Vrahn

Hello Sir or Madam, my name is Cedric and I'm looking to speak with one of the mages at the tower, I'll be staying in Holm until I can at an apartment close by, send me a bird if you are able, and please accept my humble thanks. Regards, Cedric Aurilen ((Matt8883))

Thanks for the updates!

Welcome aboard and thanks a lot for your time and effort, it means a lot to all of us. :)

Name of the Person who Proposed the Change: Whitebeard Change: Taxes My concerns or ideas about the Change: I have to echo what a lot of other people have said about this. Taxing for the sake of being a money sink doesn't seem right to me, players should be forced to devise their own system of taxation, complete with its' loopholes, tax evaders, and all the RP that can come from that. I don't think it will draw people away from towns because towns provide a massive number of benefits, including exposure, protection from mobs/bandits/enemy nations, other facilities close by, more RP, etc. Further, taxes should all be manual with emeralds, I'm actually really in favour of the emeralds physically existing, it adds so many dynamics to the game as opposed to EFTs. I think that we could take the money system even further and have player run banks and treasuries, as opposed to the auto-safe one we currently have, it could lead to some very interesting situations, providing another avenue for RP with thieves trying to steal from banks and player's safes, and good folks trying to build safer... safes. ;) Anyway in summary taxes should be handled ICly with IC interactions and not via a plugin or automatically.

No one has to maintain a DDOS attack... the attacking machines are just ordinary people who had their computers compromised by a virus of sorts perhaps quite a long time ago, they are paying for their connections, they are maintaining their hardware, etc. Increasing the strength just requires you to get more people to download your virus, it's quite a free process. And no one would need to sit there and watch it, it's pretty hands off hehe.

If possible could you clarify what exactly the problem is with Limestone that is prompting the switch?

Thanks Shift that sounds great, very much appreciated. :)

The temp. fix I listed in the other thread would work to get us back in action albeit a bit crippled. Likely the DDOS is from a competing server in my opinion.

It's a little disturbing that we've been down for two days straight with no additional information. Again really anything helps but the longer we go with little communication the bigger this issue will become for us. As a temporary measure which will work to get us off the ground again and running will be to blacklist ALL inbound connections except a database of whitelisted IPs collected from member's accounts on this forum and then via an application page on the forums. This is not an ideal situation, and it means some manual work and some people being locked out until they get all their IPs whitelisted but as a guy who works in the IT industry and has dealt with this stuff before it will get us at least back on our feet until we can get a more permanent solution. There are also a variety of other options when it comes to combating a DDOS, none of which are perfect but they are at least steps we can use to mitigate our downtime and get back up. Also to address a few points: 1) You will not be able to find the attacker, odds are any machines he owns are not actively engaging in the attack, instead it's just a big net of comprimised computers that have been told to hit up this server. 2) IP Addresses do not lead to home addresses. -_-

Hey do we have any new news or progress on the situation?

Thanks a lot for the heads up. :) Good luck boys heh.

Would it be possible to get an update of some kind on how we are doing and what's the status on the DDOS protection stuff? Sorry I don't mean to be pushy it's just good to not be in the dark on this kind of stuff. Thanks a lot guys.

Is the server down again?

Could we possibly get a quick update on the situation please?

Aye I hate to ask questions like this but considering that we're having an almost endless stream of this problem it would make a lot of sense to allow at least one or two other high level staff the ability to go into command line for restarts. Anyhow any update would be appreciated, thanks. :)