State of things

Hyp's Post:

Look, I get that you all don't understand the complexity of the issues we have been seeing for the last 2 weeks. As a result, your dissatisfaction is justified and expected. If I were in your situation I would be upset too, although I probably wouldn't post about it on the forums because overt negativity doesn't solve anything IMO. But I digress...

The whole insult of being "like acclaim" is BORING to me now. It doesn't affect us like you think it does, its a boring, uncreative, easy insult that is spawned by weakness and ignorance. Acclaim was a publisher, and while I do not think they did a lot of things right, they were professionals and ran a successful business for many years, so they had more experience than the average player at game publishing. While you all think you "know better" in how to run an online game, you are wrong. You have no idea of the complexity of publishing online games, especially from Developers half a world away. But thats not the point either...

The point is that things are bad, and from your perspective we are not doing anything to fix the badness. I get where your coming from, because you are not as informed as we are about the situation. My team has been working 24/7 shifts for the last 2 weeks to isolate and fix the issues, you wouldn't know that because you are not here seeing what is going on. We have brought in additional and very expensive tech resources to expedite the fixes, we have teams all over the world (turkey, brazil, india, korea) and even some very serious Americans working to fix what is happening. So I am not upset/angry about this negativity, it is a natural and expected response from you guys given the situation from your perspective.

All we can say is what is in the announcements above, but the issues we have are much bigger than you know...ALL our games are having these issues, it is not just 9D...so take every issue you know about and multiply it by 5 (War Rock, KOL, Sword 2, General G1, 9D...etc...) and you can begin to see the scope of what we are dealing with.

What is good about all this, is that once we are "through the woods" we will be a MUCH better/faster/stronger company as a result. But you, as players, probably do not care about this, you want your fun NOW...because NOW is what concerns you. Well, the future concerns me more than NOW, and if what we are doing NOW makes the future better for the company then, from my perspective, we are doing the right thing. What we are doing we have to do, we did not ask for these issues, but we do have to react to them. 9Dragons is going to be with GamersFirst for a long time, a couple of weeks of crap is minute in the lifetime of the game, but only if the good weeks > bad weeks in the long run. So the objective is to accept the reality of the situation now, and make good decisions now that will set us up for big wins in the future.

That being said, I have no ETA for when we can get the maps back up, and events this weekend are probably not going to happen. Do I expect logins/revenue to be low this weekend? Yes, of course I do. I expect low revenue and logins until all this stuff is fixed in general. We will get everything working ASAP. Unfortunately ASAP is probably not fast enough for many of you. Will I attempt to make things better and make cool events when I am able to do so? Yes, of course I will. But you know that too...I think I have been pretty clear in my style...I like weekend events, I like making you all happy...it makes me happy to see positivity in the community.

Also, when maps are down in general they are usually back up in 5 minutes or less, what is happening now is unique, and once we get everything back up and moving again we will not have these problems. But until then, we have to power through the tough times to get to a place where we can start making progress again.

Fooled once, fooled twice, fooled three times, awarded!

To explain the title a little bit...

Fooled once: Acclaim's ending. We all knew how it was, so no further comments.

Fooled twice: GamersFirst 's statement: "We will get the database back" As a side note, the latest news is they actually don't know if there is a database.

Fooled three times: Latest Hyperion ideea, of voting:

Which option below is the best for the 9Dragons community?

Option 1 - Events only [ 57 ] [18.94%]
Option 2 - Template Characters only [ 14 ] [4.65%]
Option 3 - Cross fingers and wait for the database [ 43 ] [14.29%]
Option 4 - Combine Option 1+2 [ 187 ] [62.13%]

Wich is taking me to the next question: why we even bothered to play again? If they will keep it as the votes are going, we will have templates chars, based on lvls. How in the world they can give us at least a part of what we have, God knows.

To see the thread, use this link: http://forums.gamersfirst.com/index.php?showtopic=89110

Enjoy! If there is something to enjoy...

A Little Bed Time Story

Just because nothing can ever be done to please a gaming community that looks like it's mostly made up of people who had little to no real life working experience.

So here's a little Nasreddin Hodja tale.

One day Nasreddin Hodja and his young son were on their way to the market. The Hodja was riding his donkey and his son was walking beside him. As they travelled such, they heard a couple of villagers who happened to be passing by, speak disapprovingly about them.

