Neveron Update Archive

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2011 Updates

January 2011

Outage: Apologies for the last several weeks of downtime! The time has been spent dealing with issues outside of the actual servers. The game is finally back up and running, sort of.

Internal Programs: The usual internal programs that have been crashing for the last few months are all currently not working. This includes Training, Zone Resolution, Landing Craft Pick Up, Mass Decomm/Scrap, etc. On the plus side, Mine Expiration is also not running, so enjoy those extra resources.

We are aware of the situation and that is a priority for the next few days. The plan is to not only get all those programs running, but actually fix the longer term issues, preventing them from crashing every few weeks.

Logins: Please take a few minutes and review ALL of your login(s) and ALL of your empire(s). Be sure to check that you have current and valid emails, Cease Fire times, Battle Players and local time settings all adjusted properly. Remeber: The servers are now based in NY, and NOT in AZ. The server location DOES change time for Daylight Saving Time twice a year.

Players that have lost or forgotten, either a login or password for any PRIMARY or SECONDARY logins, please send an email to:

Be sure to include who you are in chat, an explanation of what you are requesting, as well as a general explanation of why you are requesting this login information. Emails with out adequate information will simply be delayed, preventing you from gaining control of your empire even longer!

A valid email associated with the login is the only VALID PROOF OF OWNERSHIP! Login information will ONLY BE SENT TO THE EMAIL asociated with the login!

Help Tickets: Many tickets have been read, replied to, or closed. There are still hunreds of tickets remaining. Addittional Help Tickets will be processed daily. The Help Ticket interface is also being reworked to try and streamline the process from my end.

Do NOT open multiple tickets for the same issues. Simply ADD new comments or relevant data to the ORIGINAL ticket. Players that ignore this guideline in the future will simply face Administrative Penalties.

To help reduce the amount of time needed to process the Help Tickets, I am asking every player to go through thier tickets and consolidate duplicate tickets, mark outdated tickets [with a final comment 'outdated'] and add any new or missing relevant data to all tickets. This would include all open tickets as well as any previously closed tickets that you feel still need to be addressed.

Donations: There seems to be some trouble with the donation links. We are trying to address these issues and hope to get donations back online asap.

Help Tickets: This will continue to be the best form of communication for players to get information to Admins. Ideally any new Help Tickets will be read within 48 hours. However, not every ticket requires an Admin response, so it may not appear that your ticket has been read yet. ALL help tickets will be read. Ticket management is as much a part of player responsibility as it is an Admin's.

As an Admin, this is what it means to 'process help tickets'...

Number of Tickets Opened

As we can all see, the use of tickets decreased in recent years, due in part to the lack of responses to open tickets by current Admins. Trying to process 6 or 7k tickets alone is not an easy task. Tickets have been moved back to the priority they should have been all along. Please start to use the existing Help Ticket System for all your game related issues.

Player Conduct: In recent months, the conduct of some players has gone far beyond acceptable.

I am reminding everyone that your access to Neveron is a privelage, not a right. This means ALL areas associated with the game including Mail, Chat and Forums. Consider your actions carefully and be prepared to face Administrative p enalties should they be considered inappropiate.

February 2011

New Owner: It's Official! It's announced! It's real! Neveron has been sold! Randy and Greg [Wayward_Son] are no longer the owners. They will continue to work on the game in a very limited fashion as needed in the future. So who is the new owner? Read "End of an Era: Neveron, Inc" for all the details. OK, I'm not going to make you read that entire thing unless you want to! The rumors are true, the game has been FINALLY sold to ShadowMasterCM.

On a side note: Pretty much any Help Ticket responses that you see dated after 01/01/2011 was actually me. I have actually been using any one of the admin logins that was handy on whatever machine I was working from at that moment. So no, WWS didn't really answer your help tickets! :-P

Status: Currently there are still a few internal systems that are not working properly. They are being worked on. This would include things like Landing Craft [LC] transit and Arenas. There are many systems that are not updating properly, which causes other things to hang up. Some programs I can manually process, but the automated version is not working yet, like Mass Decomm/ Scrap. Basically all the systems that have been crashing during 2010, started out broken in 2011. The process to locate and move all the appropriate code from the older server to the newer one has been a difficult one. Please bare with me while we get all this sorted out, and hopefully this will never be an issue again in the future.

Recognition: I would like to take a minute and thank the one 'active' player that remained optimistic and kept a positive attitude during the recent 'transition' of ownership. Maghetti refused to give in to the mass negativity, and tried to encourage other people to hold onto hope that the game was still alive and kicking. I decided as a added perk for him sticking to his guns, that I would call him and bring him up to speed on the sale and relocation. He was aware of things at some point in December. He was more than willing to listen to me 'vent' endlessly as I was dealing with all the issues of relocation. He provided useful insight from outside the LAN when needed, and confirmed various systems where functional or not. He was often the person 'working' on Neveron while I was off 'working' to pay my bills. So a great big "THANKS!" to Maghetti for his efforts. Oh, did I mention he will also be getting 100 DP for his rainy day fund? Enjoy the DP Mags! You earned em!! :O)

Donations: Thanks to the players that have already donated in the year 2011! As new owner you will see several new promotions. One such promotion will be random bonus prizes awarded to Donors. The winner for the January 2011 bonus is PaLaDiN. His bonus was determined by a roll of the dice in ##Neveron. He won 25% additional DP on his donation. Congrats PaLaDiN!

MPOGD: I hate to pull an old trick out of the closet like this, but for now, it will have to do. PLEASE GO VOTE FOR NEVERON! Use the link at the top of this page and vote for Neveron. You are allowed to vote one time per day at the site. For the next 6 months, if Neveron ends the month in one of the top 5 spots, I will reward the players with an in game bonus. I would like to come up with a new bonus for each month OR a different bonus depending on the actual ranking that we end the month with. Please submit your suggestions to the forum, topic "MPOGD Rewards". I'm thinking for this month something like a morale boost for all empires. Something like +25%...

Donation Special: My 44th Birthday is just around the corner, and so I decided to run a Donation Special.

All donations sent between now and February 15, 2011 will be eligible for a special bonus. To qualify all you have to do is make an entry in the message section on the PayPal Donation page.

Enter the phrase "Happy Birthday! :O)", followed by a number of your choice, between 1 and 12.

On February 16th, I will 'roll the dice' in #Neveron_Holiday_Raffle, to determine which prizes are attached to each number. I will then award that prize to the players who donated during this promotion.

The bonus for this special will be an additional % DP added to your original donation, based on the numbers 2, 15, 67 and 44.

So that means that if you pick the number attached to prize 67, you get 67% additional DP! Worst case you get an additional 2%. Everyone will get a bonus for this special if they donate!!

This promotion will not be extended beyond the dates listed.

I will say that I plan to randomly toss out promotions like this through out the year so start saving your pennies now for the next one!

Donations: I want to clarify a few things about Donations.

First, the Donation Page is 'fixed'. It was actually fixed several days ago, but I never stated that it was, so now I have! :-P

Second, ALL on line donations are now run thru PayPal. Your can send a donation using your PayPal Funds, MasterCard, Visa, American Express and Discover credit cards. All of these services are offered thru the PayPal portal that Neveron is now using to process ALL on line transactions.

Donations are also accepted via mail, in the form of APPROVED Money Orders, Bank Drafts and Teller Checks. Please open a Help Ticket: Subject "Mailing a Donation" to get specific information about this option.

In the past few years, people were told to avoid PayPal due to the extremely long 'processing' time required to get any donation sent using PayPal. That is no longer the case! Donations are now generally processed at a minimum of every 24 hours, and as often as every 12 hours!!

The "instant" credit card option is not currently available.

Twitter: For those of you who like to Twitter, Neveron now has a Twitter account as well. I figure it might be worth a try to get the word out to any old friends you had in game, as well as possibly expose the game to new friends. So please feel free to add Neveron to your list!

Neveron Twitter

Status: The following 'routines' have been repaired and running successfully for several days. Should any of these systems appear to not be working, then please open a Help Ticket.

Landing Craft [LC] transit, most of the Top100 statistics, Auto Battle Resolution and Training

The following systems are still not functioning either at all, properly or automated: Arenas, Simulator, Free For All, Quests, War related functions [multiple interconnected programs], Mass Decomm / Scrap, Tower Creation Que.

Mass Decomm was manually run once last week. It is running now, working on a backlog of about 2k units. This program runs thru things pretty steady and quickly, so this should not take long.

Tower Que was run manually once this morning, and is working on a backlog of about 3k units. Same as Mass Decomm, Tower programs crunch thru things pretty quickly, and will be done soon.

Arenas: OK, so they are back up and running as well as they did in recent times. The 'Arena Bug' is still there. Basically if you try to view an enrolled Mech's stat page, it will cause an Arena to crash and you will see a double kill sort of an error. After a certain amount of time your unit will remove itself from the bugged Arena and you can reenter a new arena. Please feel free to stop into #Neveron and ask for more information about this 'bug'. This bug is on the ever growing 'list'.

Free For All [FFA]: FFA appears to be working correctly again. Treasure Points [TP] were being rewarded properly, at random, for 'kills' in the FFA. Prize money however was NOT paying until yesterday. There was nearly 3 Billion NDollars in there last time I looked, and that got wiped out pretty quickly once the FFA was working again. Keep watching the updates for special FFA events in the future. Players can earn some free cash and TP!

