APB Reloaded and Fallen Earth are finally on the verge of restoration after nearly a month of struggles.
Readers will recall that both Little Orbit MMORPGs went offline four weeks ago now over what initially sounded like unexpected network issues, but the outage ballooned when it became clear there was way more going on than that, and then Little Orbit boss CEO Matt Scott made the hard decision to move the games to a new provider entirely, a process that has taken considerable time and effort. At one point, Scott himself flew to the Netherlands to oversee the installation.
“We actually have quite a few tech folks in our community,” he wrote. “Many reached out with offers to help after this situation came up. Our new data center was a recommendation from one particular player and I have to say they did an amazing job.”
That said, not everyone in the APB and Fallen Earth communities has been so sympathetic, but Scott addressed criticism directly, saying it’s been “traumatic” for the company too.
“Everyone is allowed to have your opinions. Frankly, being offline this long has been traumatic for the company. We didn’t ask for this. Our hosting partner for the last 5 years got evicted from every data center and shut our game off with no warning. We had to scramble to rebuild everything as fast as we can. It’s a human effort with long hours and dedicated staff who want this game back online just as much as you do. It has required physically gathering our own hardware, installing into new data centers in LA and Amsterdam, and restructuring the network to work again. We had to write new code to support infrastructure pieces that we had to replace from Path Networks.”
(We could be wrong, but we think that bit about LO’s old hosting partner being “evicted” is a new twist heretofore unvoiced. We knew there was some sort of drama, but this is more specific than LO has been until now.)
As of Tuesday, the GamersFirst website is back online, as is the APB Reloaded OTW (open test world); Scott says that Little Orbit has been “grinding through bugs and little issues” brought on by the provider-switchup.
We’ve also got a de facto roadmap for what happens after the OTW testing is deemed a success – and that includes bringing Fallen Earth back online too.
