Fractured Online player cities were deleted as the result of a hack and the team has promised to get the servers back up and explain just what happened. Dynamight Studios has continued updating the community. Getting the game back online has finally happened, after extended maintenance.
In rounds of updates via the official Fractured Online Discord, the team noted that they would miss their original estimate for things being back up by 6am ET since there were a few hiccups. However, restored player cities were definitely on the way. By around 10am, they were reassuring players that they were close, but just not there yet.
“Hi @everyone, while internally testing the status of the restored player cities (they're back!) we found a significant issue with player permissions. We are fixing the issue, I should be able to give you an ETA on when I will be able to reopen logins soon. Sorry for the disappointment on the missed deadline!”
They pushed the estimated time for return to 11am ET / 5pm CET. Their work involves merging the two versions of the world. That time passed, and there was another slight delay, but the servers are now back online, with another update and a way to give feedback on the experience, especially if you have lingering issues.
Dynamight Studios will likely be ironing things out for a while, but it is promising that the server is back online and the restoration is well underway.
UPDATE: The Dynamight Studios team has released a blog detailing what happened in the security breach, what they were able to do, and how they'll increase security going forward.
Due to an issue in world saves, we haven’t been able to restore player cities as they should have been restored – that is, as they were ~30 minutes before the hack took place. Instead, we had to roll them back to the previous patch, i.e. as they were in the late evening (EU time) of November 17. This means player cities effectively suffered a rollback of 1.5 days, while the rest of player and world progress was untouched.
We are aware this is an atypical response to the issue (the typical one would have been a full rollback), but we felt it was the right decision to minimze damage. Our GM team will help groups who have lost their city (or lost buildings within it) to reclaim it and rebuild it, including rebuilding player land parcels within the city.
They will add new security measures, including brought on IT security specialists to help them find the holes insecurity on their backend. They've also separated the API servers that serve requests from the game client and the game servers, they've changed how auth tokens function, and are working on several other measures.
Dynamight also thanks the community for their patience and response. Fearing Steam review bombing, they reported getting lots of support, and Steam reviews remaining mostly positive.
