Before the 21st Birthday fun begins, I'd like to thank you all for your patience over the past few weeks. I know it's been quiet, but until the work was fully finished, we weren’t able to share what was happening.

The last upgrade on this scale was 8 years ago. Back then, the hardware we needed wasn't available to lease. Interest rates were very low so luckily we were able to purchase everything outright - for about the price of a house (yup, really T_T) but even then no company was willing to host our hardware without a long-term deal, so we had to sign an 8-year contract.

Everything ran brilliantly... until the servers started getting older. Like a car, the older they get, the more problems they have. Things were manageable - until Covid, and then this year's tariffs. Parts became really expensive and harder to source, and with servers slowly failing, it wasn't exactly the kind of news we could share at the time. If, for example, the site should be running on 6 storage servers but is limping along on just 3, you don't exactly want to make a public announcement about it!

We've been counting down the days until our lease ended and have been planning this move for several years. Even so, it's not something we want to go through again any time soon, so we had to make sure we got it right. It's also incredibly expensive - once we commit to the new setup, we're paying for two locations until everything is 100% moved over. And Marapets is HUGE. We estimated around 48 hours of downtime, based on the fact that even at the fastest speeds, it takes 19 hours just to transfer all our data. One small mistake during that process delayed us by another 12 hours.

The plan was to be ready before the June event, but constant changes to contracts and hardware availability caused delays. The surge of players during the event made our server issues all the more noticeable. There was a lot more we'd planned to roll out at the end of the event, but every bit of our time and energy went into making the move happen as quickly as possible. We'd spent a whole year preparing for it, and 99% went exactly as expected. The way our level games are encrypted had to be totally changed for the new servers and it took longer than expected. Our birthday event uses the same system, which means our event is running later than usual. We thought we'd have to delay it for another week but it should be live later today! but it's live now!