Snowcrash made a suprise announcement today. Apparently in response to the involuntary cancellations of many accounts, it has been declared that Neocron will be free for all existing accounts. Whether this in any way relates to the insolvency issues is at the moment is unclear, as is the duration of this free-to-play period. Enjoy while it lasts however.
Kirk Lenke the CEO of Reakktor has just posted the following good news about Reakktor's operations in the light of 10T being insolvent.
"With regards to the announcement of 10Tacle Studios AG business activity's discontinuation, Reakktor Media, subsidiary of 10Tacle Studios AG, declares that this does not affect the business activity of Reakktor Media GmbH, despite the insolvency, especially with regards to the operation of the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) "Neocron 2" and the development of the MMO (Massively Online Game) "Black Prophecy"."
As reported yesterday on the THN, 10Tacle Studios AG, parent company of Reakktor has declared insolvency. The new CEO of Reakktor, Kirk Lenke has today annnounced to the neocron community that for legal reasons, ReaKKtor Media GmbH is also insolvent and an administrator will be appointed shortly. He believes there is hope for the future of the company, although does not speculate on whether that is with or without 10Tacle. He also makes the suprise statement that a new Neocron patch is beind developed - we just have to hope that the administrators don't lay off all the staff before this hits the servers. Neocron servers will for the immediate future be unaffeceted, however support will apparently be at a reduced level. You can read the full announcement on the offical forums , or click read more here.
10Tacle Studios AG, who wholly own ReaKKtor Media GmbH (the makers of Neocron) are being reported by various websites as having declared insolvency. It should be made clear that this does not necessarily mean the end of Neocron or Black Prophecy - Reakktor may in fact pass completely unscathed.
Sources close to Reakktor are emphasising that Neocron servers will remain up for the forseeable future. It is quite possible wih the seeming strong progress of Black Prophecy and the apparent still revenue-generating Neocron that Reakktor will continue operating, especially as 10T can still hope for support from it's investors similar to the deal that recentley fell through , and KK may remain a saleable assett. This article details the directions and situation of 10Tacle quite well, alhough the deal referred to has now fallen through.
The servers are now back online after the migration to a new datacenter. You may experience some connection issue while the DNS records update around the internet. If you do, please check this thread .
The Neocron 2 servers are now offline for the planned migration of the hardware to the new datacentre. This process is expected to take several days, and is expected to be back by the 7th July.
The THN will be keeping everyone updated with the news here, but for discussion about the migration, please use this thread.
The Story so far...
29th June 23:00BST, 30th June Midnight CEST. - The login server was taken offline. Anyone who was ingame could remain ingame, but if you logged out, you would not be able to log in. The population slowly got smaller, and there was a little party in Plaza 1 .
Here is what Snowcrash posted about the first planned step for the migration.
"As already announced, the Neocron server hardware will be moved to another data center. For this purpose, the main account server will be shut down today at midnight (CEST). From then on it is no longer possible to log into the game and to administrate game accounts. The game servers will be shut down tomorrow morning at 09:00 AM CEST. Until then it is possible to play Neocron if one has logged into the game before the shutdown of the main account server.
We will of course keep you in the loop about the migration progress and will announce further details regarding the planned lowering of the Neocron subscription fees within the next days."
30th June 08:27BST Snowcrash updated the thread with the lastest news "All servers have been shut down and are now being dismantled by the admin team of our data center provider. After the dismantling the hardware will be made ready for dispatch and transported to the new data center."
4th July 09:45BST Nidhogg posted this update. "The Neocron server hardware has arrived in the new data center yesterday evening after some delay. Pending an intensive examination the hardware will be rebuilt and taken back into operation. Due to the circumstances of the transportation delay it may take a little longer than expected to bring the servers back online."
7th July 10:54 BST No further updates have been posted since the 4th July update.
7th July 12:22 BST Snowcrash has just posted this update. "The intensive examination of the hardware has just been finished and the rebuild of the hardware, as well as the adjustment of the software, is currently in progress. As already explained the shipment of the servers has taken longer then expected which is the reason for this delay.
We will inform you as soon as we have more information and ask for a little more patience."
9th July 10:45BST Server is now back up - Mission Completed! Now every back to PvPing and OP fighting!
Snowcrash has reported that there will be a migration of the server hardware containing the neocron 2 cluster to a new datacenter location between the 30th of June and the 7th of July. Obviously during this time there will not be any possible way to connect to the neocron servers.
In more positive news the price plan for Neocron 2 will change from the current amount of 9.99 € per month to a new low price of 5.00 €. More details will be vailable when the servers are migrating.
After several weeks of issues and problems with PayPal, where players where not able to cancel or create a new account, PayPal have finally found and fixed the problem.
All the information can be found in this forum thread , while in the meantime the THN Admin will be deciding what to do with the stockpile of Baseball Bat. (Suggestions welcome!)
Currently the Neocron forums are offline for reasons unknown. It is not clear when they went down, but the first report of the forums being down was at 9.35GMT on Sunday.
No news on when the forums will be back or what the cause of the issue is. As soon as the THN knows, we will tell you.
In the mean time, feel free to use the THN Forums.
Updated: Monday 10:30BST - Still down, and no news available. On the THN here are a couple of threads of interest.
Updated: 13:05BST - After a little bit of investigation and a comfirmation post from Nidhogg on the THN forums , the NC forums are offline due to a transformer exploding in the Houston datacenter where the NC forums are hosted. More news on the exploding transformer can be found on The Register.
Please note that the game servers are up and running as normal, as they are in a different datacenter.
As for the ETA, our guess is good as yours - howerver there is a service update page with the latest information.
Update: 22:55 BST - Apparantly the servers at the H1 datacentre affected by the transformer outage are beginning to come back online, hopefully this means the NC forums will be up and running again soon.
Update: 03/06-/08 @ 00:08
A statement has been released from the CEO of the company (The Planet) running the server on which the Neocron forums are hosted, from the sounds of it, it looks like the forums should be back online at 2am BST!