Arch Server New Reset - Apr 13, 2020 (reset)

General announcements for the community to read.
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Laanders
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Arch Server New Reset - Apr 13, 2020 (reset)

Post by Laanders » Apr 05th 2020 12:55

Arch Server will restart at Tue Apr 7 18:00:00 2020.
Armageddon is scheduled to begin at Sat May 23 16:00:00 2020.


Arch Server will restart at Mon Apr 13 09:00:00 2020.
Armageddon is scheduled to begin at Sat May 30 16:00:00 2020.

Changes from previous set

Changes:
  • Increase of lesser item min price limited to 50% per transaction, further explanation here.
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Laanders
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Location: Malmö, Sweden

Re: Arch Server New Reset - Apr 13, 2020 (reset)

Post by Laanders » Apr 12th 2020 19:53

Arch server has been reset effective immediately due to an issue with the Black Market. The issue, which allowed strong manipulation of lesser item minimum prices with minimal effort, had been previously identified on lightning and beta, after which a change was applied to make such manipulation considerably more ineffective. Regrettably this fix was not applied to all servers, which was made abundantly apparent early this arch set.

Because of the early stage of the set, and because there is no good way to undo the impact of the vulnerability, a decision was made to reset the server and start the set again tomorrow, obviously with the aforementioned change in place, rather than to play out almost the whole set under a flawed premise. This is a regrettable situation to have to face and the blame ultimately rests on us game staff for not ensuring the updated mechanic was deployed across all servers in a timely fashion.

Because the accusations invariably surface, I want to make it clear that making use of this particular vulnerability has not been considered bug abuse from the viewpoint of the server admin team, mainly because the issue itself is not a bug so much as a weak design. That most players would choose not to make use of such issues once identified and at least partially addressed in public, does not materially change that assessment.

My sincere apologies for the inconvenience invariably caused by this development.
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Re: Arch Server New Reset - Apr 13, 2020 (reset)

Post by Laanders » Apr 12th 2020 23:28

As an addendum, anyone who donated for supporting status has had their credits refunded.
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Re: Arch Server New Reset - Apr 13, 2020 (reset)

Post by Laanders » May 15th 2020 06:13

Arch server suffered an unusual outage between approximately 00:10 and 05:50 UTC (server time.) The game was completely inaccessible during the outage meaning no players were able to log on. Observant players may note that bots were still able to move.

It seems I am developing a habit of apologizing for inconvenient impacts on arch. I'll see if I can locate the root cause of the disruption.
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