Topics

1

Financial Status / SPRING/SUMMER 2024 - Funding Drive + Invoices

« on: February 19, 2024, 01:51:10 pm »

It's spring time and once again the servers bills are now due. Nothing fancy this time around and there were no back charges or credits made. This is the normal price of the server going forward barring any form of price increases.

Planned Bills (for six months)

• 2x $456.00 : These are rented baremetal servers that hold the Main Live server and the public PTS server. (as well as some web components)
• $240.00 : This is the staff's internal PTS server (Beta). This server pretty much lets the staff make changes to the code and test internally before we push it to the public PTS. We tried to run two servers on one box by toggling which one you log in to but that caused issues when people consistently tried to log in on the PTS server outside of the test times. So this server was bought to accommodate a change.
• $15.00 : This server will be retired. (it was originally planned for the self-hosted but it needed more room.
• $30.00 : This is currently being used to host the web forums, wiki, main website and the beta ground for the new web page.
• $120.00: This is the new Alpha shard, hosting the new game world for internal testing as to not disturb the PTS with our changes. Additionally, this server hosts all of the git repositories that we use to power the game.
  
• Grand Total: $1302.00

How to Donate:
Currently PayPal is being used to collect donations via "PayPal Fundraisers". Additionally, a few people have reached out to donate via Wise (f/k/a TransferWise) and while that is possible, will need to be handled privately. If you are an international player and wish to donate in Euro or GBP, you can reach out to me (retched) via Discord and I'll provide details on how you can donate should you choose not to use PayPal.

FUNDING GOAL REACHED!! NO MORE DONATIONS!!

I also, cannot stress this enough:

!!!PLEASE DONATE ONLY IF YOU ARE FISCALLY ABLE TO!!!

Most times we always end up with a bit of overflow. If you miss the cut, do not stress it. We still enjoy you and thank you for your time that you spend playing on COH: Rebirth!

The bill is due on March 1, 2024. Any extra funds will be used to prepay the next six months in March 2024. Any questions, feel free to reach out on the Discord in DM or Forums in DM.

Please remember that donating does NOT grant any additional benefits or rewards in game and any donations received are final, not subject to a refund.

As always thank you for your consideration and donations!

- retched

2

Announcements and Important News / ✅ 📰 Regarding the recent news 📰 ✅

« on: January 04, 2024, 08:52:13 pm »

(Copied from the Discord...)
Good evening Rebirth Players!

Myself and the Rebirth Dev and Mod teams wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that we are aware of the Homecoming team's latest announcement this morning.

This news will have no impact on Rebirth nor any of our ongoing operations and development.

We are continuing development on our next issue and will have more news to share on the Rebirth Issue soon :SOON:.

Meanwhile, have fun and happy hunting!

- retched

3

General Suggestions and Feedback / Third Email Test: Checking it One Last Time with the new server now!

« on: August 26, 2023, 01:22:31 am »

We're going to go ahead and probably p*** off the new mail router, but an "all hands on deck" email was just sent out. This email will probably take a few hours to get to everyone as there is a hard limit of 300 outgoing emails per hour (So we're sending out 250 per hour just to give wiggle room for registrations).

If you get the email, check back in here and let us know if it was in your email inbox or spam. If you don't get it by Monday (yes, THAT SLOW), let retched know by DM here or in Discord.

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Financial Status / FALL/WINTER 2023 - Invoice Bill and Donations (+ A question to donors)

« on: August 23, 2023, 07:13:25 am »

Morning all! Once again, the bill for the COH Rebirth servers are now due. There are a couple of line items that are different this time and one new charge. First here's a break down of the line items being charged:

Planned Bills (for six months)

• 2x $456.00 : These are rented baremetal servers that hold the Main Live server and the public PTS server. (as well as some web components)
• $240.00 : This is the staff's internal PTS server (Alpha). This server pretty much lets the staff make changes to the code and test internally before we push it to the public PTS. We tried to run two servers on one box by toggling which one you log in to but that caused issues when people consistently tried to log in on the PTS server outside of the test times. So this server was bought last time to accommodate that change.
• $15.00 : This is a VPS server currently hosting the Discord PPD Drone and log viewer. Late this year, we'll be moving away from this to another ticketing solution while trying to get the in-game petition system to push to the Discord. (We had this working at some point but it broke when the Docker config we previously used broke down.)
• $30.00 : This is currently being used to host the web forums, wiki, and the beta ground for the new web page.
• A credit of $342.58 was applied because we shut down an extra server that was no longer in use (our old Git server which we migrated over to the new Beta box flawlessly).

