sG Community Update

[Mimic 3307]

Hello Syndicate Gamers,

 

Tonight, we’re going to be bringing you some good news and some bad news.

 

First, we would like to congratulate skitt on his promotion to General Engineer, he will be working to ensure everything continues to run smoothly. Make sure you welcome him onto the team!

 

Now comes some bad news - We've had a disagreement with our host and thus we are looking toward a host with better DDoS mitigation. This migration will cause us to to change all of our server IP’s. We have assessed all of our options and feel that this is our best and only option. With this move, we will also be upgrading our servers as promised earlier.

 

As some of you may know from our past IP change, we took a large hit in our server population. We hope the community can help us get back on our feet after this change and just show how great our community is by supporting our servers through this difficult time.

 

A post will be made in the future containing more information. More specifically, when the move will occur and what we will be doing to mitigate the effects of the IP change.

 

 

-Mimic, Chairman of the JCS

[LOPEZ 1750]

first

[Daileyyy 835]

We need ze nao.

[Ichalvl 1752]

The static IP's like surf.joinsg.net will still work, right? I've only ever told people those IP's, so surf is set. 

[Sakata 1088]

The static IP's like surf.joinsg.net will still work, right? I've only ever told people those IP's, so surf is set. 

Yes sub domains wont change.

[Mimic 3307]

The static IP's like surf.joinsg.net will still work, right? I've only ever told people those IP's, so surf is set. 

 

The DNS entries will be updated to the new server IPs; however, when you're entering an IP into favorites for the server and you use a DNS entry, it saves the IP address and not the DNS entry. In other words, you'll still have to tell them to change it.

[Iherdcows 3419]

congrats skitt

[yeet 1050]

Didn't we spend like $600 on a CPU, serverhost, or what the fuck ever like 3 months ago to make our servers better? Those DDoS attacks are OP man

[Mimic 3307]

Didn't we spend like $600 on a CPU, serverhost, or what the fuck ever like 3 months ago to make our servers better? Those DDoS attacks are OP man

 

No, we ended up having to upgrade the space on the SSD running the servers, but other than that very little hardware upgrades were done. That being said, we did attempt to increase the amount of traffic flow our server could take as well as try everything we can on our end to mitigate the attacks.

[centran 4457]

Didn't we spend like $600 on a CPU, serverhost, or what the fuck ever like 3 months ago to make our servers better? Those DDoS attacks are OP man

 

We were in talks to upgrade the CPU just recently. I am not sure if this information was released to the community.

 

With this move we will also be able to proceed with the server upgrade.

[Destin 1958]

If someone can tell me when the migration takes place I can reschedule my marathon around to kick start war3 right out of the gates, and hit the ground running. I agree with this decision though

[yeet 1050]

We were in talks to upgrade the CPU just recently. I am not sure if this information was released to the community.

 

With this move we will also be able to proceed with the server upgrade.

 

I remember it being in the donations on the right of our homepage and prosak donated $320 for it awhile back, I figured it would have already been done by now. Well at least now were about to upgrade I guess

[Flt. Lt. Space Bugs 45]

If someone can tell me when the migration takes place I can reschedule my marathon around to kick start war3 right out of the gates, and hit the ground running. I agree with this decision though

 

I'll be right there next to you baby girl.

[Anzhi. 322]

If someone can tell me when the migration takes place I can reschedule my marathon around to kick start war3 right out of the gates, and hit the ground running. I agree with this decision though

ill help you.

destin pls

[ctark 1983]

To add a bit from the backend,  we will be looking into ways to minimize the effect from an IP change.

As was posted earlier, when you save a server to your favorites, it saves it as an IP, not as a DNS entry (aka 64.31.26.100 instead of jb.joinsg.net).  This is where the biggest hit is taken from.

For anyone who is on the forums, basically you just need to re-add the new servers to your favorites and you are good to go.  The issue is quite a few people are not on the forums, and when they are on the servers, don't pay attention to any server messages / MOTD telling them to update their favorites.

 

We will look into the feasibility of a 'redirect' plugin.  If this is feasible, if you connect to the old IP, you will be redirected to the new servers automagically.  This is only a temporary solution though, and when the time comes, we will need everyone's help to get people to update their favorites, as well as to keep the servers populated enough that new regulars will join.

 

 

Stay tuned, we will try to keep the community in the loop as details are actually decided upon.

 

 

Also one last thing, to talk about the upgrade donation drive we had a little while ago.  It takes time to work out what to upgrade.  We were just in the process of finalizing what to upgrade, the price of it, ect, when these DDoS attacks started hitting us hard.  Basically if we are going to change IP's, we have a lot more flexibility on what we can choose to upgrade to.  We don't have to stay with just one host.  In the eyes of a purely performance viewpoint, this move will help us achieve a better server, for less.

[Oreo 2073]

 

Now comes some bad news - We've had a disagreement with our host and thus we are looking toward a host with better DDoS mitigation. This migration will cause us to to change all of our server IP’s. We have assessed all of our options and feel that this is our best and only option. With this move, we will also be upgrading our servers as promised earlier.

 

 

DEAR SERVER POPULATION, LET ME EXPLAIN THIS IN SONG

 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 18, 2014 by Oreo

[Ichalvl 1752]

Why not make the server name sG | JB CHANGING IP CHECK JOINSG.NET? That way, no matter what they see it on the legacy browser. 

