A virus attacked Asheron's Call 2 on Friday evening making the game unplayable in several areas, the virus continues to do damage while Turbine works hard to fix the issues. Here is the Official Statement:

Late on Friday evening, there was a worm virus that began striking many internet sites. Unfortunately, AC2 was not immune to this attack. Initially, this meant that servers became unavailable. We are still experiencing some of the after-effects of the worm attack resulting in slowdowns of the servers and from time to time, they are all together unavailable.

The other issue that arose as a result of the worm virus was that the time management element of the database for AC2 has become problematic. This has resulted in portals, items and skills becoming unusable as well as some players logging in and having their characters status rolled back to a prior days status. Also, we have seen players logging into the game finding that most or all of their items are deleted.

One other affect of the worm virus is that we lost access to our tools to communicate directly to you, the players, through the State of the Network and Launcher Popup. We apologize that this meant this is the first full report you are seeing from us on the state of the problems.

We are working on three fronts currently:

1. We are working to get complete network stability back so players see no further slowdowns or disconnects as a result of this virus
2. We are working on finding the best solution to the time management issue.
3. We are considering all options for players as a significant portion of you have seen either character rollbacks or item loss. We want to make sure we thoroughly understand what has caused the problems and what the best course of action is. We are considering two things: a) How did this happen and what is the best fix and b) what fix includes the best possible solution for players who experienced character rollbacks or item loss. One of the options we are considering is a complete rollback of the character data base to just prior to the worm virus attack.

Since we are still unable to guarantee that you will not lose items on login or character rollback and because we are considering a complete database rollback, we recommend that for now, you not log in. If you still wish to play, you may want to start up a new character. While we want to solve this problem fast, we also want to make sure we solve it right the first time.

It's unfortunate that this worm virus has stuck and we apologize for all the inconveniences you are experiencing. We hope to have a final decision made within the next 24 hours.

Ken Karl
Program Manger
Asheron's Call 2

http://microsoftgamesinsider.com/AC2/Support/stateofthenetwork.htm