Hello everyone,
I must unfortunately announce the upcoming closure of Grasshopper and Miros. These servers will be shutting down on 2024-11-19T12:00:00Z.
To compensate for this, we will be reversing the recent maximum player cap adjustment, changing it back from 70 to 80. This decision is also made because the player cap measure has been ineffective.
We understand that this news will evoke a range of emotions and raise many questions about the future of the Wizard’s Den servers. If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly.
Thank you for your continued support and understanding during this challenging time.
Sincerely, @nikthechampiongr, Head Game Admin
The Why
Obviously we do not want to shutdown servers. They are very important to players, admins, and staff as a whole. There are however reasons that don’t leave us much of an option but to shutdown some of them.
The main reasoning for this server closure is that it is currently impossible for the admin team to support the current server count. This often leads to hours of no admin coverage for servers daily with too many ahelps for us to retroactively handle, if we even can handle them retroactively. This not only places stress on the admin team as they struggle to meet an impossible demand but also significantly diminishes the overall player experience.
This issue is especially urgent with the recent departure of a large part of our admin team. It should be noted however that it was a big issue even before that and a large part of the reasoning behind their departure. We attempted to mitigate it at the time without shutting down servers through a reduced player cap, and through the use of panic bunker on Leviathan. Of these two measures, the player capacity adjustment has proven too ineffective to make a meaningful difference to admin load and as such we are reversing it. The panic bunker on Leviathan has been successful in mitigating raider attacks, however we are still subject to overwhelming admin workload.
Why Grasshopper?
There are 2 reasons we chose Grasshopper specifically as opposed to other servers:
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Grasshopper has served its purpose. We brought it online during the PCTide as a place to welcome the large influx of new players. With the PCTide subsiding, this is no longer an issue. Additionally a lot of downstream forks are able to absorb new players with us.
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After the PCTide, Grasshopper was not being used as it was intended. Grasshopper employs a system that locks out players with significant playtime unless they are whitelisted. We allowed whitelisted players on hopper with the hope that they would help mentor new players in the basics of the game. While a lot of whitelisted players did just that, the whitelist has been misused to either simply continue playing on Grasshopper after the playtime limit has been reached, or to stomp new players who are a lot less experienced. This is an extremely hard problem to tackle and the current lack of admin coverage means that we are unable to enforce the goals that Grasshopper is meant to meet.
Why Shutdown a second Server? Why Miros?
We believe that if we only shutdown hopper, we will have no meaningful change in the amount of servers we will have to moderate at the same time as it’s likely that players would simply migrate to Miros.
Miros was picked because we believe it would have the least effect on the playerbase as a whole. It is no secret that Miros usually has no population, while there have been quite a few times in its history where it had a daily player count between low-medium pop those periods have been short and usually fade out. It should be noted that Miros is the only European server currently available and it’s regrettable that we have to shut it down, but a reopening of a EU server will be considered in the future if the player count and admin team can support it.
Will there be further server closures?
While we cannot rule out that we may shut down servers in the future, we would like to avoid it if possible. Shutting down a server is extremely painful for staff and players alike. We believe that these current closures will allow the Admin Team to refocus and recover. We will always operate official Wizard’s Den Servers for Space Station 14.
I like playing on Wizard Den’s servers and all the others are usually full! What am I supposed to do?
Unfortunately we do not have an easy answer to this, it is inevitable that with server closures some players will be unable to play on Wizard’s Den servers. Fortunately, we believe that downstream servers are more than capable of filling in this gap! The beauty and Magic of Space Station 14 is that it allows for anyone to host their own server and change the game as they see fit. There are quite a few downstream servers that are very similar to our current codebase and have similar rulesets. There are additionally downstreams that put their own unique spin on Space Station 14, or total conversations that make it seem like an entirely different game.
If you are ambitious enough, you can even host your own server. You can find information on how to do this on our developer documentation wiki. You are also welcome to ask for help in #hosting channel on discord for issues you may encounter.
I still have more questions, where can I get them answered?
I will be watching this topic and #admin-questions on our discord for any questions you may have. You may also DM me directly.
