Hello Elyrians,

As you may have noticed, an issue that surfaced last night with the check out process while under load has forced us to delay the start of the Settlers of Elyria event. We are working on a solution so we can open the ability to claim settlements and domains back up and correct any issues you had.

When the issue became apparent, we shut down the ability to claim new domains to prevent it from affecting more people. We’re also looking to fix a couple of other bugs that prevented claims or impacted you on the domain map.

At this time, we don’t have an ETA for our fix to the primary issue, but we are exploring multiple solutions. As soon as we have a clear view of this issue and high confidence in a fix, we will let you know, and give you as much notice as possible.

We have no intention of rolling the prices back, and as Caspian pointed out in Discord earlier, the auction is still in effect, with prices dropping every day by 1%.

Thank you all so much for your patience and support. This has been a trying time for us, and your understanding and help have made all the difference to the folks working till the wee hours of the morning on tracking down this issue and figuring out a solution.

Update: 12/20/2019 8:04pm PT

Greetings Elyrians,

Thank you all for standing with us as we work to resolve the issues that have prevented us from restarting the event. As of now, we believe we have identified and resolved the primary issue that was preventing folks from making purchases. What remains are some stability issues caused by our flash sales, and some hardening to ensure these systems work as intended with upgrades.

We’re still incredibly excited to see how this event will shape and change the face of each server and we’re looking forward to restarting the event as soon as we possibly can. Once we are ready to kick things off, we’ll be making some updates and announcements so hopefully no one is caught unprepared. In the mean time, keep an eye on our official communication channels.

Thanks again everyone, you’re the best community out there, we really appreciate your patience and understanding.

Update: 12/21/2019 1:51pm PT

Hello Elyrians

We are very excited to say we have resolved all the major issues with the Settlers of Elyria event. While a few quality of life fixes are on the way throughout the week, we are in the final stages of testing.

Based on this, we have high confidence we’ll be able to relaunch the event this afternoon, after we have confirmed the issues have been resolved.

We plan to restart the Settlers of Elyria event this afternoon at around 3:30pm pacific time.

Let your friends and communities know!

Thank you all for your sticking with us while we sort this out.

Update 12/21/2019 late:

Caspian said:

"Hey Elyrians. Yesterday (12/21) at 3:31pm PST shortly after the re-launch of Domain Portal with the Settlers of Elyria event, the site began to perform increasingly worse. It appears that there are thousands of incoming requests being made for sale info, domain info, etc. It's unclear yet whether these are part of an intentional denial-of-service, botting, or a bug in the Settlers of Elyria client code that is causing the issue, but the constant traffic is causing the site to run at a constant 100% utilization. Regardless of the cause, tomorrow (12/22 PST) we will begin taking steps to ensure the large volume of incoming requests are not impacting peoples' ability to use the other services provided by the site. In the interim, I've taken the Domain Portal down but the site remains unusable due to the sheer volume of incoming requests for domain name info, sale info, etc. I apologize for the inconvenience . The web team will investigate further as soon as they are able. Thanks!"

Update 12/22/2019 2:10am:

Caspian said:

"After investigation, I've discovered the root cause of the performance problems we began suffering from earlier yesterday, after the latest release of the DSS portal. I will be leaving the DSS portal disabled for the time being while we roll out a new fix and we ask anyone that has the DSS portal open in any browser to close it. Thanks for your cooperation! Please note, website performance, aside from the DSS portal, has returned to normal. Thanks again!"

Update: 12/22/2019 2:30pm PST

My fellow Elyrians,

Kain here. I’ll be candid with you all: we implemented a feature poorly and it caused us a lot of head and heart ache. We have identified the what, and the why, but there is an underlying problem with our implementation that needs to be fixed. For the time being we’ve had to disable the DSS Portal entirely. It will remain offline until we can ensure it is stable, at which point we’ll bring it back up, probably tomorrow.

The Settlers of Elyria event will be postponed until we address the underlying issue that caused all of this. We will make an announcement giving you notice as to when the event will relaunch some time tomorrow, the 23rd.

I want you all to know I’ve been monitoring this all weekend and pushing as hard as I can to get this event up for you. The fact that so many of you have been so supportive and understanding means the world to the team, and to myself.

When we know for sure everything is working, we’ll update again with a new launch time and date. We want to give you all ample notice and give ourselves the time to make sure we have it right.

Thank you again folks, truly. AK