09/30/23 | Minor Update - A Tumultuous Beginning
Hey there, everyone!
Sooo… it’s safe to say that it’s been a very tumultuous start (and that’s definitely not a word we had to look up the definition of). One of the huge considerations we’d try to prepare for before the launch, which actually ended up initially causing that slight delay for all of the eager and rightfully excited frontrunners, was adding in a system that was intended to counteract the very thing that rocked us so hard; what we weren’t prepared for, was just how large of an attack we were going to be under. For consideration, and hopefully mild amusement for the few who understand these numbers, here’s a screenshot from the first 90 minutes of our launch:
A casual near 1/10th of the Earth's population checking out our website... apparently!
Needless to say, it put our system under some pretty serious duress and caused us to exercise some particularly abstract methods in keeping everything from imploding (such as having to manually restart the web host every 45 seconds when it inevitably overloaded… sorry for that one, web developer). What we didn’t account for in all of this was how patient of a community we had during the process. Understandably, it’s an incredibly frustrating experience to have this sort of thing happen, both as a player and as the team wanting to finally open up our passion project to everyone, when there’s been so much expectation built up. To everyone who was shafted today in the purgatory that enveloped our login process, our most sincere apologies. We’ve been doing what we can to patch up everything and hold our quaint ship afloat, but the absolute orbital laser of a DDOS attack definitely got a few good swings in.
On that same note, we’ll be looking to make it up to everyone once the dust has settled in a fashion that doesn’t necessarily pull the rug out from those who’ve been able to get in, but also doesn’t overlook those who weren’t. We’ll come up with something good, we promise! The most surprising fact of today was that amidst all the chaos, there was people who were still wanting to reach out and show their support through donations. For those people, we can’t say we understand the absolutely bonkers mentality behind your actions, but we can safely understand the reason, and for that we thank you for showing your support and we’ll keep doing our very best to hold Neox to an above bar standard. We’re also reconstructing the entirety of the donation perk list and fully intend to have it in place early next week, which will also include a proper Knowledge Base entry outlining each of the perks for each tier. We’ve already typed the outline up for the upcoming changes and let’s just say there’s some fairly spicy ones.
To the beta testers (if you’d missed out on the beta phase, you can skip this whole paragraph!), don’t worry, we’ve not forgotten about you! There was talk of having you all ever so graciously acknowledged for your collective efforts during both the open and closed beta periods, and we’ve not forgotten. Within the next couple of days, a magic section will appear within the Discord where we’ll house a public forum for everyone to voice their opinions on what they’d like to see and shortly after we’ll have it implemented into the game!
Would we say the attacks compromised the quality of our launch? They absolutely did, so to whoever orchestrated them all? Give yourself a pat on the back, you managed to do the very thing you sought out to do and had some fairly decent returns. Are we even the remotest bit discouraged as a result? Absolutely not. Neox was, at its very conception, always designed to be more of a marathon than a sprint. We intend to build upon this project for ages to come and to hold it to a level we can be genuinely proud of. We want to keep improving upon the internal systems, introducing new content, growing, and ultimately… provide a place for players who share our vision. So to you, thanks for giving us the opportunity to experience one of the hardest DDOS attacks we’d ever had, and for giving us the chance to grow from it and improve on a ton of our back end. Same time tomorrow? This time, all we ask is that you buy us a drink first.
To the entire community, for what happened today, we’re sorry. We tried our very best to prevent it, failed, and so subsequently tried to do our very best to deal with it. We know it wasn’t a smooth ride, it wasn’t the most enjoyable, and it feels unfair to the vast majority of you. From our perspective? It really sucks as well. We were so incredibly excited to reveal to you all what we’d been fastidiously working on all this time, to have you log in for the first time and glimpse a world you could call your home, if only for a little while, and it feels like we let you all down. Going forward, we’ll do better by all of you and keep trying to improve.
Anyways, here’s to tomorrow. We’re not finished yet… not even close.
Thanks,
Neox Staff