Status: I have not verified if the Simulator or the Quest are functioning properly yet. I will get you more info on those later. The Tower program and the Mass Decomm/ Scrap program seem to be running fine at this point. Zone Resolution was improperly listed earlier as running. I will be doing some DoW testing later this week to confirm what is exactly still broken with the battle systems.

If you are noticing any issues with any program listed as fixed or working, please open a Help Ticket and provide as many details as you can about what is not working.

Logins: My apologies to the people who have properly submitted the Login Recovery emails. I have been trying to stay focused on these game wide system failures and have not been able to process many of the Login requests. I will try to get to them all completed or responded to in the next 48 hours. Thanks again for your patience! :O)

Mergers: I know that many people had wanted to do mergers in the past. I have finally found the program that processes the mergers. I have run a few test mergers and things look to be functioning as expected.

For the players that have found they are running more than the allowed 5 empires, you need to consider a merger to get back to the legal number of empires. Have all empires submit a request to your 'main' empire to merge. Then have that main empire send in a Help Ticket, subject "Merger Request". Please include a short summary of the various reasons why you currently have X empires and we can work on finding a special merger price for you. Please also check your Help Tickets for any other open tickets regarding mergers and close them.

Donations: The Donation pages where being worked on some more over the last few days. Some people experienced issues using the donation pages during this work. Please try again to submit your donation. Everything should be back to working as expected. Remember that the Donation Special ends Feb 15th. So get those donations in to get your chance at 67% extra bonus DP!

Player Made Mechs: This will be the first of many 'policy' clarifications. Player made Mechs are NOT supposed to have the option to resell them. Many players have been using this loophole to sell Mechs produced to lower level empires, and then those empires resell the Mech's and avoid the transfer caps for their level.

I will not fine every player who has ever sold a player made Mech for profit. I will however be looking very close at the empires that were the worst abusers of this loophole. Both the producer and the purchaser are responsible for this abuse in the worst cases. As a producer if you list 25 Mechs at 2 Mil per the request of an ally, then you are as guilty as them by providing the Mech's as they are for selling the Mechs.

I intend to fix this loophole to prevent future abuse. That does not however give the past abusers a free pass. Any empire that has been involved in questionable mech reselling should open a Help Ticket, Subject: Mech Reselling, and explain what circumstances may have been involved for your empire. I will be much more forgiving when considering fines to the empires that come to me, rather than I have to hunt you down scouring hours of logs.

Status: There are still several systems that are NOT functioning properly. Many of the 'war' related programs for example. Zone Reso was connected to the database and working for a few days. That oldest server however dropped its connection to the main server again over the weekend. I only realized it late on Tuesday. So we will get back at trying to create a solid server to server connection as soon as we can. Please be patient! We are dealing with some really old hardware using 2 diff eras of software, and its just not playing nice nor making it easy to get them connected properly. I do plan to replace the hardware AFTER I get things stabilized and there is enough funding to cover the costs of the replacements / upgrades.

Login Recoveries: I processed a good portion of the pending login requests since the last update. However as I was working on them is when the ISP for the game crashed for the first time, and I have not been able to get back to finish them just yet. I have not forgotten about you! Hang in there!

Time Warner / ISP: As some of you are aware from chat/ facebook/ twitter, the ISP for the servers experienced several outages this past week. The longest outage was just under 2 hours. The repeated, shorter ones were actually the more annoying ones for me. I would just sit back down and start to work again and POOF the Internet would drop again! So several phone calls, with no real answers, and TW did finally seem to get things back in order.

Donation Special: OK so after a bit of tracking some donors down, I finally held the drawing for the Donation Special. I had to first randomly assign 3 numbers to players that I had not heard back from. Then I assigned the prizes a number. From there I checked the #s selected by each donor, and here are the results!

I will be awarding that bonus DP to your same logins from the original donations. The bonus DP % is based on the amount that you donated. So for $100 x 15% = 15 Bonus DP. Total bonus handed out with this special was over 100 DP!

Thanks again to everyone that participated in the Donation Special! :O)

Purchase Pool: The pool has finally been processed. It was processed as a 'normal' pool initially, which means you received 2X DP. I will manually process the additional DP to bring your total to 3X DP when I process the Donation Special DP, hopefully before this weekend. As always, its much appreciated for the donation support that Neveron receives from its players!

Random Tidbits: During the week when I was working in the servers, I ran several programs to cycle a few items in game, as well as made an edit to all empires.

Research, Production, and Daily Income where all processed repeatedly until approx 2 weeks of real time had passed. What that means is that you accomplished 2 weeks worth of factory work in 1 night. You also received 2 weeks of Nev Income that night, as well as 2 weeks of Research. Not a huge perk, but a perk all the same. I will likely run similar 'speed ups' in the future until I get things stabilized across the game. So get your empires finances squared away so that you can get the maximum benefit from these mini time warps.

I also modified ALL empires to 100 morale, except the top 12 who were already at 100+ morale. For those top empires I simply added additional morale to their totals. Morale will naturally head back to zero, so this wont last forever. For those not sure what that means...morale has a bonus on the finance page. Depending on your morale amount, you could earn a penalty or a bonus, ranging from -25% to 100%, of the total of your Income Tax plus Commercial Tax. The left edge of your main screen shows a morale value. When that number says 100 [or higher] you are earning the MAX 100% morale bonus on those Taxes. What this means for MOST empires is that you are going to get LOTS OF FREE NCash. Exactly how much depends on how your empire is set up. For many empires that had negative morale, it means it also reduced your penalty. I figure some of this free cash might help you guys deal better with some of these delays. Feel free to go spend that on the FFA, bet on the Arenas, or just repair your empires!

Forums: There has been a lot of recent activity on the Sarna Forums and I love to see it! I make a point of reading ALL posts made there, even if not every day. As I have mentioned before there will be a Neveron hosted forum set up, and once those are in place, I will start to post many 'official' plans, intentions, and ideas that I hope to implement into Neveron. I want to hear what you, the player, has to say about all of this as well. For those of you that want your 'voice heard', this is your chance! So if you don't yet use the forums, get over to Sarna and get used to how a forum works.

I do have a meeting scheduled for Thursday to get a look at the Neveron Forums, so they could be up as soon as this weekend if everything goes well! Keep your fingers crossed! :O)

March 2011

Status: We are still trying to get the server to server connections to stay connected, and fully functional. As many of you noticed we had Zone Reso functional a second time, and it lasted quite a bit longer than the first time it was up. I will try to reboot the servers again and see if that will bring the connections back on line.

Even when the connection is working, there are still several other systems that are offline. Quest being the most obvious one, as new players come into chat asking how to get it started. Another odd occurrence that is being seen is units displaying much higher than normal BV, until you view the units info page, then it self corrects. If anyone has been able to determine the cause of this, or can replicate it, please open a Help Ticket.

Help Tickets: Speaking of Help Tickets...I again will ask everyone to review all their help tickets, on all their logins, for all their empires. I started out with over 1,000 open tickets in Jan 2011. I have been processing approximately 200 tickets every week. I have yet to get it lower than 800 tickets still in the Que. Last night I spent about 2 hours opening, reading, and then closing old and out dated tickets. This is obviously a total waste of time, and considering that I can only work on Neveron on a limited part time basis, I can't afford to waste any time.

I am in the process of reworking the Help Ticket interface, so that I can make more efficient use of my time when I'm working on Tickets. The current system only displays the 20 most recent tickets opened. I did not realize this until after several weeks of answering tickets, then never seeing those tickets again. What was happening is that a player would respond to my questions and comments, and then send back the ticket. Trouble was that you were now the 25th, or 30th, or 40th ticket in the Que, so I never saw that ticket again. GRRR!

I will be creating several new 'categories' that tickets should be filed under.

This first section will be handled by Player Admins. You as a player need to be sure not to send any vital information you want kept confidential to these categories.

This next section will be a mix of sections that you will see as ticket options, and topics that I will use to sort things for later. This section of tickets will only be processed by Game Admins.

Player Admin: In an effort to free up some of my time from the simpler tickets, I will be reinstating mattbuck as a Player Admin. He will start to work on tickets once I complete and test this reworked interface. As a PA, he will have full and unrestricted access to the Help Ticket categories I mentioned above. So again, I stress that YOU the player need to be sure what information you send to what category once this new system is in place.

PayPal Donations: As I have mentioned before, all donations are now processed thru PayPal. I rely on PP to send me a notification email that a payment has been received. It has worked pretty well so far. It did however let one recent donation slip thru the cracks. If you have sent in a donation using PP and do not receive your DP with 48 hours, contact me directly. You can leave a message for me in #DP_Pool in chat, or you can send a direct email to NeveronHelpDesk @ gmail.com [no spaces]. I normally process donations at least every 12 to 18 hours, more often if someone mentions to me they have a donation pending. The longer delays are more likely to occur when I'm at 'work' in real world over the weekends.

On the topic of PayPal, I have heard some people had recently been having issues getting the donation profile information to carry over to the PayPal site when trying to donate. I have run several tests on this and each time it has turned out as expected. I have used several various OS & browsers including Win 7 / IE 8 to make the donations, so I don't think the issue is the code on the server side. Please send in a Help Ticket, subject 'PayPal problems', if you are having issues with the donations page.

Donation Special: We will have a donation special for the month of March, and it will have trivia involved! So start taking those cans back to the redemption center so you can get some bonus DP! I'll post more details on that later this week.

