Nuclear Nezz

Hello everyone! I'm happy to announce the DreamBot 4 Beta testing has gone very well. We'll be approaching phase 2 of our beta testing. Phase 2 will include Lifetime Sponsors and all Scripters. We will be creating a beta channel in this discord, accessible by lifetime sponsors and scripters, as well as adding a download link to the forums. We're still working out a few technical pieces, but if all goes well the beta testing should begin next week. Worst case, it will be pushed to the week of the 7th. Either way, you will hear more from us next week. Phase 2 should not take too long, it will primarily be to give scripters time to update scripts and get some heavier stress testing in. Thanks, The Dream Team

Hello everyone, after possibly our longest downtime to date we figured we owed it to you to let you what happened and why it took so long to get the update out. The update ended up taking nearly 89 hours, which doesn't include the ~2.5 hours after the game update when we weren't able to actually start on the update (see https://x.com/oldschoolrs/status/1909935042807148552). What happened tldr; I got very sick at a very unfortunate time. On Apr. 8 I started to come down with an illness, but didn't think a lot of it because I generally bounce back from things pretty fast. Then I slept for roughly 20 hours. On Apr. 9 at 12:50:00 UTC the game was updated. Usually updates go pretty smoothly, if anything is broken I can fix it easily or Pandemic is able to take over. Generally our updates take 1-4 hours, in rare rough cases up to 8. Unfortunately, this one was larger than normal. I realized a large number of our hooks were broken which made the client unusable. I knew this was going to be hours of work, worst case days, but due to my illness and the current time (10:30pm), I was not going to be able to work through it. I hoped another night of sleep would get me at least to a point of being able to work. Pandemic and I discussed if he'd be able to step in, and decided that by the time he was even able to understand it and start, I would already be well enough to do it. Each day went by with that same discussion, with the hope tomorrow I would feel well enough to do it. On Apr. 12, I felt well enough to put in a couple hours of work throughout the day, but I knew it was going to need a lot more. Finally on Apr. 13, I was able to sit down and give proper focus to the work, and got the client back up and running around 5:48:00 UTC. I do genuinely appreciate all of the support I received any time I popped in to give an update on discord, and we appreciate the patience you've had during this time. How we plan on avoiding this in the future Having a single point of failure, like a single person to be able to fix the updater, obviously isn't great. However, in this specific case, it really seems to have been just unfortunate timing. If any of the events had happened differently (the update came at the normal time, the update didn't break our updater so badly, I didn't get sick) then the outcome likely wouldn't have been so disruptive. There's a reason this hasn't happened before in our entire 11-year history. Many comments suggested hiring an additional developer, but this wouldn't have really helped in this case unless they specifically worked on the updater. I would likely no longer focus on or be up-to-date with those changes as we're a very small team and try to focus on separate areas with our specific skills and experience. While the outcome could have possibly been better in this scenario, we don't think it'd be prudent considering how rare something like this downtime is. We think the best way to move forward and minimize the chances of something like this happening is by improving our internal tooling to be more robust so that it's less likely to break during such game changes. If this had been a normal non-breaking or only slightly breaking update, if I'm not immediately available, like this time, Pandemic could have ran the updater and updated the client. With this in mind, though, it's entirely possible that this could happen again with a similar outcome due to the nature of the our business. We have no prior knowledge of the upcoming game updates or how they may break the client or updater. No software is perfect, and we unfortunately can't predict the future. What we're doing for monthly subscriptions that were affected All affected monthly subscriptions have now had time added to make up for the extended downtime. VIP and Sponsor subscriptions were extended by 7 days, and all other subscriptions were extended by the actual downtime (plus a few extra hours to make up for setup time) as we're unable to extend those further. Any VIP or Sponsor purchases that expired during the downtime have been extended by 7 days, and you should have received the role again. Anyone with a VIP purchase that expired during the downtime (or impacted otherwise) and then bought a separate VIP purchase after the downtime have had their new VIP purchase extended by 7 days. Thanks for reading, The Dream Team