In the second part of Carolyn Koh's special reports on Horizons the EI Interactive takeover, she looks at payment issues, the vulnurability report and more.

"After notifying EI I got a response from Mr. Rask, informing me that the executive GM will contact me shortly. This never happened."

So what did he do then?

"I waited 60 days," he said, "then I published it and I informed you."

Ed Andercheck of EI Interactive/Pixel Magic saw this in a different light.

"[The SOAP vulnerability is] a non-event from the standpoint of security," Andercheck told MMORPG.com. "It's being closed."

The full article is available here.

will this game just die already. as i have stated in previous posts, the games owners are not to be trusted. they have not, and will not to this date help any customers in any direct way, old or new.

whether it was tulga or the new owners, they both were on track with one another, deny problems, silence the community, and throw out the tag line "its not our problem". too much bad blood in this game and an example of what not to do to your player base by both companies. does anyone wonder why the new company conducts business as tulga did? who is with this new company that has these tendancies...........bowman maybe?.

also sad to see bowman still employed with the new company even in a consultation capacity the individual is simply dishonest. i would have called him a thief directly but i wouldnt want my thread bounced.

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Originally posted by graill

also sad to see bowman still employed with the new company even in a consultation capacity the individual is simply dishonest. i would have called him a thief directly but i wouldnt want my thread bounced.

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Umm... David Bowman isn't working for this company in any way shape or form. He moved to Texas and works for the new Bungie split-off (I can't remember the name of the company, but it just went public. They are currently working on some halo 2 maps, and have hinted in an interview that they are working on their own consol title as well).

Not only does bowman not work for EII/PME, he doesn't even work on MMOGs any more:P. Do you even read the gaming news sites, or do you just yank random words out of the air?

"solidly researched?!" No, this is all OLD NEWS except for the last 3 paragraphs or so [the part about Pixel taking over from IE - and even that is month old news!]

News Flash:  Julius Ceasar stabbed at Senate!  More at 11!

   Sadly when this all falls apart once and for all some of these folks will then be qualified to write the how not to do it manual.  The game had some great ideas and potential but the implementation and execution from early on was awfull.   The player community for the game must be the most patient kind hearted group in gaming though.   I never played the game but tried to keep an eye on it in the hopes it might turn around but alas things only seem to be getting worse.  I even had thoughts that maybe during a vacation I might download the try and give it a look but now I feel totally uncomfortable even doing that.

Wow, the amazing research award goes to Carolyn this year :).

Very well done article, well writen, well explained and very informative.

Thanks for all the work.

As much as I've bagged HZ, it's exceedingly sad to see the road this game is its few diehards have had to go down.

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Originally posted by Mustasio
Again, wonderful job by Miss Carolyn Koh, looks like she put some real work into this.

I guess Andercheck learned that taking over an MMOG game company is sort of like taking over a sports team, except every single fan travels with the team.  The community of an MMO game IS the MMO, and to ignore and mistreat them is the worst idea you could have.  I can't help think that if Horizons didn't already have such a devoted player base, then it never would of gotten off the ground with Andercheck.

-Mustasio

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Its a real genuine shame about what happened to this game. It really was, this game actually ahd some potential of having some trully unique atributes one of which was that one of the races i belive was not even humanoid [Dragon's].

I will however hope that this new company will find a way to drag this game back toa working title with a decent level of lag rather than what was there when i tried it last time.

it sounds - from the last part of the article - that the clueless are trying to get a clue on how to build an MMO

i doubt that there are intentions to improve Horizons however - but to build a new one (like everyone and their grandmother) without the bad associations that Horizons has

of course i am wearing my tinfoil hat as usual

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Originally posted by aviendeha
Ive played just about every fantasy based MMORPG out there and i loved this game, still miss it at times, but had to leave it behind due to the poor management and the fact that they broke more things then they fixed. Why dosent the community just stop getting bent over by the companies and EMU Horizons?

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Emulating Horizons is next to impossible without some amazing server hardware and resources.

Here is the information about server specs for the Horizons shards, as told by Amon Gwareth on another forum:

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Amon Gwareth:

Current server runs on Xeons. not sure about a Woodcrest. Most ram you'd need would be 4gb per server box. Harddrive needs are negligible as its all database driven. You would need a database server, I have no idea what their requirements are or how many you'd need.

The big costs are of course, the servers themselves up front and then the power, cooling and especially bandwidth.

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Amon Gwareth: 

You cannot get the footprint down to 2-3 servers. Not if you want monsters enabled and more than 10 players online at a time.

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As for why you need such a powerful server farm to run a Horizons shard, another poster by the name of Dangit (Who used to be the lead moderator for Tazoon.com, and later for the main community site run by Tulga) posted this in the same thread:

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Dangit:

The original server code was written to make heavy use of the ram. And at the time was hitting against the 2GB (or maybe 4GB) ram limit that MBs and OS had at the time. To make use of more ram than that, the server code has to be rewritten. The server uses a lot of memory.. 15MB per character 1.5 per other entity. An Entity is anything the player interacts with. Monster, resource node, machine etc. (I believe those numbers are correct) Then you have all the memory taken up by other aspects.

From my own experience what I have found is you need 3 Servers with at least 2.0GHz Xeons, 4GB ram 60GB hard drives. And a database raid server with about 80GB.

That would be able to support about 150 people with enough monsters and resource spawning to keep some people happy. But your map size would be about the size of Lesser Aradoth.

Increase your land size and you will be adding another server. Otherwise performance becomes too erratic

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-Menkure