`Look at our Hodja Effendi,' one said to the other, `he is comfortably riding on his donkey and letting his little boy walk along. Shame on the Hodja for making the boy suffer like that!' When Nasreddin Hodja heard this, he wanted to rectify what was perceived as his selfishness. He put his son on the donkey and he started to walk beside. Shortly after, they met another couple of villagers.

`Look at the Hodja and his son!' they said, `These are the times we are living in. A young boy is riding on the donkey and his poor old father is sweating to keep the pace. Today's children have no respect for their parents.' Nasreddin Hodja found some reason in this comment and thought of another remedy. They both got off of the donkey and started to walk beside it. A little while later, a group of villagers, also going to the market, approached the procession of the Hodja, the son and the donkey, all walking one after the other.

`This Hodja Effendi and his son have no minds, whatsoever.' they whispered amongst themselves, `They are both beating on their feet and the donkey is strolling along. Don't these people know what a donkey is for?' Hodja heard this and thought they had a point. The solution was clear. Both he and his son sat on the donkey. As they continued their trip this way, thinking that they have finally complied with all the opinions of their fellow villagers, they met another of their acquaintances. He was not very happy to see both the Hodja and the boy on a scrawny donkey.

`Hodja Effendi,' he yelled, `don't you know no mercy? How is this poor little animal supposed to carry two people? The donkey is also Allah's creation, have some pity.' Nasreddin Hodja agreed with this last remark as well. What were they to do? He shouldered the front body of the donkey and his son took on the back part, and they carried the donkey to the market place.

G1 skill xp and macro-ing

As you might and might not have known, the skill xp on the Acclaim servers, low as it might have seemed, was actually tweaked to a 4xp. If you remember, after server restarts, skill xp was nutty slow - THAT was the actual skill xp of the server. With G1 taking over, skill xp is back to it's original state, that is 4 times as low as Acclaim players are used to having it.

That being said, I can fully understand that people are not very inclined to play buffers. What I have absolutely no understanding for is using macros to get around it - having some bot "press keys" for you while you go about your business otherwheres and coming back to leveled skills. As far as things go, that is called cheating. Cheating is "fooling the system" because you're not willing and able to play by the rules and loser enough not to be able to take the blow to your self esteem - that is admitting you can't make it the straight way.

So just a little antisocial word of caution here: by all means, if admitting you're a failure at playing the game as it is set up to be played would seriously damage your psyche - by all means, go ahead and macro. However, keep yourself away from Squeak-ers. There are few types of people I despise more than cheaters.

Still Restless

Well, the rodents are back and squeaking.

I have refrained posting for a long while. I didn't want to rant about the ranters and all they hysterical people who want their chars back, this minute and a 100xp compensation and free BE for all forever. I got used to the idea that we most likely won't get our old chars back and if we do, it will take ages. It's only in Ally McBeal that legal battles last the 30 minutes of an episode.

With that in mind, the rodents grinded the weekend away. So, on the 20th of September, shortly after midnight, Restless was reborn. Some of us changed names, some changed roles, some changed clans. Some kept everything, some changed everything. But we're all still restless. And squeaking.

9D is returning

Today's update contained some long-awaited news and some expected news.

The long-awaited news are that 9d will be back up tomorrow at the estimated time of 1am GMT.

You can read Hyperion's post here.

The expected news are that they don't have the DB yet, and it seems that it will be a long time before even we can hope for them. Hyperion pointed out that the DB issue is now indy21's problem, and it seems that indy will need to take legal action against Disney in order to get our info. I somehow would place my bet on the big fish, but hope dies last.

We'll see how smoothly and bug-free the servers will start (small chances there). Maybe some of us should stay up just in order to re-create our characters and at least get the names reserved.
For Restless members, refer to our facebook group and talk to the people who will stay up and make their chars. Maybe we can work something out, and after a couple of hours we'll be able to recreate the league.

More news about the league here and on the FB group. We'll keep you posted.

Claim your character !

Easy. Go here: https://www.gamersfirst.com/welcome/9Dragons/9d_characters.php and claim your fill the forms with your character data. 

That doesn't mean we will have the chars when the game will be up.