Forums: I have spent a lot of time trying to find the right forum solution for us as we move forward with Neveron. Sarna has been patient with us, but I think we have overstayed our welcome there. I had planned to host the forums locally on a newer tower system that I have here, but there have been multiple 'complications' that keep delaying that option. So I have instead started to look at a hosted forum option. The price was reasonable to get it started, but I'm still looking to move it to the local servers later. That being said, the 'simple' task of hosting the forum, gets complicated when you ask questions like can this transfer later...so I'm still playing around with the various options available from the host. I have one forum software package installed already, and now I just need to play around with it more to be sure it will do everything I want / need it to do down the road. Hopefully I can get it opened to the player base soon.

Login Recovery: I currently have 40+ open recovery emails that I'm working on. I know that some of you have been waiting for a while to get old logins. I have not forgotten about you! Later today I will NOT be in chat, so that I can work specifically on getting more of these cranked out.

3X Pool / Donation Special: Same as above, later today will be 100% focused on getting logins processed, and the pending bonus DP payments.

Last thing I want to toss out here is this...it took Randy and Wayward_Son 10 years to make this 'code' we call Neveron. I am already hearing of some players that have 'quit' the game, or are grumbling because things are not moving fast enough for their taste. Please try to remember a few key points...

The game has only been running in my control for just over a month. Even using the word running is pushing it, as we have never had a solid server to server connection from day one. This issue haunted WWS for the last several years. Add to that I'm only working on Neveron part time, things will continue to move slowly. My originally stated intention was to get all the fundamentals in place during the first year, and THEN if we were ready, to start to dig into making 'big' changes later. Part of what needs to be done is pay back the funding that was used to purchase the game, before I go tinkering with things that may alter the games ability to earn revenues. Even short term drops in revenue could seriously hurt the survival of the game if not carefully planned for.

So please keep all this in mind when you start to get irritated, at the game not working perfectly over the next few weeks and months, as we makes changes and probably even break a few things along the way.

Status: It has been a while since I made the time to post an update...so I wanted to get 'something' up here and reassure you all that I'm still here, and I'm still plugging away at many things behind the scenes. We have made some progress on getting 'Zone Reso' removed from the older server, and are currently working on getting it to run on its own reliably. Once we get that routine squared away, I intend to continue to relocate any remaining programs from the older server, to the main server. There are many minor routines that are also not 'working' but are harder to identify and 'label' for the sake of an update, but most of them are all located on this older server.

I would like to take a minute here and remind everyone of a few very important points to remeber.

For starters, I am the ONLY Admin working on the game. I have already replied to, answered or fixed something like 1100 tickets. There are still currently like 900 in progress. Im sure there are probably at least another 1000 that SHOULD be open and getting worked on. Tickets are by far the most time consuming task that an Admin has. I have requested several times that ALL players go back thru ALL logins, and ALL empires to sort out what tickets still actually need attention. I have asked repeatedly that all DUPLICATE tickets be closed, and that any new information from them get added to the ORIGIANL ticket for that item. I have also asked that older and outdated tickets simply get closed. Each week, as i dig further and further into the Help Tickets, I waste 2 to 3 hours closing DUPLICATE or OUTDATED tickets, for players that have logged into their empires at some point since the sale of the game. So obviously, Im wasting my breath asking people to fix their own tickets in updates, as people are obviously either not reading them throughly, or simply choosing to ignore them. So for the 'active' players that would like to see me start actually 'working' on some 'harder' tickets, Im asking you to start beating your allies over the head with the message to "GO FIX YOUR TICKETS". Literally ask EVERY player in your faction if they have sorted out their tickets for ALL empires. Your help is much appreciated.

Secondly, I want to send out a HUGE 'Thanks!' to all the players that have been supporting the game with their generous donations. So far we have been able to 'keep the lights on' and actually buy a few 'tools' that were needed to keep us online and moving forward. However, we are far from generating enought revenue to actually pay me a salary of any sort. So what does that mean exactly? Well each week that means I have to still head out the door and go to 'work' in the real world. My typical work week consists of Thursday/ Friday/ Saturday/ Sunday. Occasionally I can drop into chat, or I can process a few easy Help Tickets, maybe even tinker with updating some web pages. Typically tho, I wont get anything complex accomplished during this time. What that means is that Monday/ Tuesday/ Wednesday is when i have the most time for everything else in my day to day routines. That means banking/ laundry/ shopping/ budget/ vehichle maintenance/ social events etc all usually happen on Mon/Tue/Wed. Yes I do actually have a life outside of Neveron, and I intend to continue to have one in the future. However, it does not take a genious to realize that there is very little time left in my week for doing all things 'Neveron'.

I have however still managed to put in an average of 50+ hours every week, since around Nov 2010, working on something Neveron related. Obviously I have not done much 'fixing' before Dec 2010, but there are many things that consume my time that are not directly related to fixing anything, in any specific empire, or any specific program in Neveron. Most things I do will never actually be 'visable' in the game, but be assured that they are just as important as fixing any bug.

Third and final point to make is that while remembering points 1 and 2, I now need to coordinate my schedule with the 'coder' schedule. Randy has actually been very helpful in that respect. He knows the game, and he knows the software that its written in, and I have no concerns about him accessing the database etc. That being said, we try to get together for 5 to 10 hours each week. Randy uses the remote login and we work on the 'code'. Some weeks are more, some weeks are less. Most of February was a 'less' month. Wayward_Son has also been helpful, mostly with information relays using email and a few remote logins to try to look things over.

Aside from actual 'code' work, there is much time and energy spent on trying to consider hardware and software upgrade options. Keeping the game running includes maintaining the code, security, compatability, and expansion.

So please keep all this in mind the next time you feel like spouting off about how it seems nothing is getting fixed in the game. We are all very aware of how real life prevented Wayward_Son from maintaing Neveron in 2009 and 2010. We have an active Admin/ Owner in 2011. Things are being worked on. Donations get processed in a timely manner. Tickets are getting answered. Hardware and software is being worked on. We all complained we just wanted a few hours a week from Wayward_Son and we would be content. Well your getting far more than a few hours every week since the start of 2011, but that still will not produce immediate, or even fast paced, visable results. So if that is unacceptable to you as a player, then it's time for you to look for a new hobby, because thats the best we are gonna get for a long while. For those of you that have expressed your support and patience, I thank you and look forward to many years of gaming fun with all of you! :o)

Donations: There are a few issues here that I need to address

First, for those of you who have NOT yet received your full 3X Pool DP, please contact me at NeveronHelpDesk @ gmail.com [no spaces], or in chat if you can catch me active. I realized AFTER the pool was processed that I could not credit the 'extra' DP the using the Admin Donation tool I have. At that point it became a rather involved process of trying to back track and cross referance a lot of database tables and so forth. I devised a much easier and faster way to get the bonus DP to each of you, and I will explain that to you in our email. I have also been giving each player additional bonus DP on top of the 3X bonus for the added delays as I fumble my way around inside the servers.

Second, for those who where entered in the Februray Special, see above. In your cases, I also need to speak to each of you, either in email, or in chat, again if you can catch me active.

I have paid out a bit over 50% to each group the DP owed, so there is plenty of DP out there to be bought, sold or killed in wars!

April 2011

I am still trying to find some qualified people for some tasks, and schedule times with the ones I have found so far.

There has been however a handful of players that are making comments about 'broken promises' and 'inactive admins' and so on...

Let me be clear...I am working on Neveron nearly 40 hours a week, in some form or another. Ideally several updates a week would be useful if there was actually something to 'update' the player base.

Most of the stuff that needs the most attention atm is simply not worth mentioning in updates in any greater detail that I already have, let alone repeatedly saying it over and over ever few days

If this is not good enough for you as a player, then its time that you go find a new hobby.

A few weeks ago I was attempting to 'update' my personal access to 'admin' features, including Help Ticket replies that actually said 'ShadowMasterCM' [rather than Wayward_Son or Randy]. While working on that, something got fubar'd and it took out the interface to process donations, mergers and answer Help Tickets. I have since sorted the Help Tickets, but for the time being the donations and mergers are still down. Once I get those working again, I'll be sure to process any pending items.

If you have sent in a donation, and it has never been processed, please open a help ticket. I see 5 to 10 donations every week that appear in the pending donations interface, yet never receive any funds for them.

For those of you having trouble using the PayPal interface from the Donation page...it is possible that you may need to set PayPal as a 'trusted' site in order for the donation profile info to carry over to the PayPal page.

If you are still having trouble after trying this please open a help ticket so that we can work on solving this

Till next time...

Scheduled Maintenance: Last night Neveron was successfully taken offline for some routine maintenance. The main goal was an attempt to recover some desperately needed hard drive space from the main database server. After nearly 5 hours, the process has provided to produce results even better than expected!

Donations: Donation processing is FINALLY working again. All pending donations have been processed. If there are any donations that may have been missed and are still pending, please open a help ticket. Be sure to read the notes from 4/26/11 on donations as well for more details

Mergers: Mergers can now also be processed again. Anyone who wants a merger processed, please submit them and I will process them asap. Mergers normally should only take 12 to 24h max to get processed once properly submitted to the game for processing. Please check for a Help Ticket from me if your merger is still pending after 24h, as I may have to confirm something with you about the merger.

