EQC Dead in the Water

[Anesthia]

Not a huge surprise:

Many of you have recently reached out to me asking about the project's status, so I might as well take the time to address everyone.

Testing started on April 5th and I recently closed it on July 9th. The testing environment was very small, so our testers simply exhausted the content (I was only expecting the content to keep them busy for three or four weeks). I have recently become very busy at work, so I am not yet sure when the next testing phase will begin.

We did discover a few key things from this first testing phase. Starting with the bad, roughly 10% of users experienced an issue with the UDP/IP handshaking stage (this stage occurs when connecting to the server and while zoning). The severity of this issue ranged from an occasional problem to completely preventing the connection. We do not yet have enough data to say this for certain, but this seems to be a problem with recovering from packet loss during the handshaking stage (a number of these users were connecting through hotspots and other wireless connections). We have also experienced a number of issues with running the client under Windows 8, but I believe most of these have been resolved by now. On the plus side, we learned that our work is unbelievably stable. In the 2,250+ hours the server was online, we only experienced two crashes, both of which were due to silly mistakes (an infinite loop in the forage routine and a race condition in the PC trading routine). This level of stability for software that was never tested in the past is just absurd and we are really happy about that.

As some of you already know, I reached out to SoE in February with a partnership proposal, which exchanged full liability and monthly subscriptions for the rights to possess and distribute their intellectual property (IP). Although the deal was entirely in their favor (I would have essentially been an unpaid slave), they ultimately said no. I believe I have made it quite clear in the past how critical legitimate data is to me (there is no close; you either have it or you don't), so it should come as no surprise when I say I have zero interest in hosting a server without it. Plus, despite what so many others will have you believe, it is unlawful to distribute SoE's IP without their consent--you cannot argue against this.

Although I was not expecting SoE to accept my proposal, I was relying on them doing so. At this point, my only option for this project is to create an original content server, but I doubt I will have the motivation to do so. While I refuse to be involved with any classic-era content server, this does not mean one cannot exist under our work.