GM Tempest

Good afternoon, everyone! So, there's been a lot of speculation and curiosity regarding the costs of our servers and how things are being done in regards to infrastructure and server operation. We wanted to go over a few things to hopefully give some transparency into this rather complex situation, so please bear with me for a bit of technobabble and financial data! We currently use Digital Ocean to host our servers, and while we know this isn't the least expensive option available to us, they do provide us with a good degree of flexibility and scalability in regards to operations, and we do have plans to reduce costs in the future. If you're curious about Digital Ocean's pricing options, you can check them out here on their website! https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ The bulk of our costs comes from hosting mapservers, as some of you have guessed! These are CPU Optimized droplets of two types: 32 cores and 64GB of RAM at $640 per month 16 cores and 32GB of RAM at $320 per month We always have a minimum of 4 active, and we increase our capacity to between 6 and 11 mapservers during peak hours and weekends. Obviously, as our player counts rise steadily, we've found it necessary to increase the numbers over time as well. A smaller portion of the costs come from the database hosts, which we host on standard droplets. We run five total database hosts, two larger, and three smaller: 8 cores and 32GB of RAM at $160 per month 4 cores and 8GB of RAM at $40 per month With player loads increasing, we will likely have to increase the number of hosts we utilize in the future. We did our best to show hardware functionality like this previously, but as we discovered trying to shove everyone into a single shard, this hardware requirement does not scale linearly, but polynomialy (There's your word for the day! :D https://www.mathsisfun.com/definitions/polynomial.html) As you experienced in the previous group's Bree server, and our own Torchbearer before we added Excelsior, trying to fit everyone into a single shard becomes prohibitive, and instability becomes too much to manage, thus our now present four shards of Torchbearer, Excelsior, Everlasting and Indomitable! We also have other miscellaneous costs, such as the authentication server, a central services host, a monitoring host, a webserver host, and a storage and backup host! These various hosts can run between $5 and $40 a month each. And, in some community news, we will be announcing the Costume Contest Winners and Prizes SOON™. Be sure to stay tuned for that announcement! I hope this helps answer some of the questions you've had, and if you need some tech help or ingame help, be sure to check out our #setup-install-help and #ingame-help channels! See you in-game!

Good afternoon, everyone! Did you want it? You got it. One of the most requested features of all time on our servers is coming live NOW. Like, NOW now. Now. Like, now. Right now. Yep, this very second. SHARD CHARACTER TRANSFERS ARE NOW ONLINE. You can take your character from Torchbearer to Indomitable! Or Everlasting to Excelsior! Or anything in-between. This feature is in BETA, and while we have done extensive testing, it should still be done carefully, and you should transfer your mains only with that knowledge. Current limitations are 5 character transfers ever 3 days, don't want to overdo it. That limit likely will be lowered over time. The transfer button will be at the top of the character select screen, looks like a pair of arrows. Also, the transfer may say it's 'Busy', the solution right there is to wait. Now go! Hunt! Transfer to kill Skuls! Just so you know, to get that going, you need to shut your game down, select Homecoming (BETA) in the Tequila launcher!