The past few days have been really hard, both for us and for you.
The servers had been going up and down all the time and the overall stability of them was compromised.
This was caused because of major changes to the servers (mainly related to the underlying database system and compatibility with *nix).
After fixing a bug, ten more would appear out of nowhere and after fixing those, even more would appear.
It took quite a lot of effort to get the servers to be fully functional again and even though now everything seems to be okay, there were some losses.
I'm basically referring to player stats.
When I was changing the way users login I realized that the stat saving and loading code was wrong all along, both from an architectural perspective and from a persistence perspective.
Therefore, when I fixed the persistence related issues (and only the architectural issues were left), many of you lost their stats, not because I deleted them or anything, but because they weren't being properly related to your account since the beginning.
Then I moved on to fixing the architectural issues and realized that I had two options:
1) Either get the mostly corrupt stats from before and manually modify them to match the new architecture while leaving those who lost their ranks in the dark, or
2) Introduce the new architecture and completely purge all stats, therefore maintaining consistency in the store/servers and equality amongst players.
I think that my final choice is pretty obvious.
Now this will probably be the last time stats are being reset, as it's now easy to export them and re-import them in the case of major changes to the server/client.
I would also like to state that the forums were disabled to prevent spam caused by the servers being offline and stat loss.
Now, moving on to what's actually changed, you can find a full changelog here.
As previously stated, the database system was completely changed (both for the servers and the forums).
This allows us for faster queries, better connection management and a cool set of features that we couldn't have previously.
It also has a huge impact on server performance.
Moreover, there were many changes related to connection management, query pooling, etc.
Previously the servers would be able to handle about 80 users logging in (not connecting) per second and a general total of about 2.5k connected users.
With the introduced changes the servers are now able to handle approximately 1k users logging in simultaneously (per second) and should be able to handle a total of about 18k connected users.
The changes that increased the performance to such levels were essential due to the upcoming release of the project currently codenamed 'Venice'.
The private API also had several changes and new methods implemented due to the upcoming release of the public API, which will allow you to request specific user stats, server listings, online stats, specific server info, etc. (more info on this will come at a later time).
Finally, the servers are now fully native and running on Linux (more specifically Ubuntu Server 12.10 x64).
Previously the servers were running under a Windows machine and were compiled in 32 bit 'mode'.
This would limit the performance of the servers and also the managerial abilities we had over them.
The servers are now updated and able to compile in 64 bit and run natively on Linux, increasing performance by a great factor and allowing us to easier manage and update them.
Now due to all those changes we would like to encourage server owners to restart their servers, just in case.
The servers haven't been completely stress tested yet and some bugs are expected to occur, so please don't freak out if suddenly they go offline.
Other than that, if you find any bug that did not occur in the previous versions of the game make sure to let me know by posting in the Suggestions and Feedback forum.
Have fun!