Death of Elysium, birth of Light's Hope

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Death of Elysium, birth of Light's Hope

by Pottu » Mon Oct 16, 2017 8:51 pm

Brief:

The Elysium Project as it exists today is no longer a viable project due to the systemic problem of lack of oversight on those with the most access to the servers. Due to failures to uphold the project’s ideals and integrity, the Elysium Project is being dissolved and relaunched out of the control of those who have abused the trust of the staff, community, and legacy movement as a whole. We hope that our explanation below will shed some light on the situation and explain, in more detail than has ever been shared before, why we are making these choices and what it means for the community. Please be patient with us moving forward as this journey will be rough and arduous but is worth the price paid to ensure the standard of emulation entrusted to us is upheld moving forward.

Core

The Leadership of the Project has always been an obscure and somewhat controversial subject since its inception, though it has become more so since Shenna stepped down several months back. As it exists now, Elysium is currently run by a core group of team leaders from each ‘department’ who collectively vote to make decisions impacting the servers as a whole. Currently, they are (in alphabetical):

Ash (Communications)
Asura (Crestfall)
Crogge (Systems)
Link/Static (Quality Assurance)
Shenna/Akira (Development)
Staden (Development)
Vaelanor/Akuta (Support)
Whitekidney (Systems)
Housekeeping

When Shenna stepped down, she adopted the pseudonym ‘Akira’ and continued her work as a Community Manager and contributing to the itemization Github. (CONSIDERATION: It is theorized by staff that Vitaliy also did the same thing under the pseudonym ‘Alright’.) This project has run under this style of changing identities around for some time and has become a sore point with the team as it leads to an environment of mistrust and “shadiness” that is regularly pinned to the project as a whole. While we appreciate the work Shenna has put in for the length of the project we cannot continue to uphold the charade that she has less input into the project than was implied to the community. The reason she has remained with the project (and to an extent Vitaliy/Alright) is because she is the primary account holder for key Project services: the OVH account and the Github. Additionally, the PayPal is held under Vitaliy’s name and is a key reason why the project is able to continue operating without fear of shutting down from legal requests. This is why the contents of the PayPal donations were never presented to the public: the PayPal was a single person’s account that was used for more than just server-related purposes.

And that means exactly what you believe it means. We have been able to confirm that Shenna has taken at least roughly 2000 euro or more for personal financial reasons. With this knowledge in mind we can no longer trust her as an invested stakeholder in the Project.

Data/Server Integrity

Given that we are disclosing this information, we feel it pertinent to confirm some accusations and suspicions that have been levied due to oddities being discovered by the community: yes, there is a gold selling operation being run out of the Project, its sole owner being Crogge with Shenna being complicit/benefitting from such arrangements. Crogge has confirmed himself with logs supporting these findings that he has generated gold to provide to several gold selling services to sell and copied existing characters (such as Rank 14 PvPers) to provide to account/character selling services for money. This has been discovered to go as far back as several months, increasing in frequency in the last several weeks. His efforts to obscure this data have had far reaching consequences for the Staff, as he’s intentionally made it impossible to set up a Log Management server due to having to remove traces of his activity from GM action logs. The blatant disrespect of the Support team’s time and energy attempting to combat account selling/trading and gold selling has completely shattered any notion of trust in their capability to uphold our values as a team.

No one on staff will speculate or discuss another’s personal affairs, but given the revelations here we hope the community will understand why we are moving in the direction we are.

Next Steps

So what does this mean for the Elysium Project? Given what has transpired, we absolutely do not condone any form of retaliation against anyone and will actively work to eliminate any attempts on our platforms to organize anything resembling such. At this time, several key members of the Project Leadership are stepping down and walking away. We expect most of the staff will follow suit given the information revealed here. What is done has been done - we are moving on and request that you do the same.

