As we mentioned in the previous post, ever since the Steam launch we've been busy working on getting new hosting. Over the last week we've finally received all the paperwork and hardware accesses to start the process:

On June 16th (Monday), starting at 10:00 we'll start the migration from our old servers in Budapest to a large datacenter in Amsterdam operated by Internap.

Internap certainly has a track record in gaming hosting, so this will hopefully lower the on-terrain latency - Amsterdam is one of the major hubs of Transatlantic networking, so players from Europe and America should notice a much more stable connection. Internap also cooked up various solutions to continually adapt networks, so in short we're having high hopes for this.

Now, a few words about the migration itself: During the period of moving, which we estimate to be around 3-4 hours (but you know how it is), all services will be down - game, web, email, IRC, everything. Some of this delay is inevitable (DNS propagation) and services will come back asynchronously: we'll try to get the game back up as fast as we can - most services are already running and working fine, we just need to synchronize some files and databases.

It's probably your best bet to follow us on Twitter or Facebook to follow our migration progress.

Wish us luck.

From our book of “why didn’t you have this already”, today we present you our new support ticket system. This will hopefully bring some much needed stability into our current player issue tracking methods and will be a much more convenient system for you, and us as well.

So, from now on you won’t have to be on the lookout for online GMs, or e-mail support, instead you can just create your tickets on the website and can check on their status anytime you want.

We still have to perform some final testing of the system, but you’ll be able to start using this on Friday already.

Support tickets

In case you haven’t heard of it yet, Perpetuum will take a little break tomorrow. The reason is that the datacenter where our servers are located is moving to a bigger location (still in Budapest), so we will have to physically move our servers as well. Since we are operating everything from there, this means that not only the game server, but the website and all connected services will be also unavailable for that time. To avoid confusion: this is not the server move that we plan to make some time in the future to address routing issues, this is simply a necessity.

The servers will go down tomorrow (2011-09-13) morning at 7:00 CEST and will be probably offline for the better part of the day. It’s hard to make any predictions on when we’ll return, but we’ll keep you updated via our facebook page during the downtime.

We will of course compensate the lost game time to all of you by extending account expiry times accordingly.

But something good will come of this all too: while everything is down, we’ll use the opportunity to deploy a shiny new website:

Apart from sporting our first high-detail robot models that our artists have been working on for a while now, you’ll also find some structural changes. If you ever wanted to have all the news at a glance, the main starting page will become your best friend from now on. The latest news, blog posts, patch notes and all that will be part of the new front page. We have also simplified the main menu and rearranged some links into more logical categories.

A brand new section will also see the light, an ever-expanding collection of articles about the world of Perpetuum: gripping short stories, insights on some of the more intriguing parts of the lore, or official Syndicate-memos for those who are into more serious role-playing.

The blog and the forum will also be more tightly integrated into the whole design, so we hope this will make navigating our pages much more comfortable.

So that’s all for now, tell us what you think about the new website when it goes live tomorrow evening!