Regarding the upcoming content, we have read all the comments from the 300 testers regarding Dire Maul North and the Player Test Realm has been updated accordingly. Players who have access to this realm can now test it and confirm that the fixes are done. As for DM East & West, work is still ongoing and should be completed for this friday
Consequently, we'll need some of the 300 testers to be online so we can make some record for upcoming media this Friday 10 PM server time.
The development team has been working against a threat for some weeks now: gold/accounts/services sellers and bot users, all of which are forbidden in our server. Sadly, 5.000 accounts have already been banned on that topic since server opening. Please acknowledge the fact that there is no shortcut available on our server! Everyone has to level up the same way because this is what Vanilla is all about.
Previously, tracking bots was very time consuming, and relied on player reports and manual checks. Now we have created the first ever bot detecting system. It detects any bot on the server thanks to an automatic, secure and exclusive algorithm never built before. The system has been recently improved to detect them even faster last week. We've also developed a similar system to deal with gold and account sellers.
As a result, 729 accounts were banned in less than 5 days. This is kind of "shadow work" because players actually do not see the amount of work needed to track them and deal with them. Rest assured, systems have learned quite a bit regarding how these exploiters function and operate
Since this system now works as planned, we've started focusing on an automatic spam detection algorithm, based on the one we built for bot detection.
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Regarding activity this weekend, Nostalrius is proud to announce a new worldwide record with more than 7.650 players online at the same time on a single Vanilla server (x3 the population of a Vanilla server on retail back then). As a comparison, it was ~6.400 two weeks ago, and ~6.530 last week, which means more than 1.100 new players have arrived on the server in the last few days, without any advertising from our side. It means that you, the community, spread the word all around and we have gotten more and more popular to a stage we could not have dreamed of when we started.
Thank you so much for your support!
Stay tuned for more information soon
PS : In under 3 months
* ~140.000 accounts created,
* more than 550.000 characters created.
Best regards,
Nostalrius