Training: I will attempt to revive the existing training program later this week. In an effort to free up HD space, I removed several independent programs. Apparently training relied on one of those programs, and it was later that day that I realized that training was still trying to 'run' but was in fact only crashing after starting. All training that you may have submitted is still stored in the Training Check Que, and will be processed once Training is running again. There are currently 50k+ Checks in the Que. So once training is up, it will take a while to actually clear out that backlog. Remember, training runs every 3 minutes, and only processes 1K checks per cycle.

Misc 'Prom' season is here boys and girls, so that means my work schedule will get significantly more demanding for the next month or so. I will be gone to work for about 15 hours today, as well as another 20+ hour day Saturday into Sunday. I will try to check on the game remotely and make sure that everything is still running properly after this downtime. However, don't panic if things get fubar and I don't respond immediately. Worst case is I cant fix whatever until sometime Monday. I don't expect any issues and everything looks good so far! :O)

May 2011

Status: Thats the big news of this update. The server connections that I have been trying to deal with seem to have finally been brought under control. Unfortunately, it has also created a few new issues, some with programs that where running fairly well before. GRRR

So, as I have requested on the login page, I will also ask again here, please poke and prod every nook and cranny of Neveron over the next few weeks and open a Help Ticket for any new issues that you may notice. Some items are going to be lower priority than others, but eventually I will want to look at them all. So please open a separate ticket for each matter, preferably from your main empire, unless the trouble is only in one empire, then please send the ticket from that specific empire.

The systems that are NOW giving me some issues include Automatic Battle Resolution [ABR], Tower Construction Que, Mass Decomm/ Scrap, Arenas, and Zone Reso.

Automatic Battle Resolution [ABR] now runs on again / off again at will, but it seems easy enough to clear out and restart. However it's a hassle to the players waiting for them to process if they are in a battle of some sort. I plan to keep those as the focus over the next few weeks, and get them to run stable on their own.

Towers program was by far the most stable program running, until I got the server connection sorted. That program ran non stop 24/7 cranking out the thousands of towers that you guys make every week. It still runs, but it also wont refresh on its own. Several times a day now, I sit and manually click F5 to refresh that program so that it will check to see if it should build a tower.

Fortunately, I can see the Tower Build Que right there on that page, so I KNOW that there are towers ready to build, based on NTime. So far, I have manually 'created' about 10k towers...and new ones are added every day...oh joy!

/me mumbles 'I love my job, I Love my Job, I LOVE my JOB...'

Mass Decomm still runs, it just no longer seem to 'refresh' and keep current. It simply runs the current Que and then stops. I have to kick start this again several times a day.

Arenas however seem to have crashed...but now the Simulator is working for the first time in forever. No idea whats going on there yet, but this will be one of the first things we will look at next time we are in there poking at code. So hang in there Duelers, I'm working on getting it back up ASAP! :O)

Quests, unfortunately, still seem to be broken. I really want to get those working for all you NEW player out there that have joined us recently. Please stop into chat and say hello next time you are logged in! :O)

Free For All [FFA] This was working properly until the server connection was repaired. It still runs, and you still have a chance to earn free Treasure Points [TP] for kills, but apparently its not paying out the prize money properly. Hopefully that is an easy fix or it self corrects!

Zone Reso, fortunately, was already moved to the main server, and still has the original issue of crashing from time to time. That will also be worked on until it runs steady on its own, and doesn't require random restarts. Once the server connection was reestablished, I tried to run the original Zone Reso programs, if for nothing more to see if they did things differently. There are several different versions of many programs scattered through out the servers, and Zone Reso was no exception. I think I came across at least 3 variations of Zone Reso, and many, many copies of it in various places.

The one copy that seemed to run, and stayed running, had the unfortunate issue of opening a new browser window for every zone that it tried to process. Since this was on the oldest, slowest server, with the smallest amount of resources avail on it...that didn't work out so well. You can only open so many browsers before your system will choke...as did that server while I was at work...it ran out of RAM. Go figure!

So as I said, fortunately Zone Reso was already moved, and other than the occasional crash, it still runs fine

Artificial Intelligence [AI] is now running! That was one of the benefits of this recent server connection success. There are actually 4 AI programs that I now need to learn more about, so that I can keep them running properly. Please be sure to ticket any odd things about AI that you may notice.

Training, was also moved to the main server, but then it became disabled when some programs where removed from the HDs to free up space. Fortunately, the ORIGINAL training program came back on-line when the server connection was reestablished...and it seems to process things differently as far as taking chunks of units loaded into the Que and how quickly it processes them. There was just over 86k units loaded into the Que when I restarted the original training program. Less than an hour later it had processed them all!

Many of the smaller programs are also running now:

Market Averages are finally current, and you should be able to sell a Gecko for less then $1,050,000 finally!

I also expect that any market items that have been listed beyond the expiration date will also get removed, and your empire charged the appropriate fees. You will see a message similar to this: "NASI has removed items from the vehicle market that were listed for longer than 1 NYear without selling. A 5% fee of $14,850,000 has been subtracted from your account and the items are back in your inventory."

Battle Value [BV] should also now be updating on its own, as well as many of the random bits of data on your empire.

Donations: We did NOT run the March Special as I had hoped, due to the many other random issues that crept up during March and April. I still have a lot on my plate, especially with Prom Season being here, but I will attempt to run another donation special soon.

Additional Funds on the Donation page is in the process of being increased from $20M / DP to $50M / DP. I had completed all the needed changes and thought it was all set only to realize it was in fact still paying only $20M. Please submit a ticket if you have used this feature recently and only received the lesser amount.

DP Pool: For those of you with more 'immediate' needs for DP, there is currently a Donation Points [DP] Pool open, being run by Gunner. Gunner has run many successful DP Pools over the years, and I'm sure will continue to do so in the future. Please contact Gunner in chat for more information about his specific pool terms.

When I ran DP Pools as a player, I actually created a chat channel #DP_Pool. Please feel free to stop in there if you have any Pool related questions. I also created a forum topic explaining what exactly a DP Pool is. Most of that information is still relevant to ANY DP Pool, so please feel free to check out that info.

Help Tickets: I have been plodding away at some more help tickets, as well as trying to get more work done on the Help Ticket interface so that I can bring mattbuck on board to assist with ticket replies.

Scheduled Maintenance: There will be periodic down times over the next few weeks as various things are worked on. I will usually post a notice on the login page a few hours before I will take the site down. If it will be an extended outage, I will also post status updates in #Neveron topic, on Neveron's Twitter Page, Sarna and Neveron forums, as well as my personal facebook status.

I will wrap up this update for now, even tho I'm sure I forgot to mention something I wanted to...till next time! :O)

Quests: I have made some progress on the Quest. On May 12th, I was poking around in some new folders and decided to see what would run and what would not. Apparently the Quest was one that decided to run. I reviewed the logs from that program, and it deleted well 20,000 'old' Quests, presumably ones that were 'in progress' and never got cleared and reset. So if you u have been waiting to try the Quest out, now is your chance! :O)

It is not clear if its running 100% correct yet, but it is at least running now. I will continue to work on getting it to run more stable as well over the next few weeks.

Even when the Quest works properly, there are a few spots where it can get confusing and it might 'look' like its not working. I will correct those issues later on, but for now please stop into chat if you are doing the Quest for the first time and ask for some help. You should be able to earn an extra $5,000,000 NCash, a chance at some free salvaged parts, as well as the research item 25 CF for buildings.

Forums: I would also like to hear from the player base, about some new ideas that you would like to see incorporated into NEW Quests. You can start a new topic, subject 'Quest #2', 'Quest #3' and 'Quest #4' and so on at the Sarna Forums, and then others can reply to those comments.

Arenas: These are still being worked on. Will post again once I have something new on them.

Resources: We have given out a bunch on FREE Basic Metal [BM] Mines to those who ventured into chat during the last few weeks. The offer still stands if you are just hearing about this for the first time. We are also now starting a SECOND round of mine give aways. For those of you that want another free BM mine, please stop into chat and just ask! Arden, Maghetti, mattbuck, redneck and buc` now have access to the free mines list, and can give you your mine if ShadowMasterCM/ NoobieDoobieDoo is not available.

Please remember that ALL players are eligible for a free mine, and the mine can be used in any empire you want. You can also try to sell the coordinates to the mine to a producer that would put it to use, in exchange for NCash or discounted Veh's or Mech's

Empire Deletion: An empire on Noob Isle was deleted for an inappropriate name. This will be the one and only warning to the player base that improper naming of empires or units can result in fines or deletions. For those players that like to create 'dummy' accounts, thinking they are protecting their main empires...THINK AGAIN! There are many ways to tie your main and your fake empires together, including your IP, which is logged every time you enter the site. So don't come crying when you find your stuff missing.

Keep in mind ALL parts of Neveron must follow the 'G" rated rule, including login names, passwords, empire names, emperor names, unit names, zone names and so on. This means the most politically correct, non confrontational, act like your grandmother is sitting next to you in church kinda G rating. To simplify that, if your are not sure it fits that rule, then don't do it, as its likely gonna get you fined.

Current Server Time: A point that apparently needs to be clarified...ALL times mentioned [updates or main login page] are in 'Current Server Time'. The servers are now located in Upstate New York, or the 'Eastern' time zone. This time zone does in fact recognize Daylight Saving Time as well. The servers are set to automatically update for the DST changes.

Change Time Zone: I have mentioned this before, but I'll go over this again. You can set your game login to reflect all real world times in YOUR LOCAL TIME. To check [or adjust] your local time, click Empire Tab/ settings and locate 'Change Time Zone". Select the option that reflects your time zone difference from Eastern, and simply click 'Change Time'. Then verify that your local time matches 'Your Adjusted Time'. This adjustment must be made in EVERY login that you use. One key place that this will help in game play, is looking at Cease Fire times, either yours or the enemies.

