New decisions regarding the Server

[ServerSpeaker]

After a long talk in today's Team Meeting, we decided it was about time to start sharing with the community our plans and the works we have been making in order to improve the server's current state.
First there are some things we must inform you:
1. Arena Brackets got finally removed after a vote in the meeting.
Reasons:
The Arena Brackets existed for 2 reasons: 1. Prevent players from farming and 2. Make the games more fair. Since the farming subject got taken cared of thanks to the new rule created for it on Server Rules, we thought about increasing the brackets. But after listening to the player's opinions, and noticing we have currently a low population that definitely affects the development of arena, we decided to finally remove the brackets completely, in order to let players play.

2. Supremus and Black Temple Doors:
We decided to remove the doors to skip completely the area of Supremus in order to allow players to do the full instance without stopping due to a bugged boss. We apologize to those players that hope to receive a drop from the boss in question, but we are also now currently working on finding a better solution. This is only temporary until Supremus is fixed and doable.

3. S4 for hunters bugged:
After receiving several complains from hunter players about some S4 items that require more rating for them than for the other classes, we decided to create a new item and replace the bugged one in the vendor. That will be fixed and available as soon as possible.

4. Last but not least: Oregon Test Server.
As many of you already know, since our failure in the Update we have been looking for solutions to improve the server. Some of this information got leaked out before we were sure about it's probabilities of working, and hence the reason why we decided to keep quiet about it.
Three weeks ago the Oregon Test Server was up and running, we started the tests on it to see how it was compared to our current core. These tests gave out very positive results, needing only minor fixes, and showing a very good proficiency.
Some of the things already tested and proved working are:

1. Druid Talents and Spells:
124 Total Talents and spells
10 Talents and spells not tested
1 Talents and spells bugged or not working
Total = 113 Talents and spells tested and working.

2. Hunter Talents and Spells:
124 Total Talents and spells
7 Talents and spells not tested
8 Talents and spells bugged or not working
Total = 109 Talents and spells tested and working.

3. Mage Talents and Spells:
124 Total Talents and spells
3 Talents and spells bugged or not working
Total = 121 Talents and spells tested and working.

4. Paladin Talents and Spells:
124 Total Talents and spells
7 Talents and spells not tested
5 Talents and spells bugged or not working.
Total = 112 Talents and spells tested and working.

5. Priest Talents and Spells:
124 Total Talents and spells
4 Talents bugged or not working.
Total = 120 Talents and spells tested and working.

6. Rogue Talents and Spells:
124 Total Talents and spells
11 Talents and spells not tested
2 Talents bugged or not working.
Total = 111 Talents and spells tested and working.

7. Shaman Talents and Spells:
124 Total Talents and spells
5 Talents and spells not tested
12 Talents bugger or not working.
Total = 107 Talents and spells tested and working.

8. Warlock Talents and Spells:
124 Total Talents and spells
2 Talents and spells not tested
13 Talents bugged or not working.
Total = 109 Talents and spells tested and working.

9. Warrior Talents and Spells:
124 Total Talents and spells
6 Talents and spells not tested
1 Talent bugged or not working.
Total = 117 Talents and spells tested and working.

Very important bugs in talents and spells on classes such as: Warrior's Devastate and Deep wound, Rogue's poisons and talents, Hunter's spells, Druid's Lifebloom and dispells are working perfectly fine at Oregon, and we will use the things that are working in our core to fix those who aren't in Oregon.

Some of the instances have also been tested, though our first priority is currently classes bugs. The raids and instances will be tested further on. Battlegrounds and World PvP are working fine.

After seeing how Oregon promises to be a good replacement for our core, we started to ponder on how to move our Data Base to it. But during such, we realized the Data Base structure was very different, so right now we work on a converter to transfer safely our Data Base to Oregon without loss.

5. As soon as we finish our tests, there will be a small Test Server to check if our Data Base converter worked as it should. After that, tiny updates will come as we mix our core to Oregon's core.

We will be making more announces as we proceed with our tests and the Data Base transfer, and we hope it all works out as we expect.

Have a nice day community.

[Croggeadmin]

Latest informations about the Oregon Server:

We are working since 2 months on the "Oregon update" and were able to sort out most of the major issues. It didn't took years again to achieve this target because we are using now a full open-source project instead and received a lot of help from a person called "Letic". He is one of the Shadowburn developers and takes a lot of his time to support CroggesServer.

