I have a couple of announcements to make after a long phone call with Sean this evening.
1. The downtime today was not actually caused by everyone logging in at OOP, although this did cause some lag. The server crashed because of a full hard disk, and this has been taken care of. Hopefully it will not happen again, and I thank Bishop for letting me know about the problem so I could alert Sean and Brian to fix it.
2. Most likely a new server will be rolled out in the coming weeks. Utopia runs on Amazon hosted instances, and upgrading will involve rebuilding the entire system, so this is the current roadblock involving that. When the new instance is acquired and set up, hopefully game downtime switching to it will not be very long, though there may be a short freeze or a rollback.
3. Anyone whose province was severely affected by today's downtime should email me at utopiasupport@frontsquare.com, and I will see what can be done about reimbursing lost resources. As I can only answer these one at a time, be patient. I will try to get through all of the complaints.
4. Currently the system does not allow us to give extra invites, but this feature will be added to the game ASAP and we will work on helping out those who were affected.
5. I get a lot of complaints of activation emails not being sent. Please remember to type your email address correctly when registering an account. yahoo.com is not the same as yahoo.com.au.
6. After speaking to Sean, we have agreed that it would be best for Sinners to be reinstated. As I wasn't around when whatever events transpired, I would like a representative to talk to me on IRC (nickname 'creeper') and discuss what the situation is.
EDIT: Clarification: This will not happen before the truth of the situation is discovered. A lot of people seem to mostly agree that they should have gotten an answer as to why they were removed, and this is what we want to do. If it's discovered they did cheat, we will not let them get away with it.
7. Scripted provinces are not allowed and all accounts discovered to be scripting will be killed and given long holidays from the game. If you suspect any scripted provinces in your kingdom, please email utopiasupport@frontsquare.com with the kingdom number and name of the offending province.
8. The rankings for the previous age are still in the database and will be extracted soon. The rush to fix exploits found at the beginning of the current age caused a bit of a delay in this process.
Future Roadmap
Bugfixes will come first, but dealing with x-loggers and scripted provinces takes a lot of time out of my day (my inbox is hardly ever empty). Once we have a game that is more stable than it currently is, and things are looking good, we have a number of plans to create an influx of players to the game.
One of the things we are considering is a Facebook App to connect to the game. Whether this will bring in new hardcore players, or just a load of inactives to be slaughtered, we don't know, but we sure hope it can serve as some good advertising. We will of course consider traditional advertising as well.
Again, once we get a stable system, another thing in the pipeline would be a jazzier website with new artwork and guides and such.
Anyway, that's all I have to announce for tonight. I can't possibly keep track of all the replies to this thread, but I will be idling on IRC most probably.
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Originally Posted by Spiritcreeper