The new item that hasn't been billed is a $99.00 flat charge for our webmail server. We're going with MXRoute for our webhosting. This will allow us to get all of the email functionality (Wiki activation and Forum activation emails and possibly even game world password reset emails) off of the boxes (which are being blocked somehow) and moved over to a separate web instance. Once this is paid for, we'll swap our DNS configuration to THAT particular email service and drop the Postfix and other failed SMTP configs from the VPS systems.



Poll Question:
Many will notice that there is a poll question attached to this thread. The question is asking should we keep the donations open year round or keep it to being open during the two week(-ish) billing period. Some may find it a bit of a squeeze to donate with such little time.  If you feel that the option to keep it open for longer might help things, this would be the option for you. Nothing would change as far as access to the server. There will be NO microtransactions or benefits received in-game or on Discord for donating to the server. (Edit: This was brought up on the Discord but I wanted to clarify, even if we switch to the open donation pool, the bills and payment receipts of the same will still be posted up here and to the Discord as well. Nothing will change about that.)

How to Donate:
Currently PayPal is being used to collect donations via "PayPal Fundraisers". PayPal is no longer fronting the cost of credit card fees, however and any incoming donations sent in will have their processing fee removed automatically. (PayPal removed the pools functionality which allowed free "donations".) Additionally, a few people have reached out to donate via Wise (f/k/a TransferWise) and while that is possible, will need to be handled privately. If you are an international player and wish to donate in Euro or GBP, you can reach out to me (retched) via Discord and I'll show provide details on how you can help.

DONATION POOL CLOSED - GOAL REACHED!!

I also, cannot stress this enough:

!!!PLEASE DONATE ONLY IF YOU ARE FISCALLY ABLE TO!!!

Most times we always end up with a bit of overflow. If you miss the cut, do not stress it. We still enjoy you and thank you for your time that you spend playing on COH: Rebirth!

The bill is due on September 1st, 2023. And any extra funds will be used to prepay the next six months in March 2024. Any questions, feel free to reach out on the Discord in DM or Forums in DM.

Please remember that donating does NOT grant any additional benefits or rewards in game and any donations received are final, not subject to a refund.

As always thank you for your consideration and donations!

- retched

5

General Suggestions and Feedback / 2nd Email General Test "I DID NOT GET THE EMAIL"

« on: August 01, 2023, 07:10:27 pm »

As the email suggests, this thread is being used to survey the 2nd email general test I performed using our new emails server. If you DID NOT get the email at all (Neither in Spam nor Inbox), please respond stating such. If you did get it, let us know if it went to your email inbox or caught in a spam filter.

6

General Suggestions and Feedback / E-Mail Test

« on: May 06, 2023, 10:25:24 am »

We're about to send out a test email with the forums' email/newsletter function to test whether our email functionality is testing. If you get that email, please come back to this thread and let us know!

7

Financial Status / SPRING/SUMMER 2023 - Invoice Bill and Donations

« on: February 24, 2023, 01:37:45 pm »

Afternoon all! Once again, the bill for the COH Rebirth servers are now due.

Planned Bills (for six months)



Changes are abound!

As you may have noticed there is a number of changes to the pricing of the services we buy from the datacenter. This was largely due to the Coronavirus pandemic as well as a series of upgrades they performed on their infrastructure. Many of these have caused rolling outages but many of those were fixed and correct in a matter of hours. The total uptime of the servers (game and web) were roughly 98% to 99%.

A new charge is added onto this bill in the name of the new Beta server so that we can keep the live shard operating and all allow for an ongoing PTS server. The Beta server will be used internally by the programmers and developers to test new content. PTS will be used for the purposes of, as the name implies, public testing of the forthcoming patches and changes. This new server (+$240) will cause an increase in the total bill temporarily as we plan to shut down the server box we use for our Git repositories and merge it back into the Beta shard. In the Fall bill, you will see this reflected with the decrease (-$360) of the bill. (So in short: this bill will go up $240 compared to the last bill and will drop $360 in the next cycle when we remove the other server, for a total savings of $120.)

