Shadowbane Announcement

[Colin Mor]

Will there be any comp time?

April 23, 2003 Service Announcement

Answer

Let us start by saying we here at Ubi Soft and Wolfpack apologize and feel your pain. We are very much aware of the recent service problems many people have been experiencing. Please be assured that the dev teams have been burning the midnight oil to remedy these issues. But in the meantime, as compensation for your lost game time, we are comping all subscribers 3 free days of gameplay from Friday, April 25, through Sunday, April 27. For more detailed information, please read on.

1. Login Servers

We have several outstanding technical issues with Shadowbane that we want to give all our customers an update on. The number one priority issue for Shadowbane right now is the Login server crashes. We identified a bug in the Login servers’ operating system that has been slowing down our performance and possibly corrupting user character data as well. This has led to other delays and negative effects for our players. We are in the process of moving all of our Login servers to a better platform, and we expect this to be completed in the next two days. The Login servers tonight should be totally stable. Our initial results from the last two hours are extremely promising! Just in case any problems emerge from these improvements, our network and administration teams will be monitoring these servers all night long.

2. Game Servers

Our second priority issue has been the long reboot times for some of the game servers following a crash. We are currently testing a server-side fix that should alleviate this problem. We expect this patch to go live sometime tomorrow and expect to release additional client and server patches next week as well. We apologize for the frustration of having to wait almost an hour to play following a crash. Wolfpack and Ubi Soft are confident that this issue will be resolved in the next 24 hours.

Another priority issue with our customers has been the lag and server performance issues across the service. We have been working on these problems nonstop. We have more patches and fixes in the weeks to come that will put many of these problems behind us. We are committed to finding a solution to these problems.

3. Free Game Time

We apologize for the Login server downtime last Monday, which prevented many of our customers from playing the game. In order to compensate our customers for these problems, we will be extending the Shadowbane subscriptions for all current subscribers (with accounts in good standing) three extra days beginning this Friday. So this weekend’s game time will be on us.

It is important to us that all of our customers have the best possible experience playing Shadowbane. We have a dedicated support and development staff working on these issues around the clock, and we will continue this pace until we can resolve these service issues. We are committed to providing you with the best possible service that we can. Thank you very much for your support and understanding.

- The Shadowbane Team