A Sad Turn of Events…

If you’ve been looking for LegendMUD or the old version of the website, this may explain where it’s gone:

On the morning of 11/20, Legend experienced what can only be described as a catastrophic failure. The controller which manages all of the peripheral drives failed, taking it with the logic boards on the hard drives as well as the CD ROM drive. It was a shock as well to find that the off-machine/off-site backup procedures had also been silently failing.

Attempts at recovering the data have thus far been unsuccessful.

Right now, the only backups we have for sure are from July 30th of this year when we changed the machine over to the new IP address.

We recognize that this type of failure is a blow to the community, a blow to all of the hard work players have put into their characters, as well as a blow to the hard work put towards areas, helpfiles, code and all other elements of Legend. While we look toward the future, we are committed to making right what we can, or in the event of loss, making right by the players of Legend in order to preserve the community.

At this point we’re entirely unsure as to what can be recovered between 7/30 and 11/20. Worst case, of course, is that we have to roll back to 7/30 for playerfiles. We are trying to avoid this as best we can.

Moving forward, we are taking the following actions:

1. We are enlisting the assistance of a data recovery shop in order to recover what information we can off of the failed drives. We should have more information by 11/22 as to what can be recovered and what the cost of this recovery is. We understand that this can be an expensive process, and we are committed to taking every measure we can to recover the lost data.
2. We currently have a ‘test’ mud up with older code and no playerfiles. You are welcome to log in, create characters and hang around and chat or explore what we have there or whatever. Nothing that happens on that test mud will count though we do ask that people remain patient and be mindful of the courtesy rules of Legend.
3. We are currently rebuilding a machine to replace the failed hardware. This is a slow process, but so far has been moving forward. We should be at a ‘limping’ point with the 7/30 backup of the playerfiles by sometime today/tonight (11/21). Because people check out local copies of the areas and code, those should be a fair bit more recent (as of 11/19 or so at the very earliest, with additional updates available from people’s local repositories).
4. After we get back to a stable system with everything in place, we will be offering some forms of reimbursement.
   • In the event that we cannot recovery any data from the failed hard drives, we will liberally reimburse equipment and strings acquired. This will be done on the honor system, but there will be no questions asked when it comes to what will be reimbursed.
   • As for quests, finished quests are virtually impossible to reimburse without a player file restore. There will be no quest reimbursals. We are looking at ways to increase the delay between when some important quests (such as stat quests) can be done.
   • For experience, even if we can recover the playerfiles, we will offer a lengthy period of time after we are stable where experience earned will be vastly increased. We’re currently considering 4 to 5 times as much experience as earned normally. We are also considering
     greatly reducing or eliminating the penalties of death during this time. The specifics of how this will be applied are up in the air, but we will take measures to ensure that people will get at least ‘back to where they were’.
   • If any characters are completely lost as part of this event, we will make every effort to recreate the characters as they were.

   Please understand that in the event we cannot recover the playerfiles between 7/30 and 11/20, reimbursals will be slow and we ask that you be patient. We will get to everyone, but it will take time. We are currently considering ways to automate some of this process.

5. Hindsight being 20/20, we are going to institute a number of safeguards against this type of issue in the future as well as ensure the safeguards and backup procedures that were in place are both active and functional.

Words cannot express the regret we have for this situation. To all of Legend’s players, we offer a heartfelt apology for this interruption of service and the setbacks we might now face.

We hope that you will stick by us during this time and when we get back on our feet, continue to make Legend the exceptional niche of the internet that we all enjoy.

We will keep you up-to-date as we recieve and process information.

The Immortals of LegendMUD

Legend has been running officially since Valentine’s Day, 1994, and unofficially since sometime in 1993, mid-summer or so. Although neither I nor Kristen are actively involved in it anymore, I am sure it will be back.