Additionally, another server had to be put back into service as Heroku, which was powering PPD Drone, removed their free service. Rather than pay for the lightest Heroku tier, it was decided to put the small box back on instead. Later this year, probably in the next month or two we will be starting, we'll be testing out a bot that will once again send petitions in game to the Discord server to notify our mods and admins of any issues in game. Plus one additional status service bot will be researched to report on the status of the shards.

The final total for all fees and additions is $1677.

How to Donate:
Currently PayPal is being used to collect donations via "PayPal Fundraisers". PayPal is no longer fronting the cost of credit card fees, however and any incoming donations sent in will have their processing fee removed automatically. (PayPal removed the pools functionality which allowed free "donations".) Additionally, a few people have reached out to donate via Wise (f/k/a TransferWise) and while that is possible, will need to be handled privately. If you are an international player and wish to donate in Euro or GBP, you can reach out to me (retched) via Discord and I'll show provide details on how you can help.

DONATIONS ARE CLOSED!!! GOAL REACHED, SEE POST BELOW

I also, cannot stress this enough:

!!!PLEASE DONATE ONLY IF YOU ARE FISCALLY ABLE TO!!!

Most times we always end up with a bit of overflow. If you miss the cut, do not stress it. We still enjoy you and thank you for your time that you spend playing on COH: Rebirth!

The bill is due on March 1st, 2023. And any extra funds will be used to prepay the next six months in August 2023. Any questions, feel free to reach out on the Discord in DM or Forums in DM.

As always, please note that donating does NOT grant any additional benefits or rewards in game.

8

Financial Status / FALL/WINTER 2022 - Invoice Bill and Donations

« on: August 24, 2022, 04:11:16 pm »

Evening all! Once again, the bill for the COH Rebirth servers are now due. (Again, generated late but that was because of changes I had to make at the admin level.)

Planned Bill (for six months)



 
No new charges being added to this bill. One charge is actually being removed due to its inactive use, and that would be the $9.00 server charge. (The server’s usage didn’t make sense in the long run since the newer VPS can host multiple sites. This is actually part of the planned maintenance in two weeks to change around the DNS hosting for the wiki, forums, and main webpage plus storage of the manifest files.) This makes the total of all charges only $1434.00

How to Donate:
Currently PayPal (still) is being used to collect donations, but with a twist. PayPal is no longer fronting the cost of credit card fees. Any donations sent in will have their processing fee removed. (PayPal removed the pools functionality last year.) A few people have reached out to donate via TransferWise (aka Wise) and while that is possible, will need to handled privately.

DONATIONS ARE CLOSED

The bill is due on September 1st, 2022. And any extra funds will be used to prepay the next six months in March 2023. Any questions, feel free to reach out on the Discord in DM or Forums in DM. 

9

Announcements and Important News / PLANNED SERVER OUTAGE: Web Facilities/Functions

« on: August 09, 2022, 10:45:22 am »

Starting on August 28, 2022 after the reset of the Rebirth Game Server (~9:00 PM EST Sunday), all forward facing web services will go offline for maintenance.

Meanwhile, GAME SERVERS WILL STILL BE AVAILABLE. (Bolded for emphasis. We've already performed the maintenance that they needed weeks ago.) This only will affect the public facing websites and as such, gameplay is still possible.

During this downtime, this means that the following will not be available and some alternatives:

• Account Maintenance and Creation via play.cityofheroesrebirth.com. In the event you lose your password, you can always contact the PPD Drone on our Discord and request assistance. Be prepared with the name of your account and the name of at least some of your characters. Anyone wishing to create a new account during this downtime are suggested to reach out via the same Discord for basic account creation.
• Community Forums. During this time, we welcome you to join us our Discord and chat with us there.
• Wikipedia access. While outdated, by several years and fixes, we recommend using the archived ParagonWiki during this downtime.
  

These servers are being taken down temporarily so that we can perform necessary maintenance and optimizations (ie. upgrading the forum software, making changes to the registration form to allow for email identification or the like, and others.) so that we can continue to maintain the accounts. Additionally, the servers themselves need a bit of reformatting as well so that our internal tools can work correctly.

The total downtime will be no more than 24 hours as we also have to wait for a DNS change to propagate everywhere but its likely it will also be done within the first 12 hours or possibly sooner. We'll provide updates throughout the coming days as to what else the changes will entail.

