The Rollback, And Moving Forward

As some of you may have noticed, there has been a pretty massive rollback, setting the Arkfall server back more than 24 hours.  A lot of people, including our own tribe, have lost a huge amount of work and resources as a result, as did many of our players.

The players of Arkfall deserve an explanation, so we'll do our best to answer questions.


How did this happen?

Three things had to happen to caused this issue:

- The developers introduced a bug in version 185 of the server client that cause the auto-save function to not work properly; in essence, it wasn't saving anything at all.
- I as the admin performed a remote update and server restart this morning to bring us to version 186.  As I was at work, I could not log in and perform a manual save, instead trusting that the auto-save had done it's job (No players were online at the time.)
- If the auto-save had failed, I could always restore an hourly backup save that our server host provides:  however, in this case, our server host (Survival Servers) encountered their own bug with version 185 and the backup function was not saving anything.  Because of this, all the 185 backups are useless, and contain no new save data.

The developers have since fixed the auto-save bug, and our host assures us that have modified their backup system to use custom folders so it will probably work in the future regardless of autosave bugs...but none of that will help us restore the data lost currently.  It simply does not exist, anymore.

I am at least partially responsible for this clusterfuck.  I trusted that at least one of the two systems noted above (autosave, or host backups) were working and I could safely remote reboot and get the server updated to the current playable version.  I'm not sure how I can apologize, but I do, with all my heart.  Our players losing progress, significant progress, is one of the worst things that could have happened to Arkfall.


Where do we go from here?

Ultimately this is a question up to our playerbase.  This particular error may be fixed, but, if one were to ask me to guarantee there will never, ever been another data rollback, I could not promise that.  Bugs will happen, and human error will happen; rarely, in cases like this, they all happen at once.

I for one am not ready to give up on Arkfall, despite what we've lost.  I'm not ready to give up on the community we've built, or the stories we've shared.  If you are, I don't blame you, and I wish you well.  If we lost too many of our players over this, then I may have to look at shutting down the server (which is not particularly cheap).  Before it comes to that, however you deserve to be heard on the matter.  

So let's open the floor.

As frustrating as a rollback can be, this was clearly not an issue that could have been easily avoided. Arkfall is, after all, in early access and is likely to have unavoidable hiccups that no one can realistically see coming. I for one am not upset over this event.

I was hit by the rollback a little hard, not as hard as others that I spoke to when I logged on and then realized what had happened. Guess I was probably the first on and then ult came on as well. It sucks, but it's not like it was done on purpose and we can't fault y'all for that.

Moving forward, I think it's time to try and level the playing field with all the other unofficial servers. Not saying go crazy with 10x everything, but 2 or 3x taming, resources and so on.

This server needs to grow and with these servers offering faster levels and quicker materials to allow more players to build nice bases, I see it but getting the players it deserves. This community has been great and I won't be leaving. Would love to have it maxed out on players and many more stories to tell in the future though.

Just my 2 cents.