Greetings,

While investigating possible solutions to server load issues, we found that one of the key problems is the over-abundance of unused harvesters on the game worlds. There are far more harvesters out there among the planets than was ever intended and unfortunately our changes to allow structures to remain condemned, rather than removed, only made the matter worse.

Since changes were made to allow structures to be condemned rather than removed, not a single harvester has been removed from the servers. This has lead to unsightly harvester farms as well as clogging key resource areas with harvesters that are usually not even functioning.

Here is the proposed solution that we believe to be the best possible solution to this growing problem.

Harvester Cleanup: All condemned harvesters in the world will be removed to free up database space, improve server load times and increase performance overall. This will be done with plenty of fore-warning to allow anyone who needs to take care of maintenance fees, to do so before they are removed.

Harvester Maintenance: Going forward, when a harvester runs out of money, the harvester will be removed from the game. It will no longer pull money from the owners' bank to sustain itself nor will it enter a condemned state.

(The Harvester will still take damage when it runs out of maintenance and decay to 0%. Once it hits 0%, it will destroy itself rather than pull credits from the owner’s bank account).

Harvester Admin Abilities: We have also identified that, through various loopholes in the admin abilities, many crafters were able to make use of many more harvesters than was originally intended. In order to remedy this, we are removing the ability to grant Admin Rights to other players from harvesters. You will now only be able to place as many harvesters are your lot limit allows. Remember that each player is limited to 10 lots total.

This specific change will not affect houses, player city structures, guild halls or factories.

Increased Extraction Rate: We realize that this change will reduce the resources available to some crafters, so to help those who currently have more than their fair share of harvesters, we will increase the extraction rate of all harvesters by 50%

We feel, and we hope that you agree, that this proposed solution is an important change to the game. This clears up much needed database space which we need in order to allow extra character slots on the server of your choice, as well as serving to clear up older, unused harvesters and unsightly harvester farms.

Please let us know what you think of these proposed changes.

Thank you!