Posted on 2016-09-05 15:09
Hello and welcome to the 184th Devtracker Weekly Round Up!
By terricon4 via Reddit
On August 30th, at around 1:30 AM PST, the forums and game login servers went dark. According to a post on the forums this was unexpected and so probably not planned (don't want to say for sure not planned because who knows what the internal communication is like with the recent staff changes and all). During this time there was a lot of unhappy people and expectations that Firefall was being shut down... just check the other Reddit pages around this point in time, you'll see what I mean. But then everything came back up, though not exactly working perfectly, and stuff tried to go back to normal. Unfortunately a surprise outing with no communication from a studio that's largely gone dark lately isn't taken well with the ex/playerbase. Among the various issues, Firefall was reported to Steam by some people and has been removed from the Steam store (download links still work). According to another post they expected it to be back within two or so days, but that hasn't happened. I'm guessing with the whole verification issue probably having been included in the initial reports Steams not that interested in re adding Firefall to their games lists again until that's fixed.
So! Let's continue on with how the rest of the week went... On September 1st around 2 or 3 AM PST the forums and game went offline again. Around 12AM they came back online again. Once again there were some Reddit posts about this and then some for it's return. There has been no announcements or information relating to this outage.
Then on September 4th at around 12pm PST the game servers and website once again went dark. And then sometime that evening around six or seven PM the game and site returned again. By this point it seems people have stopped caring enough and there haven't really been any new Reddit threads to announce these changes.
So, by the time you read this, it's entirely possible the servers will have once again gone dark and with people not reporting changes on Reddit as much it's probably best to refer to the steamcharts for server info and outage times. While it still counts peoples clients just sitting at login and all, if you look over the past week you'll be able to see the rough times of the outages and use that as a template for the future if you want to check yourself how long they've been down. Here's to hoping they'll get steady and stay up again for awhile as there are still a number of people who do play and enjoy the game (those of you reading this possibly included) but as always the future is uncertain, though after this week probably a bit darker than it was seeming the last one.
And that's it for this weeks article, till next time everyone, please donate any spare server monkeys or hamsters you may have to R5 so they can keep things running. Toodles!