Research Acceleration: Many of you have noticed that Research was processing at an accelerated rate well above normal. Wayward_Son had apparently set up a 3 stage acceleration process, presumably to make up for some lost time during a past outage. It is not clear when these where turned on, but they have been running during all of 2011. Now that we have made some progress with the server connections, and the normal daily updates seem to be running, I will begin to bring research back into its normal cycle. I have just disabled 1 of the 3 accelerators. I do NOT have a planned point when I will disable the next one, but they will be going back to normal eventually.

Daily Update Routine: The Daily Updates used to run at 5AM server time. There have been several more daily updates that have been added to all the servers since relocating to NY. The multiple updates start around 4AM and can run until as late as 8AM. I have tried to spread these updates out to reduce the impact they will have on game play. I will continue to modify these updates to find the best balance of updates vs performance.

Additional Funds: The 'Additional Funds' option on the Donation Page has been updated from $20M to $50M per Donation Point [DP]. These Additional Funds are exempt from the normal transfer caps based on an empires level. There was some trouble getting that change to properly update for the past few weeks, and some people actually received the original $20M. I will be going back thru the donation logs and correcting all these transactions over the next few weeks.

Empire Deletion: I have started to purge the databases of some of the more vulgar items, specifically the names of things. After finally taking a closer look at the database tables, and what sort of information was contained in them, I realized the problem was far worse than I had ever imagined. This is not simply a matter of over vealous censorship. This is not about making Neveron 'kid proof'. This is about establishing a decent morale environment for people from all walks of life, from countries all around the world, to enjoy a simple game.

Some players have expressed concern over this project not being the best use of my limited time to work on Neveron. Others have stated that by doing this project, rather than fix what they felt was more important, I am driving the player base away. This is how I see it. When a player, new or old, enters the game, and they are exposed to this vulgarity, that can pop up unexpectedly anywhere, and they stop coming to play the game...then that is a MAJOR concern for Neverons future. I have been approached numerous times in the past about exactly this sort of thing when I was a Player Admin. I now can finally do something to actually clean things up. On a personal note, every time that I sit down to 'work' on Neveron, I am exposed to all this excess vulgarity, and quite frankly, I'm tired of seeing it.

I spent the entire day yesterday creating SQL queries, and searching database tables, for the random tidbits that show up in the game as inappropriate names. These names appear on many items including Soldiers, Units, Unit Formations, Zones, Empires, NMail and even Logins and Passwords.

I started my 'purge' yesterday with seeking out more inappropriate named empires. I started with the most basic queries, covering the most common profanities. As the queries flagged more and more items, I would discover even more items that I should be filtering for. By the end of the day, I was running over 60 queries against each db table.

As I ran each query, it flagged more and more empires. I then pulled the associated login information with each empire, recorded it, and then proceeded to delete said empires. These empire names generally contained profanity, direct insults, racial slurs, inappropriate slang terms and so on. The IPs, emails and the specific offenses have all been recorded for future follow up. All but one of these deleted empires where L0 and usually in the [N00b] faction.

Consider this the FINAL warning, about player conduct, that comes with out severe fines and or penalties. Do NOT think you can simply create a new empire, act irresponsibly with said empire, then dispose of it and suffer no consequences. As soon as you log into the game, information is provided to the servers by your computer and its software. With minimal effort, even a Noob like me can track you back to your primary empires. So the use of 'disposable' empires is over, and any action that you take with such an empire WILL come back to you and your primary empires. The disposable empire will simply be deleted and then your PRIMARY empires will face the fines and punishments. I consider this deceptive action of using a disposable empire to do your dirty work, as bad, if not worse, than the dirty work itself. Expect the fines and penalties to reflect that as well.

After cleansing the empire names table, I moved on to the unit names table. I found far to many examples of inappropriately named units in far to many empires. Creating units named to insult your enemy is unacceptable and I consider that dishonorable conduct at best. Naming units to direct insults at Admins, past or present, is also unacceptable. General vulgar and lewd naming is also unacceptable. Inappropriate slang terms, use of 1337 or scripting to 'hide' inappropriate names is also unacceptable. Again, the more deceptive you are about your inappropriate naming, and the more effort you put into trying to hide it, the harsher the fines and penalties are going to be against your empires. This time I merely renamed the units.

Over the years that I was a Moderator on Sarna Forums, I would often run into postings that had used foul language of some sort, but the post still generally had some valid content to add to the thread topic. So rather than simply delete such replies, I started a practice on removing the 'F Bomb' and inserting the a phrase like "I wear pink panties".

When I got to filtering the unit names, I didn't think it was proper to simply delete units, no matter how vulgar the names where. I decided that renaming them to "I wear pink panties" was all that would happen THIS time. In the future, units will likely be deleted for the worst offenders. There will be NO refunds for such deletions, even in the case of a STR Mech that was inappropriately named.

So after manually reviewing and deleting several hundred empires...and then manually reviewing and editing several hundred more unit names, I moved on to the next task...Zone names. I ran the same 60+ filters and the results that it pulled numbered in the thousands. I had already spent nearly 12 hours to get to this point. Now I locate thousands more inappropriate zone names? After reviewing the list, I realized that all these zones where contained in only 80 empires. As most of the empires deleted to this point had been L0 disposable empires, I incorrectly assumed that this list was mostly composed of many more disposable empires. I decided at this point that I would not be manually editing these zones. I would simply edit the zones by empire, meaning that all of its zones would be changed. I proceeded to change all zones in those 80 empires to 'I wear pink panties'. I clicked on the button to run the update, and the SQL engine churned and churned for several minutes.

Finally it stopped churning away...(543472 row(s) affected) Well that was far more than I expected from a bunch of disposable empires...

At this point I was very unhappy with the number of active empires that I had already manually edited their unit names. I figured for the few 'real' empires that got caught up in this zone renaming, could deal with renaming a few of their 'key' cities. I considered this are part of the 'punishment' for having this crap in their empires nearly 5 months into new ownership and proof of Admin activity. I also wanted to make this cleansing very public, and very noticed by all players so that the word would get out, that this sort of behavior will no longer be tolerated. I accomplished that, and then some.

I found out over the next few hours, that several of the empires in that list of 80, contained some of the games largest empires. I heard from several players who had meticulously named many of the cities in their empires, using some sort of system or theme. Many many hours of hard work had been lost do to this renaming of zones by empire.

Let me be clear on one thing. It was NOT my intention to screw over any such empire or player. I figured I would hit some of the more reckless players with this change. I am looking into other options that I may be able to restore specific empires to the previous zone names. IF I am able to accomplish that, then I expect the owners of said empires to MAKE the time to hunt down and manually edit the zones that got them flagged in the first place.

As a follow up to this little 'wake up call', I planned to state here in the updates, that any of the 80 empires affected by this zone renaming, could now open a Help Ticket, provide me with a 'generic' word or phrase, and I will rename all of your zones. At that point you can then go back and rename any 'key' cities or zones to whatever you like. For those of you with more extensive naming schemes, if you used 'flagged' zones, your current flag listing should provide the old data. I suggest you copy / paste that info to notepad and use it as a reference. Players that name their defensive units to the city names for organizational purposes, can simply look at the units in said city for renaming as well.

Repair Bays [RB] can be located from the Repair Tab/ Facilities...click on any RB zone, then click Finance Tab/ Income/ (rename city) to rename said RB zones. Technology Center [TC] zones can be renamed in a similar fashion, by clicking the Research tab/ Tech Complexes/ Switch Zones, changing to every zone that contains a TC, then going to the Finance tab as mentioned for RBs. Larger buildable zones / cities and so forth can be found using the Land/Build tab and the various options located on that page. If you are unsure how to locate your cities, or need more help with these instructions, please come to chat and we will be happy to help you sort things out.

For the empires that have spent numerous hours on naming your cities, that where impacted by this zone renaming, please send a Help Ticket explaining that you would like to be considered for the reversal of naming, IF such a thing can be accomplished. Id like to create that list now, so that IF i can figure out a way to reverse them, I can knock them all out at one time. As of right now, I have Kituwhaga, Therosa & Aotearoa on the list for reversal requests.

Over the next few days I will continue to purge the database of this vulgarity. The next items on the list include Soldiers, Unit Formations [Lance/Comp/Batt], Promo Codes, Logins, Passwords, Emails [associated with your logins], Faction Names, Faction Information, Battle Chat [logs], Help Tickets and of course ALL public NMail. [N00b] faction mail is considered public and shall be regulated very strictly in the future. I will be more tolerant of NMail that is kept inside private faction mail, but I would prefer even that kept somewhat civil.

If your login or password contain inappropriate words, I suggest you get them changed ASAP. Create a new login if you have to and transfer your empires over to the new login. Passwords you simply can change. Promo Codes can easily be changed as well. If you purchased an empire with a login / password / promo code that is inappropriate, then its up to you as the active user to get it fixed asap. I suggest that every one take a very close look at all these aspects about any empire that you care about. I only plan to do this sort of cleansing once a month or maybe two. However, the next time I do this, I will be doing a lot more than renaming things about the color of underwear you wear.

