Ladies, gentlemen,
I have one good news and one bad news to announce.
The good news first, since I can explain everything else better then and hopefully people stop reading after that out of joy:
Tomorrow (Wednesday 5th November 2014) we will publish the Client version of Crossfire 2.0.
The bad news:
You will lose 6 weeks of progress on your chars.
There is practically no good way of telling you this news so Ill say it straight away.
During yesterdays online tests we noticed a server malfunction (to be more precise a malfunction in the Windows version that is used on the server) that corrupted large amounts of chars on the server.
After checking the logs and the account data, we had to realize that this malfunction was in effect for nearly 6 weeks unnoticed by anyone. Not by the players... not by me.
While not being a big problem for CF1.9 it is a major problem for CF2.0.
The server of course did backups of all chars every day... but since it also included the corrupted data into these backups they are no real use anymore.
Fact is, in order to get rid of this problem and release Crossfire 2.0 we have to do a char rollback of 6 weeks.
I see no other way to get this problem fixed.
This whole situation sucks... for more than 10 years Ive tried to prevent such incidents but now it still happend.
Im sorry about this mess.
This clearly belongs into the category "worst-case scenario" but right now I have no other choice than to focus on limiting the damage.
Since we are now forced to do such a rollback on the server we have decided to release Crossfire 2.0 as a "pre-release" or "beta" or ... whatever you want to call it.
Every day waiting would have made the situation worse. Every delay would have made the rollback and the amount of problems just bigger.
Today the server will stay offline while we do final tests and preparations.
You will be able to download the mod from our filebase tomorrow.
The client version is 100% complete and done.
It will run stable in Singleplayer AND Multiplayer.
However, we are forced to release the mod before all parts of the server software are complete.
There might be small issues and there are some online features which will not be available right after the release.
In the following weeks we will use the CF2.0 server environment for public online tests and apply fixes and updates in the background. You may play online with CF2.0 and use the features that are already available but we might interupt regular gameplay when important tests have to be done.
Practically we can consider this a public online beta test for the mod.
I encourage everyone to report bugs and problems via our bugtracker (in the Portal Tools) so we can take care of that.
Since this is some kind of "unofficial" release of the mod we will not make big public announcements about it. No news at Moddb... no sent newsletters. We first would like to observe the situation and if everything runs well we still can take care of promotional actions.
I hope that the almost 3 years of work we have put into this mod outweight the character rollback and the lossed related to this incident.