If you are reading this, you may already be aware that all of the realm servers are currently down. This is intentional. The team who reviewed these findings determined that, based on prior conversations with Crogge, the privacy of the player data was at potential risk given that there have been offers to buy the account data made by third-parties. This was not an easy choice to make and the team struggled with both the implications and how it would be seen. Rather than accept the risk that there may be a ‘cash-out’ option taken with the players personally identifiable information, the team has decided to completely wipe the existing servers. This does not mean that there is no backups available to be reused by Crogge and Shenna at all; however we believe this action will severely impact their ability to continue this behavior and reduce the exposure to player privacy (as much as we are able) if data is given to an outside party. The core team that are stepping down from the Elysium Project are coalescing around the foundational ideals this project is supposed to represent and are relaunching/rebranding as Light’s Hope. The servers will be relaunched with the backups created prior to the posting of this announcement, though there may be some data not saved that encompasses an hour or two prior. We apologize for the inconvenience, but there is nothing we can do to correc any lost items, experience, etc. as a result of this process. The existing realms of Anathema, Darrowshire, and Elysium will be hosted as they were directly prior to the downtime. The server realm names will remain the same for compatibility reasons and we will be reorganizing our future plans for how the realms will progress. At this time, we have no intentions of launching any sort of fresh start server and will be proceeding similarly as we did prior to this announcement. Given what has transpired, we will need a short amount of time to put our collective heads together and establish a baseline and be more communicative about our intentions going forward, especially concerning patch timelines and plans for The Burning Crusade.

We understand that we are abandoning a lot of brand recognition from both Nostalrius and the Elysium Project by doing this; however, we believe that the actions of two rogue staff members have irrevocably damaged the image of the rest of the staff and trying to pick up the pieces is not worth the hassle. We will be making every best effort to ensure that we communicate this change to as many platforms as possible so that word may spread of the coming shift in branding. We ask that you, the community, assist us in these matters so that we can continue to provide the best legacy experience possible, improve our internal processes to prevent these kinds of issues from ever happening again, and rebuild the trust that we hold in highest esteem. We want to demonstrate to you that we are worthy of that trust and your time invested with the Project.

Rest assured: all instances of gold being generated by external manipulation are being undone and every character that was duplicated will be deleted outright. We will be updating you shortly on what will be changing going forward with our plans, strategy, and implementation to ensure that this never happens again.

https://twitter.com/LightsHopeWoW

https://discordapp.com/invite/mraKxcU
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Re: Death of Elysium, birth of Light's Hope

by Heavenscape » Mon Oct 16, 2017 8:56 pm

Nostalrius 2 is dead
Long live Nostalrius 3
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Re: Death of Elysium, birth of Light's Hope

by Xoxoqt » Mon Oct 16, 2017 8:59 pm

xD
HAMBURGER
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Re: Death of Elysium, birth of Light's Hope

by Azuregos » Mon Oct 16, 2017 8:59 pm

This post was brought to you by <Alexensual>

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Last edited by Azuregos on Mon Oct 16, 2017 10:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Death of Elysium, birth of Light's Hope

by Askental » Mon Oct 16, 2017 8:59 pm

tfw Viper was right the entire time
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Re: Death of Elysium, birth of Light's Hope

by JimPaladin » Mon Oct 16, 2017 9:01 pm

how will the effect erping on elysium
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Re: Death of Elysium, birth of Light's Hope

by pattez » Mon Oct 16, 2017 9:02 pm

xd
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Re: Death of Elysium, birth of Light's Hope

by Eloah » Mon Oct 16, 2017 9:02 pm

tfw this happens again
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Re: Death of Elysium, birth of Light's Hope

by Tatakau » Mon Oct 16, 2017 9:04 pm

Wonder when we'll see the servers up and running, just got back here after a long time away and then all this.
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Re: Death of Elysium, birth of Light's Hope

by Junkerd » Mon Oct 16, 2017 9:05 pm

shenna.... how could you...
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According to Pottu, making a post about Silithus miners in a thread about unfair bans is spam.

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