If you’ve not played on the original Star Wars Galaxies emulator in a season or two, it’s probably escaped your notice entirely that its core server, Basilisk, had a serious extended downtime back in August thanks to the hosting provider, which turns out to have been a blessing for the game’s longevity.
“We lost disks on the original Basilisk server causing us to do manual work to restore the game server databases, this work resulted in the restoration of the server on August 16, 2017,” explain the admins. “The week before this incident one of the mirrored disks failed, our hosting provider failed to notify us and meanwhile we did not get the emails from the sever alerting us to disk issues. In a sad twist of fate the second disk that was mirroring this failed drive also started to fail a week later. The odds of two disks failing within such a short timeframe are fairly rare.”
Wanna feel old? That server is from 2006. Fortunately, the developers were able to save all player data and get it all back up and running. The upside is that since then, they’ve also overhauled the infrastructure of the emu and its test server Nova to “power the project’s needs for many years to come” and “make it easier for the team to manage existing services and provide new and exciting capabilities to the community in the future.” Oh yeah, and while it’ll cost a bit more to donors in the short-run, in the long-run the costs will remain the same.
In case you’re considering playing, know that the emu patched up to publish 9 this past summer, adding the Village Jedi progression system (everything but Force ranking), tons of quests, the Corvette dungeon, and tons of fixes for professions, droids, and pets.
