State of server address

2010 is in full swing and the year started out with a large amount of stuff happening here at Gravity.

The bad part is many of those things have been delayed due to issues that came up that are out of our control. The main part of that is a DDoS attack that began with ROSE and carried over to Ragnarok and some effect on Requiem. Most of the connection issues are a direct cause of that DDoS. Being on the internet as a stationary target (which as a game and web service we have to be somewhat stationary) you become open to such attacks. We have weathered many DDoS attacks over the years, but this one seems to have taken on a life of its own in its longevity.

We have occupied our network teams and ISP for the past 5 weeks or so in dealing with these problems and while better off than before it is still creating a problem. The silver lining is once its resolved we will be a harder target in the future, bad part is the game service sucks..

We are wanting to do many new stuffs for our communities in all our games, but much of our GM/CM efforts are also being consumed by these attacks. We are answering emails, and currently are not more than 18 hours behind the emails, but I fear that not all messages are reaching their target recipients. Currently PW resets, registration emails and VAS emails may not be going out in a reasonable time. If you use the PW retrieve system the PW immediately changes on the account, and an email is SUPPOSED to be sent with that PW; well I'm sure many of you can see where the problem is with that in this situation. The emails should be going out now, so you should check your email box for those datas.

Now all that stuff above is the history of bad news for this year, but there are positives ahead.

Renewal is slated for this year, infact we are doing our planning for its launch currently. We know this update will take us at least 3 weeks to localize, then more time to test than usual. We do expect a longer than normal public testing period as well. Once we have the testing in process we will start discussing directly our launch date and all that with our community.

There has been much discussion about mergers or new servers or RO shutting down and all that over the past month or so. I certainly can understand the "doomsday" feelings when there is repeated server downs and all that. But I can say with absolute certainty we are not planning on shutting iRO down. There is some software optimizations that have been done this year to fix the login short comings, now we need to do the same for many of the other systems; hardware updates are also being planned out, especially with renewal coming.

We are planning a merger prior to our launch of renewal, that merger is planned out in process but the timeline is sliding due to other problems (read above). I can't release the actual process/restrictions etc until we finish our internal testing to be sure they will work. Our intention is to do a merger that has the players happier, with as little negative impact as possible. The Premium server character DBs are HUGE, exponentially larger than any of the mergers (oRO and Sakray) were in the past so we have more concerns to deal with there.