Sadly, even running 60+ filters, this has barely scratched the surface of the inappropiate naming that goes on. Once this purging is complete, I will rely heavily on the active player base to help monitor things. Should you come across something that might violate the "G" rating spirit of the game, then please open a Help Ticket and provide me with details. Not everything reported will get changed or deleted, but we as a community can accomplish more working together to weed out the scum bags that infest our game.

Illegal Zones: I will also be purging ALL zones that empires have obtained in 'illegal' areas. Most of these zones should not have been able to be claimed in the first place. Since they were acquired using a loophole in the code, there will be no fines attached to ownership THIS time. All future loopholes allowing you to claim illegal zones should be immediately reported via a Help Ticket so that the hole can be closed, not exploited by a player. I will be removing ownership of all such zones. I am renaming all the zones I consider illegal 'DMZ Zone'. Please be sure to search your empires for any such zones, and remove ALL items of value from those zones IMMEDIATELY. This will be the only warning about this and no refunds of any sort will be granted to replace lost items stored in these zones.

An illegal zone is one that is claimed in an area of the game that is NOT where normal empires function. Examples of this are zones in or near the Quest zones, random zones outside of the 'border' for the mainland, zones on Noob Isle when your empire is on the mainland, water zones any where outside of the normal mainland area and so on. Should you own a zone like this, or your not sure if one of your zones is illegal, send in a help ticket to confirm it.

June 2011

Additional Funds: All players that have used this donation option since Jan 2011 have been given the new increased amount of $50M per DP spent. The help tickets sent in by you have been updated and closed. For empires that did not yet have Help Tickets, they where created from the login that used the DP, and the ticket information was updated and closed as well.

Status: Many of the new issues that appeared after the server connections where fixed are still being worked on. There is not currently an eta on when these system will be working correctly. Arena/ Simulator/ FFA/ Tower Creation/ ABR routines are some of the most notable programs that are having issues

Help Tickets: Finally had some time to process some additional tickets as well. I will try to spend a few more hours this week going through them, and have actually started to 'fix' some of the easier tickets. If you know of any empires that have zones on both Noob Isle and the mainland, please send a Help Ticket with the empire name, ID#, and a map coordinate in question so that I can try to clear all the old errors for this issue while I'm working on it

Donation Goal: The oldest and slowest of the existing servers has caused several issues including outages in 2011. This is the 'noisy' server mentioned in "End of an Era: Neveron, Inc." and it really is working on 'borrowed time' at this point.

I would like to set a goal of raising $7,500 USD on or before 07/31/2011. For those of you who were considering to make a donation, now is a great time to do so. Get the word about this promotion out to your friends and allies ASAP! Go turn in those bottle returns and dig the change out of the couch cushions...this is the promo you have been waiting for! :O)

All donations sent in from 6/01/2011* until 7/31/2011 will be counted toward this goal

*The only exception to this will be "DP Pools", including the recently completed one as that has already received the 2X bonus DP. As with any promotions that Neveron will run, only one promotion per donation is allowed.

Should we achieve this goal, then all donors will be credited with special bonus package.

Status: Over the next few weeks there will be several maintenance related items worked on. The servers may lag, or go offline momentarily, or for several hours at a time. I will be sure to post the latest status for all of this in the #Neveron topic, so if you are experiencing issues, please check there first.

This process actually began about 24h ago, and was the cause of the on and off status of the game at that point. When I was done for the moment, I set everything back up, and went on to deal with things other than Neveron. Less than an hour later, that oldest server decided to crash again. So thats 4 crashes in 4 weeks...tick tock, tick tock...remember I said we are on borrowed time with that server! Please check out the details on the bonus package for all donations between now and the end of July. Neveron really needs your help right now!

PayPal Issues: For those of you trying to use the Neveron link to the PayPal portal...you need to change PayPal as a 'trusted' site when you have Neveron set as a trusted site. IE does not like to pass data from a trusted site, to a non-trusted site, and so it will dump all your Donation Profile data during a donation once you click the link to get to the PayPal site. PayPal accounts are free to sign up for, and really offer a great way to make online payments. You can link them to your personal bank account, and then simply transfer funds from that bank account to your PayPal account. This porcess removes the need for you to ever list your credit card data on any website that accepts PayPal. You can usually set up a simple account at your regular bank if you have concerns linking your primary account at your bank. Just a few easy steps and you can interact on the internet with relative ease and little to no security concerns!

Logins & Passwords: During the recent 'clean up' process, it was realized that Neveron staff has complete and full access to ALL aspects of your empires, including your logins and passwords. Some people incorrectly assumed that the passwords where encrypted and could not be read by Neveron staff. So at the risk of soundling like a broken record, please be smart about controlling your login and passwords. Do NOT use the same password for Neveron that you use to access otherwise valuable or sensative information and accounts elsewhere in the real world!

July 2011

Status: Still working on sorting out some internal conflicts with various Neveron code, software and hardware. Mostly behind the scenes sort of work so its difficult to see anything from the player interface, except that things are actually still working. As mentioned in the last update there will be various short term outages and downtimes as we continue to modify multiple items

Donation Goal: So far things are going as well as I had expected. Keep those donations coming, dig a little deeper into your spending funds, ask the wife for an advance on your allowance, collect alluminum cans for recycle from the neighbors if you have to! We are all putting in that extra effort to make sure we can get this oldest server replaced before it actually dies on us. Please check the update from June for all the details on the bonus package offered to ALL donors from June and July 2011 IF we hit the target goal of $7500. Tho there is no official amount posted anywhere on the progress, I will say that we can still make the target, on time, if donations keep up at the pace we had for June 2011

There are however various 'concerns' I'm hearing about via the rumor mill. For instance, there has been some misinterpretation about what I said, or worse 'implied' in previous updates and in various conversations [ie: chat]. Let me try to clear a few of them up now. The majority of the hardware that Neveron is currently using is in FACT 10+ years old. Some of it is in FACT commercial, or 'enterprise' class hardware, so it is designed better to run in a 24/7 environment. Some of the hardware is NOT enterprise class. I had hoped to start replacing the various hardware starting in 2012. Upon closer inspection of the various hardware, and monitoring its activity and so forth, I have decided that we need to start replacing hardware immediately. I want to be PROACTIVE about the hardware upgrades, rather than REACTIVE and trying to deal with additional headaches like lost data and bits of programs and code. The oldest server is also causing some of our issues, as it is simply using older versions of pretty much everything, which causes conflicts with the remainder of the Neveron LAN among other things. That oldest server is also the server that when it 'crashes' it takes out maps, and you see that 'database does not exist' errors. So YES the hardware needs to be replaced, and should actually have been replaced 2 or 3 years ago. The reason I'm stressing the importance of this fund raiser is that if the game should 'crash' and go offline, how well do you think donations are going to go at that point? It would be a shame to see Neveron die at this point after all the work put into it to save it!

There is some concern considering this specific information, that Neveron 'won't be around' and so a donation is a 'waste of money'. All I can say is that is a bunch of nonsense. The only reason Neveron is going to 'go away' is if you actually stop donating! I have personally been 'donating' my time, with an average of 40 hours every week, since Nov 2010, working on Neveron or related items, with ZERO compensation. So you keep those donations coming and Neveron will not only stick around, but we will also help it grow and become a great game again!

One additional concern is the lack of progress displayed. Most of the people that seem to be concerned about this the most are also the ones that have told me 'let me know when we get close, and I'll send in a donation for $X'. This is typical behavior from many players when particpating in "DP Pools" as well. The entire point of the 'bonus package' was to give players an extra incentive to send in donations NOW rather than later, including DP Pools. When you use a DP Pool, you must also pay the transaction fees to send the funds to the organizer. Donations sent directly to Neveron cost the player ZERO fees, Neveron takes the loss and gives you full credit for your donation. You also get your DP 'immediately', as compared to the 'wait' period typical with DP Pools, which can be a few weeks, or a few months while the $1k limit is collected. So I will say what I used to say to players considering joining the DP Pools I used to run...IF you have money that you can afford to donate, THEN DONATE IT. Sitting on your donation and waiting for some irrelivant prerequisist is simply a waste of time. I will not give any further information about how close we are to the goal until after July 31st. So if you want to support Neveron, and help fund us purchase modern hardware, then please send in your donations now. Remember only donations [except DP Pools] sent between June 1st and July 31st will be eligibal for the bonus package.

Donation Goal: Less than 2 weeks to go till we reach our goal deadline. Be sure to help spread the word to all your allies that are considering making a donation, and tell them to get it in before July 31st! Keep those donations coming and some lucky players will be faced with the tough decision of how to allocate their free 100t unit prize

Status: Trying to schedule some time next week to do more work on Arenas, Free For All and a few other systems that started acting up after the server connection issues were addressed. Still trying to sort out exactly what the root cause is, but hopefully we can get it all sorted soon enough

Donation Goal: Today is the final day to donate and be included in the current promotion bonus. The deadline is midnight July 31st [server time], and this will not be extended! Please make sure you get the word out to any allies that you think may be interested in this promotion.

If you need help with completing your donation, please join chat and we will be happy to assist you. Remember that in order for Neveron to send your donation profile information to PayPal, BOTH sites must be marked as trusted in your Internet Explorer settings

August 2011

Congrats to the Neveron player base!

Donation Goal: The deadline has passed, and the results are in, the players of Neveron have indeed met the intended goal. What does that mean to those who donated? It means the players that donated during June and July have earned the special bonus package. Over the next several days I will begin the process of adjusting all DP to the 2X totals. The next step will be to award the morale boost bonus. The final step will be to hold the drawing for the 100t prizes. I will post another update, with more details about the drawing , when I get closer to the actual date of the drawing.

