Recent Issues & Future Plans

[Shenna 1135]

Dear community,

First of all, we want to thank everyone who supported us over the past few days and since the launch of the servers back in December. Together we’ve managed to throw together the necessary sum and pay for the servers in advance, largely due to our loyal members. You know who you are, so we thank you.

Once again we’ve shown that a there’s a close community of people from across the world who actually want to play Vanilla WoW and with your dedication and support you have shown this through and through. You’ve shown we can rely on you.

A special thank you goes out to our NA/EU players who vocally and financially supported us during the recent issue with our hosting provider and most importantly the Chinese players who came together to help provide for the server so that everyone can continue to enjoy Vanilla gaming. Usually they are silent, and proved that even though many players make snide remarks and blame them for everything, they came together to help support the project and to prove that they deserve a place of recognition here at Elysium.  

For all of our players, across the globe, the constant support, the silent supporters, vocal and devout majority continue to provide proof that the Legacy Movement is worth fighting for and we will not give up on that dream.

Here are the expiration dates for our machines:

• Anathema: September 2017 
• Darrowshire: October 2017
• Zeth’Kur: May 2017
• Elysium: October 2017
• Website: October 2017
• Backup Server: June 2017

All recent donations were directly paid to OVH, this can be confirmed by the expiration dates.

Upcoming changes to our server infrastructure
Currently our lead system administrator Crogge is working together with Whitekidney and Zaph on upcoming infrastructure changes. These changes include for example additional redundancy in form of proper SQL replication, improved RAID setups and security improvements.

This way the amount of possible downtime can be decreased noticeable on each realm, especially in case of major server failures or a third party issue as we had it on Anathema. With these improvements Anathema could have been moved within a few hours to a different machine and continue operation without any database rollback.

Crogge will post an announcement with further details after these changes have been implemented.

It’s been two weeks since we went Open Source
It’s been two weeks since we launched our open source initiative and we’re pleased to have had some constructive and fruitful dialogue with the community on our public development Discord channels, as well a healthy number of early contributions to the core.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be making organisational improvements to the repository on GitHub aimed at helping newcomers getting started with working with the core and database, as well as streamlining the development process for those wishing to contribute to the core as well the team’s own developers.

One of the major complaints about the project’s development has been the introduction of new issues after many of the weekly updates and hotfixes. With this new workflow implemented, every update will go through a more rigorous testing process before being deployed to the live realms.

In terms of current development priorities, we’ve received encouraging feedback from players testing encounters on their self-hosted cores and as we invite guilds to participate on the PTR, we’ll continue to work on polishing and tuning the encounters.

News on project rules
Over the past month the GM team has been reflecting on the Terms of Use, and the impact some of our rules have on the community. We are very conscious of the fact that the rules keep the server “fair” for all players, but if they are too restrictive those same players are unfairly punished. We want to make sure the rules achieve the goal of a fair, balanced and enjoyable playing experience for all. We have already made one major change to the policies by creating a much more accomodating quest item restoration policy (See here: https://forum.elysium-project.org/topic/39835-announcements-from-gm-team) We will also be using this same thread to let you know important GM related information — so keep an eye for future announcements. We are listening, so if there is anything in particular that the rules allow/preclude that you think we should change feel free to post it in the suggestion sub-forum. 

Community Ambassadors
We’re happy to welcome our Community Ambassadors: active community members who help people on the multi-language forums and in Discord channels.

Elysium & Zeth’Kur goes to Patch 1.3! 
We’re happy to announce that your realms will be updated to Patch 1.3 with new realm bosses Azuregos and Kazzak which will start to appear in-game on March 25th. We will also complete the fix for the PvP set itemizations for your realms. Good luck out there, it’s going to be a battle for sure.

Summing it up and ending the drama
So as you can see, we have been quite busy over the last few weeks, moving towards greener pastures and putting processes into place that not only better the Vanilla community as a whole, but for everyone who contributes towards the unification of Legacy Gaming as well.

In conclusion, we do not want the Elysium Project to be synonymous with the atmosphere of drama and constant backstabbing common for the private emulation scene. This is our home and we’re going to protect it.

However, we do want to thank everyone on the staff for their bravery and resilience. Together we have weathered all the attacks that have been aimed at us personally, all the real life threats, blackmail and libel. We want to thank our players for the priceless support they’ve provided when they asked us not to give up. We’re happy to see that the vast majority of loyal players believe in us and understand that Elysium is more than just another private server. 

There’s also a silver lining to all the trouble we’ve gone through: our team is now stronger and we’ve got new talent coming in, including people from other projects. This is actual proof that our idea of a unified community is a really good one. At the end of the day, everything we do is for our players. 

Sincerely,
Elysium Staff

[Salahuddin 0]

<3

[LittleRebel 2]

Thank you Elysium Team! <3

You're the best!

[genaside 0]

Thanks Elysium! <3

[Severyn 7]

Any news on Zeth'Kur merge / transfers? I believe it is fine to let it run a little longer but I'm afraid that it might become unplayable especially for NA players if the server population decline will continue in the same pace we have seen in the last few weeks. I guess in May latest it would make sense to merge ZK with Elysium. We (the community as a whole) would also safe some money an could use it for one server instead of two.

