Private server disconnection 1st May 2012

[Hypernoma]

Dear NI Community,

This notice is to provide server owners with notification of the disconnection of private servers as of 1st May 2012, excluding extraordinary geographical exceptions. This notice provides you, the server owner, with an excess of a four weeks to close your server. No member of the NordInvasion Team is in any way responsible for any charges or liabilities incurred as a result of the disconnection of private servers.

The development team have unfortunately had a large amount of their time occupied with policing private servers and dealing with an extraordinary amount of players exploiting and glitching the game, as our two previous notices have stated. The development team spend a huge amount of their free time working on NI and it is disheartening to see players abusing the game in such a manner. The Team cannot and will not detract from their professional lives to police a section of the community that insist on glitching the game. A portion of the community has left no recourse for the Team but to pursue this course of action and the Team will not be swayed from this course of action.

There are currently an excess of official NI servers to meet player needs but this will of course be subject to review after the disconnection of private servers. The Team accepts that further servers may need to be opened and will address this as of the 1st May 2012.

We appreciate that Houses may wish to play together on servers in House events. The NordInvasion Team are currently looking into this and a system will be examined for allowing House players to play in events together.

Yours sincerely,

#The NI Team

[Tameless]

I ave payed 3months payment what can i do with server then?

I reported glitchers and exploiters mys elf as a server owner im obliged to do so but how come i need to disconnect my server?
Im sure that phalangites didnt exploit or glitch because they only play on the server when im on it my self...

[Kwal]

Dear NI Team

that's cool, I understand naughty behaviour is a problem and if this will take some policing off of your hands I'm all for it. I'm wondering though how the private servers are linked to excessive glitching. AFAIK it's just as easy to glitch in any of the servers, or is this about having less servers so it's easier to monitor them?

Yours faithfully

Kwal

[Sparhawk]

I'm not going to complain or ask if my servers can be left up, because I know that you are doing this to all servers no matter their quality. It's too bad it came to this though.

[Huscarlton Banks]

Ah, this is unfortunate, though I can see why it would be frustrating to spend free time making sure nobody is glitching. I won't be able to host the PK servers for a few months after May anyway though, since I'll be graduating from my university.

It might be particularly hard to organize house events for US players without disrupting public play with the current server ratio (especially on hard), but hopefully it all works out.

[mistress_amber]

I dont belive this is the awnser that will bring around the soltion you hope to see. You the development team are tired of having to police the private servers as well as the servers directly under your controll. I see the simple soltion is to look for a team of moderators to work under you. That way houses can keep there servers and diversify places to connect to. I can understand if you still want to take down the private servers for now while you look in and recurit and eveluate moderators for your servers. Properly done this would free your entire deveolpment team from having to do the dirty work of keeping the servers fun and glitch free, while providing a varity of places to connect to.

Sincerly,

Inquisiter Vail

[ettarkcaSuD]

I fully support your decision, this mod has to stay free of exploitation and cheating.

I was surprised in the first place that you trusted the players so much to allow private servers...

sadly, the majority has to pay for the actions of a few, but that is not the developmen teams fault, always keep that in mind when discussing about the topic...

[Juline]

I almost bought the 3 months server subscription for my server. I can see why the moderators are upset because I would be too if the game that I put time and effort in is being abused, hacked or glitched ......but why should most of us be punished because of a few people that broke the rules? We all know it's not the way to go. This is not the solution and I do agree with the posting above where a team of admins that you guys trust can work under you to ''police'' the servers and I am sure there are other options out there. If you do choose the bad decision to take the servers down please at least enable the polls again. Thank you.

[Sphinx]

With only Worm having access to the admin pw, it was easy for private servers to lock it and do some "bad" things without no one really knowing. I think it is good thing that private servers get removed and maybe if donations get back online, we can have a House Event server were people have to book time slots to play with their house members. Anything to remove the glitching possible (or at least reduce it) is a good thing. It sucks for the server owners, but it sucks even more for the people devoting themselves to this mod and see people abusing and exploiting glitches.

[mistress_amber]

I allready sujested above about needing a group of trusted people to moderate the servers. Just removing all private servers still leaves the job of policing how ever many NI offical servers there are. So expanding the moderating population outside of your development team cant hurt. It would allow you to focus on this game we love to make it better and more enjoyable. I think you could still have a form of private servers in the effect of servers where the host hands over full access to the NI team and he loses access to everything but the abilty to keep it up to date. At this point I dont think my idea is really an awnser but thats not the point, the point is the desire to look for a better option. I suppose Im just an optimist who allways holds out hope.