Word from the Big Boss.

[Baurus]

I acquired R's e-mail by scouring the internet, and after I sent an E-mail to him i got a reply today.

R has several options at this point and if anyone would like I will post the message he sent on here for you all to see. R seems to want to bring the game back he just doesn't know how he wants to approach the current dilemma.




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I'll do my best. But the server and the ISP I've been using since the grand opening are no longer viable options. Their support has always been bad, resulting in multi-day outages, and getting into their datacenter to perform server maintenance is really a nightmare. If you've ever seen a sci-fi movie where an astronaut had to go outside the ship's hull to perform repairs, well, they had it comparatively easy.

Now my Dell server, which has always been really flaky itself, is finally dying. It's not dead-dead yet -- at least the hard disk still works (thank God -- we have a lot of data on there), but the BIOS is corrupt and the network interfaces have died.

So I have to find some time to put on my space suit, climb out to the hull, extract the server, take it home, set it up somewhere (I have no space for it, so maybe at work on a weekend), get the data off it, and then start looking into somewhere else to host the game.

Google _still_ doesn't have usable services for hosting (I've been waiting on this for years), so basically my options are:

* go buy another $10,000 server to replace the dying one, and then find a local ISP to host it in some rack somewhere. This is the high-cost, low-effort approach. (Although maybe servers have come down in cost enough to where I could replace my existing one for cheaper than that.)

* set up on Amazon.com's cloud-computing service. I don't know how expensive it is, or how long it will take to migrate the game there (there are lots of dependencies that will take some time to reproduce on Amazon's linux environment). And from what I can tell, Amazon has outages and performance issues all the time -- just look at reddit.com, which is down at least once a day. (They use Amazon's hosting.) This is the medium-cost, medium-effort solution.

* try to convince someone at Google to let me use some machines for Wyvern. It would be free, and I'd have full control over the dependencies and performance, so in many ways it's the best option. But it's also the most work, because I'd need to get security reviews and launch reviews and do all this other stuff that takes months for normal projects -- and Wyvern is far from a "normal" project, since it allows user-contributed code to run on the server, which most people would rightly view as a gaping security hole. So this is basically the low-cost, high-effort solution.

* open-source the whole thing and then hope someone else does the work to host it. I've had a few offers. However, this option has some downsides, including:
- it's unlikely that Arilou and Teshuvah would be allowed to remain admins on some arbitrary person's hosting machine
- there may be nobody who can step up and host it to a level of performance/availability that is acceptable for the players, as it's not exactly cheap
- as a team, we basically lose control of how the game evolves and so on
- it's also a lot of work to open-source stuff, even though it seems like it should be easy

Anyway, I'm considering my options at the moment. All of them require getting the server back home, so I hope to do it this weekend or next weekend.

But it could be weeks to months before Wyvern is back up again at this rate.

R
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Things may not be so grim Wyverneers/Wyvernites as R may try to revive everyones favorite RPG.

-Riordan

[Teshuvah]

In all fairness, these are the things he's been saying for 5 years (or more now).
I recommend, as I said in our first post, that you continue to email him, as your support maybe what motivates him.
Him just "getting the game back up", isn't going to do any of you any good without him being actively involved after that.

[Halloween]

The cost of that server sounds bit high. Maybe he's adding in other costs besides the server itself, but they weren't that high last I knew. It would have to be a very good server to cost that much.

I would definitely encourage him to look into that number again.

[igorith]

Would it be a good idea to get said email address on the forums? He might recieve much more support that way but also might recieve a ton of junk mail he wouldn't want. I don't want to spend forever trying to find this man's email address, but from what I have found he has alot of buisness to do other than Wyvern.

[Valkon]

Originally Posted by Halloween

The cost of that server sounds bit high. Maybe he's adding in other costs besides the server itself, but they weren't that high last I knew. It would have to be a very good server to cost that much.

I would definitely encourage him to look into that number again.

Correct, you can buy a decent server (one that's better than the old one) for a quarter of that price.

[Teshuvah]

Originally Posted by igorith

Would it be a good idea to get said email address on the forums? He might recieve much more support that way but also might recieve a ton of junk mail he wouldn't want. I don't want to spend forever trying to find this man's email address, but from what I have found he has alot of buisness to do other than Wyvern.

As I said in the original post announcement, his personal info is not to be posted on the forum. I'm sure if you ask someone will send it to you in a PM though.

[Baurus]

Well Tesh I am trying to stay positive, and if nothing happens soon I will persist in asking about the server status. But i'm hoping the rest of you wyvern fans will do what I have done and ask about the game and tell R how fantastic it actually was. Maybe he needs to see how strong the supporters love for wyvern is and that will make him want to dedicate some time to its revival.

Regardless of how things go with you guys. Baurus, and Vesrayech will continue to try and motivate R. We love this game and I hope some of you feel that way towards it.

[Jacksparow]

As for the Server cost I agree. Computer parts are extremely cheaper then what they used to be. My top of the line $1500 build I made 2 years ago costs about a third of the price now for the same parts, and some of the stuff is "outdated" even though I can play crisis on high detail still on my "old" model. Just my internet out here sucks so I can't play anything online.

[Irlazy]

Should we ask him to shop around and then try to get a fund together to come up with as much as possible to go towards a new server? Depending on how many people chip in and how much people chip in we might be able to get the majority or even all of the price for the server.

[Lacuna]

I don't think we can jump to conclusions right now about the money issue. It's like R said: right now he has to assess the damage and the opportunity cost for each choice.

As Teshuvah echoed I think it's really important for the Wyvernites to continue to show support towards R and towards the continuation of this game.

As a sidenote, if he were to ask for funds to buy new hardware or support the cost of a better ISP, we definitely the collective will and funds to make it happen.

[darthsuegar]

This is just a thought I had while logging in earlier, and probably not a good idea, but how about Steam? Especially since they are now offering support for free to play games. Of course, there are several limitations to this, but it's still a possible option.

Edit: I'm not sure if Valve provides hosting through Steam or not, it may just be pure content delivery for free to play games.