Nonetheless I am happy to hear that everything seems to be running smoothly now. Hopefully it will stay this way fow now. 

[Aklol 16]

Could you maybe consider giving more notice on patches like this?

[Nymis 12]

Still nothing on ZK's population decline, we're losing so many players every single day it's not even funny anymore. Do you still believe it's healthy thing to have between 700 and 2000 players on one server and 4-5 times that number on another? 

[Nogar 5]

Crogge for President

[Docholy 4]

WTB CC rep vendor!

 

[Wahlberg 0]

great news thanks

[Manaci 0]

Great post, keep up the good work!

[indi 10]

Can you merge Elysium and Zeth'Kur already, its getting real harsh seeing 700 lows while struggling to break 2k at peak.

Edited March 16, 2017 by indi

[Docholy 4]

A server merge might be a good idea for the low pop servers mentioned.  Lowers the cost of servers no?

[HelveteTV 5]

When are you gonna inform us who did the chargebacks so our guild can stop getting undeserved hatred for something we didnt do?

[HelveteTV 5]

1 minute ago, Docholy said:

Why does it matter that people know that NOPE back charged?  You should be more concerned that your guild is on the chopping block for possible guild wide bans for loot planting and teleporting to bosses, bro. 

nice bait bro

[NoGnomo 7]

Yea why did you guys even roll on Zeth Kur? It should have not even created

You could not wait 1-2 weeks for queues to end to start playing on Elysium or just roll on Anathema

90% of the ppl who rolled there are impatient kids who learnt about the server on some youtube so they ofc they quit at lvl 20 cause they are not made for vanilla

Bad choice of server

BTW I agree it should be merged, actually I believe it should only exist ONE server with 10-15k people, everyone together, as Nostalrius, not three servers with community split

Edited March 16, 2017 by NoGnomo

[Forest_ 40]

Glad to see the servers have been paid so far forward.

REALLLLLY looking forward to testing AQ40 PTR, also would love to hear more about your plans for reducing the War Effort as stated earlier this week.

[Outstanding 10]

Oh noes. The rep button is back, that's not going to last long with the minus option (irony incoming).

In other news, Crogge, what have you done?

Also, fishing dB, please fix.

[metagame 8]

27 minutes ago, Nymis said:

Still nothing on ZK's population decline, we're losing so many players every single day it's not even funny anymore. Do you still believe it's healthy thing to have between 700 and 2000 players on one server and 4-5 times that number on another? 

Between 700 and 2000 players is "Blizzlike" Medium to High population, and to some who take Blizzard's original decision as God's original holy word and intention, this is a good place to point them to when they say 9k players on Elysium is "too crowded" and "not Blizzlike".

[Acki 0]

Good job - keep it up, please !  ;-)

[indi 10]

Just now, metagame said:

Between 700 and 2000 players is "Blizzlike" Medium to High population, and to some who take Blizzard's original decision as God's original holy word and intention, this is a good place to point them to when they say 9k players on Elysium is "too crowded" and "not Blizzlike".

You're completely missing the point. Zeth'Kur was never advertised as the "Blizzlike" server, it used to peak 5k, now we are bottoming out with new lows in the triple digits each week. If the population was stable, sure, maybe 2.5k would be alright, but the issue is Zeth'Kur is losing players every single day. This will only get worse as most of the server is hitting level 60 and turning to raid logging because there isn't much else to do at the moment. The ranking scene is barely alive and you end up sitting in ques on both Alliance and Horde for significant periods of the day.

Both Elysium and Zeth have lost enough players to warrant a successful merge, as it stands both servers combined would struggle to break 10k and have lows of around 6k, very similar to what we had on Nostalrius.

Another issue is the matter of server funding, is it really viable to continue to pay 310 euros per month for a server that is sinking population wise? It seems extremely overkill to pay for that kind of hardware when your server is averaging around 1.2k people.

[Zak Preston 5]

Any fixes on fear DC bug? Maybe you should disable any skills that provoke DCs at least?

[Jabark 2]

I'm a Darrowshire player, but agree with the consensus that ZK should be merged with Elysium.

On the subject of Darrowshire, when are we going to get a patch upgrade? I've been looking forward to the STV fishing contest for months and we're still two patches away!

[Jabark 2]

19 minutes ago, NoGnomo said:

BTW I agree it should be merged, actually I believe it should only exist ONE server with 10-15k people, everyone together, as Nostalrius, not three servers with community split

You forget that Darrowshire is a PVE server. I personally have no interest in getting my ass handed to me constantly while trying to level up.

[metagame 8]

1 minute ago, indi said:

it used to peak 5k, now we are bottoming out with new lows in the triple digits each week. Zeth'Kur is losing players every single day.

Both Elysium and Zeth have lost enough players to warrant a successful merge, as it stands both servers combined would struggle to break 10k and have lows of around 6k, very similar to what we had on Nostalrius.

All servers have lost avg playercount because the hype of a new server launch is wearing off.

It's true that ZK is hurt the most by the population decline but I don't think the majority of people want the servers to merge. I'm sure when the dev team feels it is appropriate they will advertise the server through the proper channels and raise up the population again.