Editing AC2:Announcements - 2003/01 - Cacophony (section)

== Important notice ==
{{AC2 Article
 |  Link = microsoftgamesinsider.com/AC2/Guides/notice_0103.htm?nc=1
 | Title = AC2 Status Update
 |  Text = January 27, 2003

As many of you are aware, Asheron's Call 2 was affected by the recent virus attacks that the entire Internet experienced over this past weekend. (For more information visit: http://www.msnbc.com/news/864184.asp?0dm=C11KT). We'd like to take a moment to update you on what sort of impact this worm had on Asheron's Call 2, and what we are doing to rectify the situation.
<br><br>
The worm dubbed the "SQL Slammer" affected unpatched Windows 2000 SQL server database software. We want to make it perfectly clear that all of our databases used in Asheron's Call 2 were patched with the most recent updates, and were unaffected by the worm directly. Our bandwidth however, was affected by the worm because it crashed many other unpatched servers worldwide, and caused unprecedented network congestion. Unfortunately, because of the way this worm works, the ripple effect caused plenty of other problems, which many refer to as "collateral damage." What did this mean for AC2 over the weekend?


* This network congestion created strange behavior for some players who lost items, could not interact with portals or chests, and were unable to use certain skills (grayed out). This was mostly confined to our US Datacenters
* Many players couldn't even connect because of the bandwidth congestion
* We lost the use of many of our customer support tools, and were unable to update the state of the network and even our message board during this time period
* .NET Passport services were not functioning properly for a short period of time on Sunday
* We needed to restart the worlds a few times over the weekend to try to clear up some of the anomalies people were experiencing in-game


The reason we haven't been able to communicate much with the players to let them know what was going on and what we were doing about it, was because of the fact that many of our tools were not functioning properly, and we wanted to take the time to carefully evaluate the situation and not make a snap decision. That said, we apologize for not using the accmty.com board to communicate with you in a timelier manner.
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Over the weekend we gathered feedback through the message boards, support calls and emails. While you may not have seen many threads approved to the main AC2 community forum over the weekend, we did read each and every one of the bug submissions, complaints and problems that players identified. We want to thank the players for reporting these issues. This helped us to make our decisions what steps to take next. We also took the time to read your thoughts that many of you posted on other AC2 fan sites.
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We mentioned on Sunday that we may be considering a rollback of the databases to the last backup made before the virus attack (Thursday morning), because we wanted to prepare players in the event that we needed to do such a thing. After careful evaluation, we confirmed that a relatively small percentage of the players have been affected with item loss or personal rollbacks, and to do a complete server-wide rollback would negatively impact the great majority of our player base. We have even heard from players who lost all of their items but pleaded for us not to roll back, because the XP they earned over the weekend is more precious to them than the items they lost. For these reasons we will not be conducting a rollback of the character database.
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We are aware that there are still some residual problems currently in the game (like skills not resetting), and we are working hard to fix these problems in order to bring things back to normal in the world of Dereth. Most if not all, of these sorts of problems should be solved by the end of the day.
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Once again, we thank you for all your feedback during this difficult weekend, offer condolences to those of you who could not play or lost progress, and thank you for your patience and understanding.
<br><br>
-- The AC2 Team
&nbsp;
}}

[[Category:AC2]]
[[Category:AC2 Patch Announcements]]