Chet NCash Bonus: For those wondering if, how and when you will be paid out the NCash bonus that Chet offered on the forums...that NCash will be processed with the other bonus items. Chet does not have access to the needed information to porcess it, so please don't ask him to send you the NCash. Just need to sit tight and be patient for a bit while everything is processed. Thanks :O)

Status: I am hoping to set up some time this week to do some more work on the old issues relating to the Arenas, FFA and several other minor issues that have been running with temporary fixes. I know that the Arenas are a big part of Neveron for some players, and just wanted to let you know Arenas have not been forgotten!

Just checking in...

Apologies to everyone for the extended delays on processing the fundraiser bonus package. My responsibilities outside of Neveron have kept me VERY busy for all of July, and now for most of August. It looks like things should settle down for me again by the end of August, and I can get back to working a few extra hours each week on Neveron. So hang in there if you are waiting for the bonus items, they HAVE NOT been forgotten! :O)

Status: I was NOT able to schedule any time to get more work completed on the Areana/ FFA Prize Money related issues. I will work on this again when I get back to having some more time for Neveron as mentioned above. I know there are several of you veteran players that are really missing the Arenas and I am trying to get them back up and running !

Status: Our favorite little server is suffering from a serious hardware malfunction atm, and when it starts to throw a fit, it takes out map functionality. Do NOT start any new battles / DoWs / Raids until I give an all clear here in updates. The server could crash at any time with zero notice! This will likely be an issue for at least the next 24h while I work on replacing things.

Status: OK boys and girls! Looks like we have things back under control, for now!! ;O) A defective stick of RAM was located and removed from the terrain server, and a smaller capacity stick was taken from local stock and used to replace the defective one. What that means is that the total RAM that server works with was reduced, but not by much. When your working with a total of only 2GB to start with, every little bit counts. So I will give the all clear for battles to resume.

Maintenance: As mentioned on the login page, there will be ongoing random 'outages' as hardware and software is installed and updated to the Neveron LAN. I have been trying to perform these tasks at off peak times, reducing the hassle for the players, but being an international game, that is very difficult to do. So please be patient if the game goes offline from time to time. To stay current with whether an outage is a 'plaplanned maint' sort of thing, of some other sort of weather related utility issue and so on, please join Neveron on facebook or twitter. There are links on the login page for both of these items. Even if the electricity or the ISP gets knocked out here locally, I can still send out an update to both those pages via my old fashioned cell phone! So stay informed and get yourself set up on facebook and twitter today!

Donation Goal: Again the processing of the bonus items has been delayed! I apologize to every one for dragging this out so long, but I assure you I'm working on it as time allows. Obviously when this crashed server issue popped up, that becomes top priority, even over paying out bonus items like this. As a thank you to the players waiting on these bonus items, for not beating me up in chat every day about it, I'm going to toss in a few extra prizes into that final 100t drawing bonus! Again, thanks to everyone for their patience while I get my poop in a group. :O)

Player Conduct: I have covered this issue before, and for the most part the general player base has greatly improved its conduct, in all aspects of the game [chat/NMail/BattleChat/etc]. However there are also the handful of players that like to 'rule-surf', or just plain disregard any previous warnings. So let THIS be the first real show of force, that I am dead serious about player conduct.

A nuclear blast has been detected in zone 56, 474 of the empire Archon Epsilon Delta!

Recent public mail postings from Archon Epsilon Delta, while clearly role playing [ which I want to encourage more of ], the attempts at witty banter fell short of the "G" rated environment. This is by no means the worst violation, and I am aware that there are others that have violated the rules of conduct. This is simply the first step in the ongoing process...

Future nukes will be dropped on real cities, and real units will be damaged.

FYI: Don't think you can slink off and log into a 'disposable' empire, do your dirty deeds, and then return to Neveron like nothing happened. Every time you log into Neveron, your IP is recorded along with various other information that your browsers share with the Neveron LAN. It can be a very time consuming process to properly identify a player, but I will do what is needed. The further you cross the line, the more severe penalties your empire(s) will face, including nuking your top cities!

Donation Goal: Still working on the bonus items due to the players that donated during the hardware fund raiser. I have NOT forgotten about you, but real life schedule has been extremely busy all spring and summer and its not looking much better for fall as that approaches! The little bit of time Ive had recently for Neveron has been spent dealing with the server and hardware issues mentioned above, and many others that I have not discussed publically

Recognition: Special thanks to Bassy for all her random bits of help through out the summer months when I was on the road. She has been manually updating towers, rebooting hardware when needed, and has even been processing PayPal donations! Pretty soon she will be learning how to tweak some code here and there...better watch out!

September 2011

Status: Sadly there has not been much progress made on the major items discussed in previous updates [Arenas, FreeForAll Prize Money, etc] over the last few weeks. There have been numerous smaller behind the scenes items that have been accomplished, so its not been a total wash by any means. Lots of various things pushing us in the general direction of forward, that eventually will help Neeron gain some momentum in the future. Those items still remain at the top of the 'to do' list, but there is no eta at present.

Donation Goal: As some of you may have heard, Neveron ran into two additional 'snags' when the manual processing of the Fundraiser bonus items was started. First item was that previous practice for issuing DP for bonus or bug ticket fixes, where listed the same way as actual donations, making them appear as if they where additional revenues. Additional revenues = more tax liability, for revenue that was never actually earned. This obviously presents a major hurdle that must be fixed before moving forward. That means creating an entirely new Admin tool for processing that sort of DP related items. Issue number 2 was that to enter a lot of this type of DP, manual editing of the database tables was a normal practice. While that does accomplish the task, it leaves zero entry in any log file system. Needless to say, trying to look back into an issue for missing DP or math errors and so forth, if you have no log entries, you have no paper trail to follow up on. This is also unacceptable in Neveron.

As Im sure many of you are aware from previous updates, Neveron does NOT currently have a 'professional' coder on staff, and projects like these may seem easy enough, for the non-professional coder, these things take a fair amount of time. When NEveron is only worked on part time in the first place...well you see where this is going...more delays! Again be assured that these items are being worked on, and that all players eligable for bonus items WILL get those bonus items eventually. This includes the NCash prize item that Chet put up. As a 'Thank You' for your incredible patience [cause I know you all have been] I do plan to add in a bunch of extra 100t prizes to that final drawing.

Nuke: As many of you will have noticed by now...there was another set of nukes dropped in Neveron. This action was due to a certain player who decided that he didn't want to play Neveron any longer and tried to run a scam with his credit card company. Needless to say, if you poke a sleeping bear with a stick...well you might get bit!

To be clear, the first empire nuked happened to take a city from the offending empire(s) and so to simplify things, Neveron simply nuked that city in its current empire.

The down side to this players misguided scam, is that the Neveron cash fund was reduced, and has created a mess of paperwork and headaches dealing with credit card compnay and PayPal...this is but one example of those 'other things' that an Admin must deal with from day to day. This mess started several days ago, and Im just now getting to the point where thingss are about half sorted!

/me walks away mumbling "I love my job! I Love my Job!! I LOVE my JOB!!!"

October 2011

Some interesting things going on behind the scenes...

Status: Still alive and kicking, and the game is still online, despite a few annoying set backs that had nothing to do directly with Neveron!

Donation Goal: Well the DP portion of the Fundraiser Bonus items has finally been processed! I had to go back through the list of donors a second time looking for a few that had been actually PROCESSED after the July 31st date, but not to the fault of the donor. I forgot I had processed 3 last donations about :50 into August 1st...so they got missed on the initial payouts. I also had 2 pending EChecks from PayPal, that where not processed for several days awaiting those items to clear PayPal processing to the Neveron account. Those 2 donations have also been added onto the second corrections list. So at this point, everyone who was expecting Fundraiser DP should have it...except of course MichaelRahl...but I wont get into that here! :o) As for the Chet NCash bonus item, I'll be working on that as well for those that qualified for it.

The next phase will be to get the morale bonus sorted out and then we can get into that last bonus item, the 100t prize giveaways! I'll get morale completed then make an announcement here as to when the live drawing will be held in IRC, so stay tuned!

NASI Mechs: There has been lots of random tweaking going on with the NASI Mech Markets. Some poking and prodding was being done to try and figure out exactly how NASI ran things...in the process, it was observed that it seemed to crash at a certain point. Upon closer inspection, there where 4 or 5 items that always seemed to be in the 'stuck' items. So a few more rounds of Mech dropping, and it was soon determined that the consistently hung units where in fact player made mechs. So those items where removed to see what would happen. Presto! Problem solved.

What you the players saw was 7 or 8 FULL rounds of NASI mechs dropped onto the market...and the feeding frenzy began! Hopefully you where one of the lucky ones that got in on some of those initial drops. Mechs that hadn't been seen in ages here dropped in large quantities. So over the next few weeks, some more poking was done. Some manual drops to the largest mechs in Neveron where made...as there still never seemed to be enough of them on the market, even now that the NASI Mech drops seemed to be running better than can be recalled for several years. So Mechs like IMP-2E, AWS-8Q, AS7-D, BNC-3S and HGN-733 where all dropped in quantities of 15 to 30, and even 5 MAD-4As where dropped on the market for $2,500,000,000 each! Needless to say, those didn't last to long either!!

