If you're wondering why we're offline..
 

We're working hard to bring Era back up and will post an update as soon as possible.

Thanks!
Era Staff

Love you alf

:]

I will wait for a response from Stefan, but I am confident to open era before most of you are back from school or work today. The crash will have some consequences which I will explain abit further later here or via ingame news.

can we look forward to a double exp weekend or something to make up for downtime and subsequent consequences?

We have some things planned out for our players, no worries.

This thread sure looks important, if only I could read.

I had a dream you broke PyroTech. :( That's not very nice guy.

I'm sorry to tell you it wasn't a dream.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZY2hPmAj5o

Sounds like a great Idea, I support it fully! ^_^

Wonder if we could get an estimate of how much longer we have to wait. You guys have an average of 20 "staff" on the server and still your not done? I mean If it was something you would have warned us about it. But since that is not the case may I ask, what the heck you are all doing?

Will probably take ~a week. I heard there are no backups so a rollback might happen too.

Well that's a disappointment, and angers me a bit. Era needs to get their stuff together. I have noticed many complaints about Staffing structure, the server itself. The server should have enough knowledge to have daily backups. But I am gonna come to the conclusion that they don't do many world-wide server saves. Because it may cause "lag". I am just hoping Era gets its crap together before it digs itself in to big of a hole to climb out of, even though Era is already in a hole...

It's too bad right? Sucks when someone disables outgoing connections from the server ^^

And it shouldn't take too long, be patient. The issue was un-expected and shouldn't of happened under normal conditions.

Daily backups would be logical, too bad we still have no stable way of doing this natively by default.

Not going to give these great people of era a time estimation?

What makes you think we had any idea this was going to happen? The number of staff we have isn't the issue we have here, we didn't plan for any of this. It was a huge inconvenience for everyone, as you can see.

Stefan stopped keeping backups 2(3?) years ago and that resulted in Era eventually getting a backup system, but that was disabled by Stefan as well from what I hear. So there was no way to prevent this without any backup or save methods.

Sometimes things happen, no server is perfect, especially with the limited functionality allowed on graal.
IMO, it's unfortunate that the global staff have not worked harder to put in safeguards and methods of recovering lost data (and from what everyone says, have actually blocked previously existing attempts to do so). This is a failure on their part, not the Era staff
The best course of action would be to blame Alfonso, this is obviously his doing. The breadcrumbs are as big as tacos
but seriously, now you owe me a double exp weekend (next weekend though kk thanks love you)

Since my first post a few things changed. Instead of letting every player back on the server but blocking all broken systems we decided too fix as much as possible.
Double XP weekend is possible and you can tell me if you need more compensations. Also we keep on working on our normal developing projects like gunskins.

The huge halloween auction on Saturday (5pm est) will NOT be delayed.

The server will be live again shortly, at which time you will notice a message from the NPC-Server which explains the state of the server and provides information regarding exactly what happened.

See you soon.

Perfect thanks guys. Also, could staff use the bulletin board more? It's used quite sparingly and instead mass pm's or "staff messages" are sent out with random updates and the like. I don't see the detriment to posting them to the bulletin board so people who aren't online when things are fixed or introduced can see what happened :3

That was the idea behind the change log that used to be posted here. Perhaps we'll bring that back. I definitely agree with you, though, that the updates need to be broadcasted more effectively. Thanks!

Always loved me some bulletin board.

However, it doesn't exactly 'pop up' and notify players online, like a Staff Mass/Message would for those little things.

And it isn't as in-your-face as a staff block with a message on it, for even littler things.

Many people do not read the news, realized because many people do not even follow the rules of the server which are also displayed in that gui.

Plus to my knowledge only a few people can edit the board, even more-so there is a character limit to the little textbox, in which you need to manually edit the file to correct/finish the announcement, which even fewer people can do.

I got some ideas on how to tweak it, we'll see.

Why not just use both then? Or mass message saying "Check the bulletin board for the new update/fix"

Usually a mass message & bulletin update combo gets the message across. Sometimes a staff block as a reminder too.

Was just saying why it isn't used for every little update/situation.

Though this generally happens if the updater is capable: