Chromiecraft 2024 – Summer Update

Dear Time Travelers,

Firstly, we hope you are all keeping well and enjoying the summer (or winter for those in the southern hemisphere). It has been a hectic couple of months and want to give the community a wider update as to what has been going on behind the scenes on the team.

The website / PTR issues

On the 8th June, we had a complete outage of our website and PTR. Unfortunately, this lead to a downtime on these for a good 24 hours or so. We are constantly battling attacks on our infrastructure, DDOS etc which has not really affected us in the past minus a slow to load / hanging website at times so thought it was another attack. This one was something completely unexpected however. Our host which had both the PTR & website on seperate servers had completely shut down our hosting. The reason why, a lovely C&D served on us by a small, independent developer who we cannot name. Of course our host didn’t take the liberty to inform us, giving us just a few minutes in the middle of the night to mention the shutdown of our services and us to wake up to it.

Given we have everything registered with our real names, with real registrations with authorities, to have such a notice is to say the least, concerning. At this point we want to give a special shoutout to our friends over at Turtle WoW who also went through something similar on their socials with their approach / talking over the similarities. Construct approached a specialist firm, funding this himself with some legal advice and approach, which enabled us to be back online just a tad over 24 hours later. This was a real ‘all hands on deck’ from the entire team, with a huge thank you needing to go also to Yehonal & Helias who handled all the migration afterwards to a new service after the disappointing actions of our now previous host. This of course was a real shock to the system what we all gave ourselves a week or two to take stock of and ensure we remain true to our goal. Unfortunately we are unable to release the full letter, being able to provide just the below redacted snippet:

We took this time to also make some behind-the-scenes improvements of the website in terms of scalability and functionality, with Roboto also bringing Legacyplayers on the new host as well. We were in two minds should we make this public knowledge however in our effort to be as transparent as we can, you now know what we got up to over those few weeks in June and why we were not able to give as much attention to matters on Chromiecraft as we would have liked. To say this was a costly month is an understatement, we are planning to potentially produce a ‘what does Chromiecraft cost to run’ in the near future to highlight probably why nobody really does a non-P2W / no boost / no gear model if they ever want to actually make money from a server (as always we can promise you will never be sold anything like that from us or treat the server as some form of cash-grab).

So many bugs and what about the Black Temple release?

As per our progression plans, we have a soft-target of hitting a new release approximately every 2 months. This is to ensure we continue to go through content, working to continuously fix the core (which is the whole reason why Chromiecraft started in the first place, to fix Azerothcore and make it the best open-source 3.3.5a core out there for all to enjoy) but keeping the community engaged in the project still. We know it is an impossibility to fix everything with just one run through all due to regressions, legacy bugs etc. Our aim is progression > perfection in this run of the server still. We cannot ignore however the sheer amount of bugs still to be tackled, some important class bugs and a need to go through a very painful modernization of scripts which have existed in the core from the days of SunwellCore & MaNGOS. This has lead to a re-introduction of issues, especially in places like Karazhan and Nightbane, Vashj in SSC etc which were heavily affected by these script modernization works.

Due to this, we approached a good number of people throughout Chromiecraft, both contributors and players alike for them to highlight the biggest current bugs and issues what we have been tackling during this time. We have also been guilty of never really producing quality changelogs, instead relying on Github comparisons to show the difference between each build. Bench has been putting in some great work to highlight these in plain-text for the community in the #changelog-chromie channel also (example below):

We are fully aware not everybody is on our Discord server so we are working on a new system to broadcast these messages to our newly created channel on X. This is still under development but aim to have it written and coded in the coming weeks.

At the same time, we have been doing our best to tackle the amount of bugs needed to be triaged and worked through during this time (which hopefully hasn’t gone unnoticed) to ensure we are in a fit and fighting state going forward and to tackle the whole ‘bugged’ Chromiecraft. Again the entire reason of the server is to fix those bugs! Whilst we would love to tackle everything, we need to be realistic in that our development team is tiny, sadly.

Due to the above, as well as the amount of bugs we have had to tackle in the Black Temple plus the aim to never repeat a release like Hyjal again, we have not yet been able to put a date on its release. We will still give a 4 week heads up as to the release so all raiders can prepare properly. We have also started to look into the feasibility of a return of the mythic mode with its bad-luck prevention system currently in use in both the Mag & Gruul raids, giving you a score to purchase loot from the raid should you not get the drop you want after a number of runs. We are also working on getting some tunes done on BT for the community to begin testing. When we have some further news, this will be shared with you all immediately. As always, only the developers can give the go-ahead for a release date to be set.

It is just a game afterall

There has been a noticeable amount of animosity around the project recently, some of it understandable and hopefully the above sheds some more light on what we do / go through running Chromiecraft. I am saddened to announce a recent attempted suicide by a member of the community (what I can happily say failed) with the project specifically mentioned in a note they had left. So why are we saying this? Because people need to remember this is just a game at times. We are all real people behind each and every person and there needs to be more kindness in this world between everyone. It is also completely fine to feel like shit sometimes but there is assistance out there. Even if you don’t feel like you have somebody to talk to, there is guaranteed to be somebody around here who has probably gone through the same here in the community. We want Chromiecraft to continue to be a safe haven for all who are tolerant and respectful of each other, no matter where they are from or their beliefs. Less hate, more love. Less fake news, more positivity. Take some breaks from Azeroth, go touch some grass here and there! To finish this section in a positive manner, they are back playing here again and somehow got their fiance to join them also! Full permission to share this news was granted from both and we want this to serve as a reminder that help is out there no matter what. One gamer saved from this message means it was as success.

Our recent recruitment drive

We recently shared a number of roles and positions we are on the lookout for to join the team on Chromiecraft. A massive thank you for all those who applied, with over a dozen interviews held as well as some more booked in for the coming weeks. These are open still, please see Shin’s post about it as some roles require little to no programming skills and always aim to upskill those of contribute wherever possible.

The Chromiecraft in 2024 survey

We recently conducted a survey regarding the current existing, alt player experience (raids are a separate issue being tackled) with the outcomes in its entirety to be found here. A warning about some of the language used by our community in that survey also, very lovely as always! We have recently been implementing the findings of the survey, with XP now boosted to x2 across the board up to level 70 with it stacking with the Recruit-A-Friend feature. Daily arena points have been doubled upon your first battleground victory of the day and work is underway with boosting RDF rewards below level 70 for EXP & Gold as well as badge drops in raids. Hyjal is also having its attunement removed as per the survey outcome of the existing raid having it removed after a month of it being out (the attunement will be removed on the next server restart). Thank you again to everyone who took the time to fill this out!

Thank you all as always for everything that everyone does to make Chromiecraft the incredible community it is, have a good-as-you-can rest of the day!