Embers Adrift Remains Offline After Zone Server Hardware Failure

Embers Adrift has been offline since the evening of October 5 after a hardware failure took out the indie MMORPG’s zone server machine. Stormhaven Studios says the game is now expected to come back sometime on Thursday, October 8.

The studio said its backend services run on a VPS, but the actual zone servers are hosted on a bare-metal box. That machine failed, forcing the team to lock the world and open a ticket with its hosting provider. The provider wasn’t able to investigate until the following morning.

On October 6, Stormhaven was told the server’s motherboard had died and needed to be replaced. There wasn’t another machine available to move the game onto, so the team had to wait for a replacement board to be ordered and shipped overnight. The fix slipped again on October 7 when the part didn’t reach the data center in time.

Stormhaven has apologized for the downtime, but for players it’s another frustrating extended outage. Embers Adrift also went through a major hardware-related disruption in March, which pushed the team into an emergency migration to a new host.

The timing isn’t great for the studio. Its September patch notes said most development time had been going into Forgotten Depths III, which was planned for October 13, shortly before the game’s fourth anniversary on October 15.

Further reading: Official Embers Adrift site