Welcome back Repop players! The servers are back up and running! It's important to say that this isn't really a full re-launch yet, but more of a soft re-launch to get the servers back up and running and allow players back in, we are still transitioning a lot in the backend, including the backer portal. Here are some bullet points to enlighten some people to the situation:

Backer Portal still hasn't been fully transitioned from ABT to us, this means that we cannot verify 100% of the accounts and backer status, we are working as hard as possible to make sure everyone who has purchased the game has access, but some people have been put on hold and this is the reason. We want to make sure all supporters have access to the game before opening the gates.
MAJOR NOTE: We will not be able to re-open sales until this has been fully transitioned. We hope to still be on track for this week, but this transition really does need to finish.
Servers are exactly the same as they were before, same hardware, same locations, same configuration, same everything. Please feel free to send in dxdiags and crash logs so we can take a look, but please check other software too as there is a large chance it's to do with your computers environment/drivers/hardware adjustments there could have been a lot of changes over the past year. One major thing that has cropped up a few times is updates to Windows 10, and not installing direct x 9.0c. That is not to say we don't have work to do in solving a lot of these crashes, there is a LOT for us to fix up, thank you for submitting issues and so forth.
US West was taken down before the servers went black, ABT gave everyone a heads up and allowed transfers before taking it down, but this server is not up due to this reason.
Currently Live Server is being restarted daily due to players getting stuck and the some of the below issues. We hope to have this fixed over the patches, but until then the server restarts will continue.
A lot of people have asked about wipes, there is a guaranteed wipe before release (a long way down the road), we also plan on but cannot guarantee at least 1 more wipe in order to check the economy from scratch. There may or may not be other wipes down the road depending on circumstances and issues that arise.

Warning, the rest of this post is mainly technical!

update march17There is a bit of bad news: The first major patch (16.0.0) wont be any time really soon. We have been digging in to the zoning/transition issues, which have provided an insight to many other issues, this includes but is not limited to a lot of information that is being replicated which doesn't need to be, and some major issues with server drops, memory leaks and performance are being extrapolated by this.

What this means for us is... We have to go over all replicated information, sort out what should be server side and client side, then apply all of the fixes without borking up other interconnected systems at the same time. As example of this is when players go over zone lines: ALL of your Account information is replicated from one area to the next, this includes for example, your inventory. So the more information on your character, the longer it will take to transition. This is not a straight forward and easy changing a 1 to a 0.

Another related major issue with this, is that information shouldn't be going from area to area in the first place, it should be using a proxy system so it stays in one place and relays the information, which is another big amount of information to fix on the systems side, and also needs to be done at the same time when fixing the systems.

We did try enabling the ability for NPC's to go over area lines, unfortunately this provided a lot more problems than we hoped which goes a lot deeper than we had imagined. The NPC's positions would be wrong, you wouldn't be able to attack as they would be invalid, yet they were still able to hit you, it is/was extremely game breaking. This is a lot to do with replication, and the NPC not using the proxy code.

Unfortunately an engine update wont fix any of these underlying issues, as development goes on they will become more and more apparent, more players, systems on systems and so forth will just make it worse and worse. So at this point we have decided to fix a lot of these issues, which in some cases means some pretty deep coding.

A lot of the above is actually fine for prototyping, early alpha, making sure systems actually work, but we want to get it to where it's sturdy and can be built upon without having any major issues.

Meanwhile, the art team is still fixing a lot of errors, cleaning things up and providing an efficiency boost, most of these bug fixes will come in to fruition in a patch down the road.

So overall we have had to move on to some fixes to do with account replication, area replication and systems area work, the longest amount of time is done in the research and learning of what systems will be affected by what changes, when all of this is plotted out and known we can start to apply fixes one at a time. The first major patch (16.0.0) will not fix absolutely everything, (but we hope to have the core done) and may show up to have bugs which are not currently apparent. BUT overall performance should be improved, other elements should be more fluid and we should have a stronger base to build upon.

You may see a few other external updates from the game version before the next major patch, things like bug reporting being more fluid for us, site updates and so forth, and we hope to provide smaller patches of the framework instead of one giant patch.

Internal testing may be slightly delayed from this, but they will have a lot more to test when we get the fixes going.
You can read more and discuss on our forums