Some where in there it was also discovered that the 'Player Made Resell Loophole' seemed to be 'fixed'. After looking back at what I adjusted initially, its clear now that was the cause of not only the NASI routine crashing every now and then, but those same quirky data lines where also what allowed Player Made reselling...so we killed 2 birds with one stone. Let's hope that everything in Neveron fixes like that! So over the next few weeks, some additional NASI Mech Market poking and prodding will be conducted. Some drop rates tweaked, some prices modified, some variants added...I think you get the idea. So if your a mech lover, you need to pay close attention to the market in the next few weeks

Web Pages: As some of you may have noticed, as time allows I have been randomly tweaking bits and pieces of random web pages. Most of this IS actually needed to be done, in order to bring the game up to modern specs and allow bug and loopholes to be worked on and corrected. Some of it is simply being done to find a friendlier user interface, which in my opinion is as important as any of the bugs that plague this game atm. Web page editing is generally a quicker and easier change here and change there, and I can drop what I'm doing and come back to it in a few hours or a few days. For that reason I will jump into web page work when I have limited time, for example going to work/coming home from work/at work...or when ever I just don't have the energy to jump into something more complex. So while many of you may think 'why is he working on that...' there is a method to my madness!

Hardware: For those of you with access to excess hardware, please take a minute to review the Hardware List and see if you can provide any items to help upgrade the equipment on hand. There are also several items that I still need initial equipment for. Please be sure to remove the spaces from the contact email listed on that page. Thanks to those that have already supported Neveron! :O)

Login Abuse: I really really don't want to bring this topic up again, but I dont think it was every properly addressed publically. There will be new policy developed for the future to address Login / Password Management & Dishonorable Player Tactics. For now it is simply an old thorn in the side of Neveron. Any suggestions that you may have on how to address this in the future should be posted on the forums

for now thats all I have

November 2011

New Mech variants hit the market!

NASI Mechs: So after some discussions with a few veteran players, it was noted that there are several normal mechs that where either extremely rare drops or simply missing from the regular NASI drop cycles. With a list in hand I researched the suspect Mechs, and it turned out they where indeed not even on the NASI drop list.

All of the mechs listed above where added to the NASI drop list and the first complete round was dropped on 10/31. NASI has already begun the next round of drops on its own...at least one mech dropped at a cheaper price, however most actually went up in price due to the quick purchase and sell out of the initial mechs dropped. This is EXACTLY how the NASI market is supposed to work, so its good to see thats running solid! As mentioned previously, there will be random tweaks to the NASI mechs over time, so keep your eyes on the mech market!

Unit Naming: Recently Vehicles names where modified. The intent there is to apply a consistent, useful and intelligent naming scheme to all Neveron units. There where 'outcries' of "Why is his fixing that...instead of XXX??"...FAR TO MUCH outcry over such an insignificant issue, in my personal opinion. That will be my last comment on this over reaction, and any further comments made to me regarding that topic will simply be ignored.

Many of the Neveron web pages where created ages ago, using many 'depreciated' commands and markups. All of these pages need to be modernized along the way in order to get Neveron to a point where we can actually focus on bugs with the game code, rather than bugs with the language code. Any steps that can eliminate unneeded or repetitive lines of code will simply speed that process up.

There where also several other 'issues' that motivated me to tweak some of these names now.

6:30 PM [Server Time]: The Neveron SERVERS perform updates in an attempt to keep the hardware and software healthy. This includes maintenance tasks like disk defrag and SQL database shrinking and trimming. This process normally lasts about 1 hour

The PM session in particular will cause various page load and time out errors as its the actual database that is being worked on, and will not grant access to player login requests. Some simple planning to avoid battle during this time period will save you a lot of stress.

December 2011

Incomplete Buildings Bug

For an undetermined reason, random buildings...in random zones...in random empires, have been changed from 'completed' buildings to 'incomplete'. All building types where randomly impacted, including Residential, Commercial, Factory & Technical Centers. Buildings that where DPd for as well as built 'normally' where impacted. This was not a deliberate Admin action targeting certain types of empires or players.

What to do: This will require some effort on the part of every player to recover from this.

Incomplete Buildings Bug

Building BugAfter some poking around late into the night, I think I may have been able to fix most of the bugged buildings. You no longer need to follow the above instructions, as all CF has been reset EXCEPT for buildings below 24CF.

What you DO need to do now is enter each city, and simply click the "Correct Population" button for any city that has incorrect Civ Pop showing for 'complete' buildings. As I stated above, the CF has been corrected manually on this end, but you need to update the Civ Pop from your end.

Should there be any other odd issues noticed, please open a help ticket. For those of you who have already opened Help Tickets about the incomplete buildings, please check to see if your buildings are now fixed, and if they please close the Help Ticket.

I have been made aware of an additional issue, where some random buildings where apparently set to 10CF. This appears to mostly impact the 25CF buildings. As I stated above, please open a ticket if you think you may have discoverd additional issues. I will work on them and see what I can figure out, but I need information from the players that have been impacted by this additional bug.

I am holding off correcting the CF of the smaller buildings until I get this second bug identified and sorted. Players can still go through the cities of their empires and manually restart any buildings below 25CF, and I will force them to build periodically.

Messages: As some of you have already noticed, when using IE, [Chrome for example does not have this issue] the message 'pop up' seems to have lost its scroll bar. Should you have more messages than the viewable space allows, it simply pushes them off the viewable section of the page, and you cant 'see' them. This is due to the various generations of asp/html/css code that is mixed thruogh out Neveron. I have tried several different variations to fix this, and only seem to break the ability to even display the message pop up. So for now, I'll leave it functional, with out a scroll bar. Part of the issue that makes this even more complicated, is Microsofts/Google/Mozillas constant need to 'update' things. This week for example I updated my Windows 7 computer, and have been having problems with various websites ever since. Gotta love microsoft! Mozilla Firefox is also now working on version 8 of its browser. Just this year I installed version 3...seriously 5 major upgrades in less than 12 months? Chrome is up to something like version 10 as well. So please be patient as we try to get Neveron caught up to something still considered acceptable by modern browsers

What to do: For now what you can do is simply copy/ paste the message pop up into any basic text program like notepad, which will then add the needed scroll bar, so that you can view all messages properly. When done, simply close the editor as well as the original pop up window. I realize this is not the best option, but it works.

Incomplete Buildings Bug

When discussing the 'Correct Population' button, I am NOT refering to the Finance Tab/Zone Check option. You need to click on Land/Build Tab/Buildings/'Correct Population' button, in order to adjust the buildings Civ Pop to match the 'corrected' CF/MaxCF that was fixed on 12/15/2011.

I am still looking for some SPECIFIC information from players about cities that they KNOW for FACT what was in them before this CF bug was noticed. Best guesses about what you 'think' was in a city that you took in war is not going to help identify this bug. Players that have noticed changes in MaxCF in cities please open a ticket so that I can look at them and try to sort this bug out.

Incomplete Buildings Bug Still trying to determine exactly what program went all rouge and screwed up the CF in some many empires. According to all data on my end, this was NOT a hack of any sort, as some players have wondered. I will be working on correcting things all week as we identify exactly what is 'broken', including all the empire issues.

One further clarification on the 'correct population' button. Any building created with the exact CF/Levels/basements will create the same number of 'slots'. Those slots are either Civ Pop, or 'jobs' [Commercial/ Factory/Research]. So with this recent CF bug, it has also reducced the number of available 'jobs' in city CF. For Civ Pop buildings, you could see the city pop increase. With cities with 'job' buildings, you will only see the actual number of jobs listed by the building change, but it will 'correct' the number of jobs once you click on the 'Correct Population' button. I am still looking for a way to automate the 'correct population' process from the server end, but nothing so far! :O(

Terrain Reset: I meant to post this here the day I posted the topic in the forum. Thanks to Techpriest [aka dieaready] for reminding me I hadn't!

On a side note, please be sure to check the forums, especially the "Neveron News" section for random announcements and updates. Gradually this 'updates' page will be used more like a 'change log' and the forums will be where the longer version of explanations will be posted. Thanks!

Incomplete Buildings Bug Still working on this issue. Will finish correcting all the smaller CF buildings later this week. For those empires that seem to have additioanl issues, please submit a help ticket and explain what you notice odd about your empire buildings so that it can be looked into.

Terrain Reset: Please be sure to review the additional information added to the original forum post. Neveron will do a terrain reset for all UNDEFENDED zones first, and then reevalutate the database bloat again. It may NOT be neccesary to do the fulll terrain reset. However, in the case that we DO need to, please be sure to submit your list of zones you want exempted from the terrain reset. Instructions on how to do this are included in the forum announcement.

Code Fest Looks like Code Fest will actually take place late Jan/ early Feb. There are 2 6 day sessions planned where getting the new hardware up and running, and then getting the various parts of Neveron working again will be the top items. As time allows we may also hunt down some loopholes and bugs, and we may revamp some more web pages and so on. I'll keep you in the loop as things progress.

Donation Pool For those of you that may not be aware, Gunner is currently running a DP Pool. He can be found in chat if you have any additional questions about how the DP Pool works. Gunner has been running Pools for many years and is considered a 'trusted' player to handle your funds and get you the best bang for the buck for your donation. Neveron will need to purchase some rather expensive commercial software between now and Code Fest, so any additional support would be greatly appreciated!

Player Holiday Raffle The count down timer on the login pages is getting short! Less than 8 hours till the 2011 Holiday Raffle kicks off! Please check here for all the details. Hope to see you all there!