10

Announcements and Important News / ⚠️ UNPLANNED SERVER MAINTENANCE: Some disruptions may occur ⚠️

« on: June 29, 2022, 05:52:24 pm »

Our datacenter has just informed me that they will be performing maintenance on our routers and switches today. During this maintenance, there may be disruptions to all facets of the game. (Forums, account maintenance, game world)

If you experience any of these disruptions during the time frame, they're estimating about 9 PM EST and onward, please do not open a new ticket via PPD Drone. Instead use rebirth-help and keep an eye on this channel for updates.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

- GM retched

11

Announcements and Important News / WEEKLY MAINTENANCE ALL CLEAR

« on: February 06, 2022, 09:53:44 pm »

Evening everyone. After a series of Windows Updates and running the backups to the server. We gave out a total of 512 tokens to all players in the server who logged in during the last week.

Nothing major to report this week while we continue to maintain and develop the changes to the server.

We'll be back next week to do another reset next week.

Happy hunting all,

- GM retched

12

Announcements and Important News / PLANNED MAINTENANCE + HOTFIX DEPLOYMENT : ALL CLEAR

« on: January 05, 2022, 01:58:19 am »

Evening/morning all. After a bit of a misstep, the server has been restarted successfully and the hotfix deployed. Patch Notes will be published later. Additionally, the 1.5x/1.3x modifiers have additionally been turned off and gameplay is back to normal.

Thank you for all that were participating in the event and I hope everyone enjoyed the holiday event.

With regards, enjoy your time on the server!

GM retched

13

Announcements and Important News / REBIRTH SERVER MAINTENANCE/COMPLETED!! ALL CLEAR

« on: November 28, 2021, 09:44:55 pm »

Evening Rebirth Players!

Maintenance has concluded on the servers as they are coming back online. (AuctionHouse will forever lag behind because of it's two-minute clock.)

After the maintenance, we've given out 501  tokens AND as a bonus to the holidays, we've give out 5 bonus  Winter Super Packs to start the holiday season off! Hope everyone had a happy holiday! (There is a 2% chance, everyone might have got 10 instead but I'm saying five to cover my bases.)

As a reminder, our holiday event schedule is listed below.

HOLIDAY SCHEDULE
12/3 - 12/5/2021 - Double XP Enabled
12/12/2021 - Planned release of Ri2.3 (Rebirth Issue 2, Update 3)
12/12 - 12/19/2021 - "Fright Before Christmas" Enabled
12/20/2021 - 1/3/2021 - Winter Event Enabled

As of now, hope everyone has a happy and safe holiday season. Good hunting.

- retched

14

Announcements and Important News / 🚥 ⚠️ NETWORK DISRUPTIONS: PARTIALLY ALL CLEAR ⚠️ 🚥

« on: November 22, 2021, 10:30:31 pm »

Afternoon everyone, earlier this morning I reported that there was a connection issue over at our game server's data center. The datacenter crews reported back to me that evidently that outage was caused by a downed fiber cable. After working with their bandwidth providers, they did manage to get all servers (not just ours but the WHOLE data center) back up and running.

The game server seems to be functioning fine as I go through the box myself at this time. (It's as if the box didn't get cut off except for the several error messages I see from forced disconnects on the AuthServer to the game worlds.)

For anyone wanting to play on, you're welcome to do so but exercise caution. During the financial call out for the 2022-2023 years, I'll be working with a few members of the admin team and possibly reaching out to other game servers for recommendations on other hosts. We're prepaid up until August 2022, so I can't ask for a refund (even a prorated one) and I'd rather not move us to another host until we're all paid out.

For now, once again, happy hunting. And I hope you have a safe holidays.

GM retched

15

Announcements and Important News / WEEKLY RESET - November 7, 2021

« on: November 07, 2021, 10:13:58 pm »

Evening.

This was a pretty uneventful restart tonight. We do have some changes listed in both #live-patch-notes and #pts-patch-notes going out today. Feel free to stop off there.

Additionally, Halloween has finally come to a close here on Rebirth. Hope everyone had a happy time. (I did hear of some complaints that the event did drag-on a bit. We're having internal talks about the length of future shard events (Halloween, Christmas, Summer Blockbuster, etc.). Speaking of, there will be a Christmas/Holiday event soon. (We're just trying to nail the date down... but it will definitely be in December with at least one 2XP weekend thrown in.)

This week a total of 554 Paragon tokens have been issued out. (As a reminder, we are now back to normal scheduling and are now THREE weeks to the next bonus token.)

Have a safe week everyone and hope to have more news about the server throughout the days ahead.

- GM retched