Hey there, Justin here, how's everyone been?
I heard about the recent disappointment that happened with Valiant and even though the server I personally run (SerenityRO) is by no means "successful" like Elysium was, I felt the need to at least allow you all to know my side of the story as to why Elysium shut down back in September, as well, to give you all a place to use as a neutral place to talk to one another if you care to do so.
And before anyone asks the obvious, "Are you re-opening ElysiumRO?", I'll be honest; I have no intention on doing so anytime soon. My apologies to those who still to this day send me emails requesting I re-open as well to those of you who have stated numerous times your love for how I ran Elysium, however, what with school on the horizon and operating my project of the past few years, designing websites for a living (
www.justintynne.com) as well as everything else I have going on, I just don't feel I'd have the time to devote that you all
deserve to have devoted to you as the lead of the server.
Alright then, let's take a walk down memory lane together..
Starting from the beginning, we had issues with the item databases which was an internal eAthena issue affecting servers using our SVN backwards. This caused extreme lag spikes within the first 72 hours of the server opening and as such, we lost roughly 50 active players due to a problem that was initially beyond my control. (Thank you again to those of you who actually sat with me for at least four hours while Nibelungen and I attempted to find the cause.)
After we isolated the first issue, we switched hosting providers to ServerPronto. We even had a donations drive to do this to raise the needed $180 USD to move to their company. They then charged me an extra $100. I just shrugged it off and we kept working to resolve latency for as many areas as possible. Eventually, however, it became very apparent two things;
Firstly, the lag we thought had been fixed (the item database issue) came back (this was fixed within 48 hours of being with Server Pronto),
Second, latency caused by ServerPronto themselves.
After we spent a good two weeks with ServerPronto, they then billed me an additional 200$, and then again another 180$. Donations weren't enough to cover that so the Paypal account associated with ElysiumRO was over drafted, which then over drafted my banking account. Paypal did absolutely nothing about any of this and so I had to take out a loan in the amount of $1,700 from a relative to cover all of the fees. I then dealt with the BBB of Florida, Ohio and California against Paypal and ServerPronto. Paypal then refunded me $180 and stated that they had no just cause to reverse the $200 or $100 transactions ServerPronto initiated, and my bank refused to reverse the overdraft charges.
I went ahead and paid for the monthly expenses two months in advance which brought the loan down to less than half of a third month's worth of expenses. Donations from this point to the end did nothing for the remaining charges that were still up in the air from ServerPronto, over draft fees, et cetera.
Unfortunately, my battle with ServerPronto was a lost cause like many others who have had similar issues with their company. Seriously, Google them and you'll find a ton of horror stories, some of which are worse than our own. I wrote a review myself at the start of the fiasco prior to all the additional billing charges and things escalated from that point. In the end I had to cancel my debit card, force Paypal to reject any billing requests from ServerPronto and had to also pay off around $600 in fees that occurred for no reason at all thanks to ServerPronto's con artist ways.
The next "big" issue that was a long and drawn out process was Kalicia's banishment. As much as I dislike giving the girl attention for everything she attempted to do, it caused a load of offline nuisances for me personally. I had police departments calling me left and right for two to three weeks asking if I wanted to press charges against her, her ISP continuously called me asking for follow-up information in case she attempted to sign back on. That whole mess was just ridiculous and I chalked it up as a girl who simply had too much time on her hands. Period. It was eventually all taken care of and I never heard from Kalicia again, but it was stupid and never should have escalated to the level it did in the first place.
Nextly, the various in-game squabbles between players. The most prevalent being Kanna kept getting reported for "harassing" Incognito, and then anytime I or another staff member did or didn't do something, we had either Kanna's friends or Incognito's friends harassing us over IRC/MSN for doing this or not doing that. I personally thought what Kanna was doing/saying to Incognito was funny, as did the majority of the staff at the time, however, again, it was incidents like that which wasted the time of both staff members and player's time alike.
At the "end", I attempted to rally up support from within the community as "Constantine", a character we the staff previously used as a sort of relief from our GM duties which would dead branch higher level maps and harass Nyx's legit, Sakura. Constantine pulled a lot of support, but in the end after seeing a drastic 150 to 60 player online drop, I finally threw in the towel and joined the rest of the defeated staff. It was at this time I took a vote amongst the high staff and in a unanimous decision, I shut the server down without explanation. Because the entire staff was at the time comprised of knowledgeable people, I allowed Hephaestus to contact many of you to start a server anew elsewhere. That project met the same fate as Valiant, and tore the Elysium staff into two. Keiki joined me on SerenityRO v4, where he came from, Nyx joined Heph's server until she was banned along with Rico/countless others, Thanatos remained with Heph until he was fired for BS reasons, Persephone joined Heph as that's her IRL husband.
If you recall I sent many of you to ProjectRage. Then, they were hacked and I withdrew my support from them as clearly they weren't as thorough as I had hoped. I then sent everyone to Heph's server, which tanked due to drama between both myself and Hephaestus, and once that proved to be yet another fail, I simply closed down the Elysium website and went back to my original community I'd been with for nearly three years prior to Elysium.
I eventually was informed about Valiant's re-opening from Aya and a few others from Royal Flush who migrated to SerenityRO from Elysium/Heph's attempt at a server of his own. I watched from afar and enjoyed a few laughs hearing things from both Nyx and people who intended to play there. While I was hoping Rehael would be able to manage Valiant again and thus provide a stable, long-term environment for those of you I met here at Elysium to play, I quickly realized that their server would fall apart. My hat's off to Rehael for trying, but there were just so many things that unfortunately were not in their favor. And once again, another server inevitably bit the dust.
While I hold no ill-will toward anyone for Elysium's demise, I do wish to instill one thing to you all where ever you may choose to play next; Support has to come from every single player within a community and you must all work together to make a server truly "great". A staff can only do so much and the rest is entirely up to the community itself.
I thank you all for having been apart of ElysiumRO while it was open, and I invite you to make use of the forum to once against re-unite with one another if you have no other places to do so.
With warm regards,
Justin T. aka "Calix"
