This evening, while restoring a character for a user who had apparently deleted it by accident, Andy accidentally deleted all the characters in the database. This would be kind of funny, if it wasn't for ALL OF OUR CHARACTERS BEING DELETED (!@#!@#). So, anyway, we've restored from a backup made at 4:00 AM (CST) this morning. Character changes made since then will not be reflected in the database, except for the handful of lucky people who happened to be online when Andy had his snafu, and had their characters preserved through activation on the server.

We sincerely, sincerely apologize for this. It's the first instance of a problem we've ever had like this, and it was a pretty bizarre event that caused it (not entirely Andy's fault.. partially mysqldump apparently acting in a way other than documented). To apologize, we've given all paying users a free week of gameplay.

The new UI will also include features to prevent people from accidentally deleting their own characters (having to type in the character name to confirm deletion), to hopefully mitigate the cause of this giant mess in the future.

At this point (8PM) I don't know the exact status of the escort mission stuff. I will post as soon as I do.

-john