What is left to do?
The converter which is changing the current database style to the Oregon one has still a few minor issues left. For example reputations are being set to the maximum value once a player is logging in, the reason for this problem is currently unknown. The stability of the testrealm improved a lot in the last weeks, issues like the "logout crash" which was causing sometimes a crash when a player logged out are finally solved.

How much time do you need?
I would have said "soon" in the past but I think that the remaining part of the community deserves a better answer. It will take around 3-6 weeks till we can open a public testrealm with the defaultrealm characters. It would be quite pointless to open it in less time because a lot of characters are without the "start spells". That means that you cannot talk at all and that important spells like the "attack" one are missing. It will take several days to create a script which will add this "start spells (and skills)" via the database on each character.

What will happen here in the meantime?
We will make more events and introduce new server features like the "Happy Weekend". "Happy Weekend" means that we will increase the XP and honor rates by 50% (to 1.5x) each weekend. We hope that more players will be online at the same time and that we may get additionally more new players who will use the time to level up their characters.

Suggestions from the community are of course welcome!

[Croggeadmin]

Less then a week has passed and we got already new informations about the Oregon Server. The following major issues got fixed:

• The problem that a lot of converted characters had missing "start spells" got fixed by a script. The script is adding automatically the missing spells but won't remove already existing ones (Script created by Milambar).
• A lot of characters couldn't talk anymore because the language skills were missing, this issue has been solved (By adding the related skills) and won't cause trouble anymore.
• Most trinket features were "ignored" by the server, invalid permission levels were causing this problem and got corrected now to valid values.
• Map exploring should work in a Blizzlike way now, the current progress of "explored maps" may get removed though (Not confirmed yet).
• The basic Oregon revision has been set to an older one to increase the stability, all important fixes have been backported so you won't notice any difference (Except the higher stability).

The public testrealm will be opened in 2-5 weeks (as planned), we may invite some players to the private testrealm before we open the public one. Tefa will post in the next days how you can get on the private testrealm.


We noticed that a lot of players are curious how we will increase the population again. Fact is that we have already a basic plan which should give the server a decent population boost once Oregon has been installed, it has the following points:

• Write a newsletter via email to all existing accounts (Over 150.000 valid addresses!)
• Write a more detailed (public) changelog so new players can see the progress of the server
• Work on a new website so new players have a better overview and post way more "news" (The current website has a bad news system)
• Increase the rank on voting websites by giving out more vote points / more interesting voting rewards
• Add a referral system to the server so players get rewarded by getting new members into the community
• Create more threads in gaming forums to get more clicks and better search engine ranks (We got most players this way when we started the server)

In other hand, since we expect (and hope) our current community increases once Oregon is installed, we are also looking for new trustable team members to join our team. That way we will be able to provide a better service for the community.

You can use this thread to post suggestions.

[Croggeadmin]

It took us nearly 4 weeks to fix the remaining (important) issues on the Oregon update and we are slowly coming to an end. Here is a small list of changes:

• Big parts of the "Charming system" have been rewritten, that way spells like "Mind control" are working fine now. The "Charming system" related spells were totally bugged on Oregon and could be even abused in PvP to "bug" the targets.
• The world database received a decent update, a lot of quests got fixed that way. We made afterwards a cleanup to increase the performance of the world DB.
• Most unique parts of "CroggesServer" have been ported. For example:"The full Premium / Vote system, 8 level command system, Channel system modifications, GM Commands, Char backup system (As you know chars get achieved here), Instant mount block in BGs/Arena...".
• Most of the unique parts in the world DB of CroggesServer got ported to the Oregon update. That way all unique objects, items, creatures and spawns will be still available afterwards (That includes also stuff like guild houses and the related core systems). A lot of entries / functions got modified to be more Blizzlike again, we did that on request of the community.

The public testrealm should be opened as planned in 1 week~, further details will be discussed in the team meeting tomorrow. We may use this time a "bug tracker" instead of the forums to sort out appearing issues faster. The release date of the update itself cannot be published yet, it depends on the feedback of the community.

Edit: The testrealm has been opened in the promised time frame, read more about it here.