Shroud of the Avatar's community manager has confirmed what many feared (and we reported on Saturday): the build on the current test client is indeed from August following server outages the past week. As such, the team at Catnip has laid out some of its plans to recover and restore accounts affected.
As we reported on Saturday, a migration error from the update to release 106 saw the team required to use a backup to restore the SotA database. After assuring fans that the MMO was "not going away" following the issues, the team had to address the issue of getting the release out and the database back in a playable state. As a result, it seems the entire month of September was lost in test build as the current database is a snapshot from August 2022.
Yesterday, taking to the Shroud of the Avatar forums, Community Manager Ravalox further explained what happened and laid out the team's plans to restore and recover items lost thanks to the extensive rollback.
"When we deployed R106 on the morning of September 29th, we found that there was underlying database corruption. We worked diligently for the next week identifying the issues and attempting to recover the database. During this time we worked on a number of past iterations restored from our backups.After seven days of work we still unable to achieve stability and made the very difficult choice to restore a database backup saved prior to releasing R105.The type of restore is known as a 'Rollback'. This means that any and all progress gained from the point of the restored backup will have been lost. This also means that new characters created will no longer exist."
As such, players who have created new players during the window that is now lost will need to re-create them and reach out to SotA support for the XP now lost, while those who purchased from the COTOs or Website will have those delivered in-game. Housing lots will need to be reclaimed, while the team will also be undertaking the arduous task of restoring XP and gold to players during the nearly 5-6 week period lost. As of now, the team is still "investigating" what they can do to restore the gold.
Due to the downtime, eviction timers have been suspended until at least November 18th, though the team is still looking for a way to address the back taxes in Shroud of the Avatar. Subscriber rewards have still been delivered as part of the R106 bundles according to the post. R105 and R106 rewards were combined into one delivery, while the Shroud team have also bolstered what is in the October log-in rewards.
Ravalox also states that the team will be hosting a live stream to further address the issues and what the team is doing to recover as much as they can from the loss. You can read the full post on the Shroud of the Avatar forums.
