able to bring the last stuff up including the dev and sunrise servers.

Only a little, but that said, we are getting close. Right now we're basically at the last step but it looks like we are going to have to upgrade from the version of Visual Studio we were using to the latest version and that unfortunately means a number of changes and errors with code to work through before the game server will run. (Thanks, Microsoft!). We are trying to locate the older installer to get it back to you sooner but so far this has been unsuccessful.

Yes not you, we have to get the game server set back up on top of the card pyramid, after that I expect any remaining issues will be cleared up. Any issues that you're still seeing are most likely to do with our architecture and we expect them resolved once that's back up.

Don't worry guys, we aren't upset. Just direct communication as asked.

Here's your update. Everything's done except getting the game servers functioning again along with the registration process being tested, to my knowledge at least. That's where we've got, unfortunately, it isn't as easy as you'd imagine coordinating all this with people who are volunteers and are not being paid. Nobody can be compelled to work on it, and some of the stuff requires different skillsets so we do it as people can make themselves available. This isn't a full blown corporation with people being paid salaries ignoring you, these are people with lives and choosing to give you their time here and there, as they can. The donations that are received go entirely to server bills and software/upgrade needs. From here on out I'll give a daily update of 'no news' since that's good news, right? As I've said before, we get it, you're bored. We're pretty bored too because most of our free time outside of crap we have to do in our own lives/homes etc. is being spent working on technical issues thanks to some 'people' deciding that they needed to teach everyone a lesson and blasting evil shit out like a firehose. You should instead probably be glad that we got it sealed off and corrected before the scripts came out to fix it because the attack that caused it got much worse and we might not have recovered anything at all, had that been the case. That said, no ill will from me/us to you, you can hate us if you like but we're doing what we can to get it back, and I'd mostly rather not just sit and write meaningless updates until there's something worth updating you about.

State of things right now: We're *allllmost* there. We are working on getting our dev and gm tools back up so you can be supported, as soon as this happens, barring a few minor changes for our new firewalls and setting up the game server program on the servers (easy, once the underpinnings are there) and you should be ready to roll again. It's been a fun month, I know. We're sorry but we're gonna try to learn some things from this so it won't repeat in the future. I will update the main post when we're ready for the final steps just know it truly shouldn't be that much longer. This is the last 'difficult' task that leaves things hard to estimate.

Hadn't had this report from anyone so far other than you, so before we add it to a list for investigations are you absolutely certain you're logging into the account that you think you are, if you have multiple?

Hi folks, This may or may not be visible to you yet but you may notice that the portal has come back up. We strongly recommend (read: Just don't.) that you DO NOT make any alterations to your game account data until we are happy with testing. You could send us back to the drawing board if you're not careful. Don't be that guy/girl.

You're welcome but that was mostly for my sanity because it kept pointing me at things i'd already seen with the reminders.

No anger here, just cold emotionless 'it is what it is'. Hopefully no hard feelings.

Well, that it may be but I'm not going to commit to exact timelines until they're actually reasonable and possible. This database business will take the time it takes, even if that's longer than anyone would like. I assure you, while you are bored without the game, we (for the few of us who can do this level of it) are tearing our own hair out and would like to get back to our lives, never hurts to remember that the donations do not go to paying anyone other than 3rd party vendors, so they are volunteering free time for fixing things in these types of scenarios. So you can rest assured that it will be done as soon as it can be, but you'll have to accept that I'm not going to quote a timeline and stick us on something for people to be more upset down the line for making a promise I/we can't necessarily keep. For what it's worth, I wouldn't do this in a professional setting either, I would keep reiterating that I couldn't yet quote a time and if it meant a company would end our contract, then that's just what it means. It's far better to take the time to do a thing right than it is to rush, I've found few exceptions for that in my time. I'd like nothing more than for the rest of the databases to just take 10 minutes, but right now for example I'm working through format issues with your game account data and if say.. it went wrong and became corrupt then everyone would end up starting over or we'd have to begin the process of importing this data and working through it again. This is ***By Far*** the largest of the databases involved with the game clocking in ~1.92GB, so it's taking some time to work through. Hopefully the lessons and fixes we make for this will make other issues disappear before those are imported because mostly what we are dealing with is differences between the version of database we had vs. the version we have now.

We'd been trying to keep up with things on Facebook too but I'm just going to centralize things we know and what we're doing here and link it back there going forward. If you have questions, feel free to post, we'll answer as soon as we can. High level on things that happened and where we're going: We were attacked by a broadly spread "spray" attack known as esxiArgs, which is a ransomware for the VMWare environment older than a certain version. It exploited a service in older versions of VMWare if it could reach it to gain admin authority and thus control of the disks. Fortunately, we got an early version of this ransomware and it was possible to retrieve the vast majority of our data What we decided: It was time for a new host, and to leave the last host because while this is also on us, there is really no reason keeping this level of service up to date shouldn't have been easier. We acquired a new host and a new separate web hosting plan in order to help reduce costs AND server maintenance outside of improvements to the game. We have migrated our data here. We had to build out the new environment and protective mechanisms and tested Because what we were hit with was a security issue with a version of our software, we decided that as part of this we would upgrade all of the major software involved. This led to some issues with the database imports. We are working through these issues. After the databases are restored and available the sites should mostly be online (already in physical place they're just missing databases, we will check them out and confirm the state passes and some testing is done. Once all is confirmed we'll be setting up the game server again. << YOU ARE HERE The Game Server, the part you care about of course , it's dependent on those websites / DBs in the previous two steps... so as soon as these are done we should be able to bring the game server itself up pretty quickly.

Furiously working on databases and back ends of the various web sites (web... it really is) and trying to get those back up and ready to roll with every spare moment so we can get the game rolling again. Also getting our new servers hammered out, which just finished up with the basic operating system configurations. We're getting there. Of course I don't think this fits the theme of the post...

It is definitely getting there, at any rate.