 

(It's what swoobles did and it worked out quite well)

Edited February 18, 2014 by Ichalvl

[Destin 1958]

Jailbreak currently has a steam group, so running off of that idea. Why don't we make server specific groups and invite the regulars and players into their respective groups then when the IP changes we can post events with the new IP? Just a thought

[Azzkicker 100]

But the ddos lag was so fun

[UnknownLegend 5480]

The biggest thing is going to be making sure everyone who plays on the server but that doesn't necessarily check the forums knows that we are switching.  IP switches have killed servers in the past (Dust2, our old ZM and ZE servers, to name a few), which is why we wanted to try and avoid it, but we really don't have another option to try and mitigate the size of the attacks that have been coming at us lately.

[Clamps 4783]

I think it may be prudent to hyperlink this thread in the motd of all the servers to help curb the population loss. Is that possible?

[Ichalvl 1752]

The biggest thing is going to be making sure everyone who plays on the server but that doesn't necessarily check the forums knows that we are switching.  IP switches have killed servers in the past (Dust2, our old ZM and ZE servers, to name a few), which is why we wanted to try and avoid it, but we really don't have another option to try and mitigate the size of the attacks that have been coming at us lately.

 

Well, at the cost of bugging some players, we could easily put (in BIGASS TEXT) that we're changing IP's on...

 

- The server name (Like I stated above), something like sG | <server> CHANGING IP SEE JOINSG.NET FOR MORE INFO

 

- Changing the MotD's front page to be in big red text "CHANGING IP'S" and linking to this page

 

- having a sm_msay pop up for each player on the second round of each map

 

- Posting announcements on the official sG steam page

 

Now, I know that players might skip past the server name and the MotD (They'd be pretty goddamn retarded at this point) but any active player would notice the sm_msay (Don't let the 1 key hide it, make it 0 or something) even if they only play for a couple maps.

 

Due to Warcraft 3 having an XP incentive, many of the regular members are in the JoinSG steam group, so War3's population will not hurt that bad.

 

Jailbreak has a group for all of their regulars, however JB is one of the highest random-player-joining servers, so getting the message across to one-time joiners will be hard (but is also hardly necessary). 

 

A possible win-win situation for this is to HIGHLY incentivise joining the sG Steam group ; 2x or more exp for Surf RPG (However drunkula has told me that the rpg plugin is hardly working at the moment so I don't know how plausible that is) ; 2x the credit gain on JB and ZE ; nothing new on War3, and for MG... well... that server is like 90% regulars and dead. 

 

Adding major bonuses and perks for joining the sG Steam group is, in my eyes, a very effective way to curb the player loss. Sending out steam group announcements is a quick and painless way to not only announce the changing of IP's, but when they change, and what to. 

 

Overall, I believe if staff and SO's work hard, we can get the message across that sG's IP's are switching and we can keep our player base as high as possible, with the fewest losses that I can forsee.

 

Good luck staff. I don't want surf to die even more, and I sure as hell don't want sG as a whole to die with it!

[xmen 983]

I remeber some servers changing their names to like "server change use jb.joinsg.net to join the new server" when they were changing ips so the ppl who had the servers favourited would notice too

I was too late

Edited February 18, 2014 by xmen

[MrCoolness 547]

Well, at the cost of bugging some players, we could easily put (in BIGASS TEXT) that we're changing IP's on...

 

- The server name (Like I stated above), something like sG | <server> CHANGING IP SEE JOINSG.NET FOR MORE INFO

 

- Changing the MotD's front page to be in big red text "CHANGING IP'S" and linking to this page

 

- having a sm_msay pop up for each player on the second round of each map

 

- Posting announcements on the official sG steam page

 

Now, I know that players might skip past the server name and the MotD (They'd be pretty goddamn retarded at this point) but any active player would notice the sm_msay (Don't let the 1 key hide it, make it 0 or something) even if they only play for a couple maps.

 

Due to Warcraft 3 having an XP incentive, many of the regular members are in the JoinSG steam group, so War3's population will not hurt that bad.

 

Jailbreak has a group for all of their regulars, however JB is one of the highest random-player-joining servers, so getting the message across to one-time joiners will be hard (but is also hardly necessary). 

 

A possible win-win situation for this is to HIGHLY incentivise joining the sG Steam group ; 2x or more exp for Surf RPG (However drunkula has told me that the rpg plugin is hardly working at the moment so I don't know how plausible that is) ; 2x the credit gain on JB and ZE ; nothing new on War3, and for MG... well... that server is like 90% regulars and dead. 

 

Adding major bonuses and perks for joining the sG Steam group is, in my eyes, a very effective way to curb the player loss. Sending out steam group announcements is a quick and painless way to not only announce the changing of IP's, but when they change, and what to. 

 

Overall, I believe if staff and SO's work hard, we can get the message across that sG's IP's are switching and we can keep our player base as high as possible, with the fewest losses that I can forsee.

 

Good luck staff. I don't want surf to die even more, and I sure as hell don't want sG as a whole to die with it!

 

I believe what this man suggested is optimal + more precautions

 

 

also, congrats Skitt! you da man

[TeflonAssassin 63]

Moar Wcs