Some Heroes of Newerth services return; dev apologizes and offers compensation

Following yesterday's report of "catastrophic hardware failure," Heroes of Newerth has returned using a temporary solution. In a blog post, developer S2 Games offered an apology and outlined its plan for compensation.

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In a lengthy post on the official Heroes of Newerth forum, Marc DeForest from developer S2 Games has both apologized for the game's recent issues and revealed a number of items offered to players as compensation. Yesterday, Shacknews reported that a "catastrophic hardware failure" caused the game to shut down service.

DeForest says that the last five weeks of service have been "unacceptable" and announced that every player will receive "2,000 silver coins," every item in the Goblin Store will be "unlocked until Wednesday, June 29" (12PM ET), and "Leaves" on all player accounts from Tuesday, May 17 through Thursday, June 9 will be removed.

The S2 Games founder went on to outline the reasons behind the game's recent issues, noting that following distributed denial of service attacks in May, the company "retained a world renowned internet security firm to secure [its] network." Required updates and server transitions to protect against attacks began on June 9, until revealing the team would need to upggrade its database boxes for "additional capacity and consistency of service."

When the replacement CPUs started on June 21, DeForest says, the engineers noticed "anomalies in the raid setup, causing a total loss of data on the master and slave boxes." As of today, Heroes of Newerth is back online and running on a temporary setup while the developer constructs its new environment at another hosting firm; however, "not all services may be operating at 100%"

Heroes of Newerth is playable and will continue to be, DeForest promises; however, the team will notify the playerbase of required maintenance.

To their credit, S2 Games says it holds themselves "completely accountable" for the events that have transpired.

"Through two years of closed beta, open beta, and retail play, we provided nearly 100% uptime. We are intent on restoring this level of service you have all come to expect," DeForest wrote. "We will be making the necessary adjustments in our systems, processes, and management to achieve a better and more reliable quality of service."

Xav de Matos was previously a games journalist creating content at Shacknews.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    June 22, 2011 7:00 PM

    Xav de Matos posted a new article, Some Heroes of Newerth services return; dev apologizes and offers compensation.

    Following yesterday's report of "catastrophic hardware failure," Heroes of Newerth has returned using a temporary solution. In a blog post, developer S2 Games offered an apology and outlined its plan for compensation.

    • reply
      June 22, 2011 7:05 PM

      I appreciate their improved transparency with this whole debacle. That goes much further than their offer of free gifts.

    • reply
      June 22, 2011 7:08 PM

      damn everyone is gonna have custom icons now

      • reply
        June 23, 2011 9:40 AM

        I'm happy enough with my gold preorder shield :D The one thing nobody can buy with coins.

    • reply
      June 22, 2011 7:34 PM

      "100% uptime" during closed/open beta and retail play is a far stretch IMO, but I do love this game!

    • reply
      June 23, 2011 8:01 AM

      Well done S2. This is how you should handle an outage.

    • reply
      June 24, 2011 8:10 AM

      Well done. This is a great company.

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