Dear Kronos

We’re almost a week into what has been a tough transition for some, both veterans and new heroes alike. We apologize for the radio silence however as hopefully you can understand we’ve been devoting all our resources to adapting to this new reality. We’d like to take a moment to welcome all the new players to the community. Hopefully in time you will come to regard Kronos as your second home. With a migration of players choosing to make Kronos their new home, this has put both stress and frustration on both new players and veterans alike. The challenges haven’t stopped there however. Since Wednesday our team has worked 24 hours a day every day on the numerous challenges that we faced. These challenges included adapting to the sudden (and completely unexpected) increase in population by working on significant performance and stability improvements, dealing with a higher than normal GM ticket volume, and with any added population our team has noticed increases in both attempts at hacking and gold selling. Our team has had a lot to do in a very short amount of time. As of this news article our team is finally starting to catch their breath, and likely seeing their loved ones for the first time in nearly a week. So lets bring you all up to speed on some of the challenges our team has been facing, and more importantly how we’re going to be handling some of the key concerns the community (and we) have moving forward.

We’ve greatly improved the performance of the server and despite a few hiccups the stability of the server should be getting back to normal. While most of our optimization is unseen by the player base, one big one that is noticeable is /who. This was reduced to default settings in order to increase performance by limiting the amount of queries being sent. With respect to tickets, right now our ticket system is averaging at least 1 ticket every 30 seconds which to our teams credit has not significantly impacted ticket response times thanks to the long hours that our GMs have been putting in. This leaves us with two of the biggest remaining concerns, cheating and gold selling. At the time of this writing, since the announcement of the imminent termination of Nos, both our GM team and numerous built in security measures have banned nearly 200 attempted hackers/exploiters/gold sellers from the server. An increase in these numbers was to be expected, however, when compared to weeks leading up to this new reality these numbers are statistically more significant than expected.

Given the seer amount of these incidents, our team understands that this trend absolutely cannot continue. Further to this we must add that this is not solely to blame on players from a specific country, these are players from numerous countries around the world. When we broke down the numbers of both cheater & gold sellers, a vast majority of them used VPNs and/or Proxy. To help curb the growing rampant use of VPN/Proxy by players attempting to hack/exploit/gold sell we’re implementing the following change within the next day or two:

We’ve been working diligently on a network protection system which will reject access to our project when it detects VPN/Proxy use after a few minutes. After going through the numbers and making projections, our team was left with no other alternative but to implement this system to curtail a vast majority of these cases in order to bring the numbers down to a very manageable low. While this decision may not be acceptable to some, we as a team must put the health and wellbeing of our project first and foremost.

This doesn’t mean however that all VPN/Proxy will be outlawed entirely. As stated in the rules, our Admin reserves the right to allow the use of a VPN/Proxy if they see fit and grant permission. To that extent, it may be possible for a guild to apply for permission to use 1(one) VPN/Proxy address. We do not guarantee that this permission will be granted, and for those who are granted permission the use of the address will be strictly monitored for any misuse/abuse. Any abuse of the address by any player using this address would result in the immediate termination of that address. So it would be in those guilds best interest to ensure the address does not go beyond the guild, or lose access for good.

These are just some of the measures we are taking to help improve the server. We have added other measure in game as well, some of which you may have already run across while others the every day player likely won’t see. Our commitment to quality and our desire to provide the best experience possible are the driving forces behind the numerous changes and improvements we have (and will) implement.

We thank you all for your patience during this time of transition & adaptation, and you can rest assured we will continue to work hard to give you the best experience possible.

Safe travels friends.