New server owners

[Mavrixio]

As some of you may have noticed, I have been less active lately (for a while some could say)… it is not that I love less Sinfar but just the usual reasons: other projects and less motivated to work on it.

I still very much love and believe in Sinfar as a NWN1 legend, but I also know that a lot of things still depend on me to move:
- Providing/Managing access to special development: development site, nwnx, sinfarx, discord bot...
- Providing/Managing side servers
- Updating the core gameplay rules as needed
- NWN:EE support / alternative
...

So I am considering to hand Sinfar to someone or a group (probably the latter) willing to do those things that Sinfar need plus the usual requirements: hosting, supporting DMs, builders...

It would come with:
- This forum and sinfar.net wiki ownership
- The discord server ownership
- All the server data: databases, servervault, modules / hak resources...
- The donations (patreon, paypal... I won't be accepting donations anymore)
- Of course, the players (I won't be running something else and trying to drag them there)
- My help to setup that new server and some longterm support.

Here's what I am looking for:
1) Someone that knows Sinfar very well and that wants to make it grow
2) Someone able to invest. I not am ready to do this move for less than 10k USD. It can come from multiple people.
3) Someone with management skills (server and/or people/social and/or development)

[Mavrixio]

So it seems that the teams to take over the ownership has been found and its not anyone:

Nelak, LockOn & ABadger

I will let them present themselves, but they are long time Sinfar players, DMs, builders & the main investor here Nelak is my perfect replacement on the technical side.

Thanks to those who have donated: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-fund-th ... evelopment
... I was worried at the beginning to have to hand the server to someone that has money but is not really trustworthy. Now I am 100% sure that Sinfar is in good hands and will thrives for the next 10 years.

We wil post a timeline of the transfer / server move but basically it will be seamless.

[badger0]

Hello again for some of you. And for others, hello for the first time.

Once again, we'd like to thank everyone who's offered their support to us since this started; including words of support, offers to help, and of course monetarily. Your generosity and care for the community is inspiring and also a thumb in the eye of everyone who said the server was dead and ready to be put down.

So the first question we'd like to answer, is what is Sinfar to us? We just organized, raised funds, and are in the process of buying and migrating the server and the community. What are we going to do with it when we get it?

To us, at it's core, Sinfar is a sandbox that supports multiple styles of gameplay. This freedom to express our creativity without the strict rules of other NWN communities is in my opinion what makes Sinfar special. we see areas like Sinifer City, Aeon Beach, Angelos Island and others as the social hubs where everyone should feel comfortable hanging out. At the same time, experiences like Darkmist, Sakura, Arche Terre's faction system and many others are places for people to go and find story and engage in more strict RP, with their own rules and standards for conformity. Where players can roleplay their characters and be fully immersed.

But we're not done there. We have multiple Dungeons, leveling areas, CTF, Gaming areas, and tons of other unique experiences. It even opens up building and scripting (for those of us that actually do it for fun) in a way that no where else offers. How many other NWN servers, or indeed any other game server out there offers us all these ways to play and engage in the community without ever having to log in anywhere else? None of these experiences are better or worse than any of the others. Quite the contrary, we're only better for our variety.

So what are we doing right now? Right now the server hardware is being set up in our new data center, chosen for their reliability and connectivity to players all over the world. Mavrixio has set a very high bar for a stable and high performing NWN server over the last 10 years and we intend to meet or exceed that standard. Contracts between us and Mavrixio have been signed and work is planned to start as soon as our new server is delivered to us, sometime this week. From there it will be at least a few weeks of establishing and testing the new environment and prepping for the eventual cut over. And as Mav has said, if we do the cutover properly, you wont' even feel it. All within the next month or two tops, with any luck.

Once the handover is complete, and we're confident that everything is running well, one of the big things we intend to look into is a possible NWNEE migration. This won't be easy and any timeline we could give right now would be a pure guess, but we feel it holds a lot of potential for Sinfar.

We hope you will stick with us as we move and grow and make this community a welcoming place for all players who want to come in and check us out and hang out for a spell. Thanks again and we'll talk more soon but if you have any burning questions please feel free to reach out to any of us.

- NelaK, Badger, and LockOn

P.S. Just so there's no confusion - we're not in charge yet. We have simply taken the first big step in that transition and Mav is still The Boss.

[badger0]

Hello everyone,

Thanks to the efforts of everyone who hopped over and helped us test the new server, we're finally ready to migrate. Once this change takes place, Sinfar will be in it's new home, in a data center in New York, and it will be running on modern hardware able to ensure it's lifespan for years to come.

And so, Sinfar will be undergoing a planned outage on Saturday, September 9th 2023.

Start times for the outage are listed below, and it is expected to take 1 to 2 hours.

During this time Sinfar will be unavailable to play, including chatting via the web client. Discord will be the place to be for live updates of the server, and we'll update as soon as we have any status changes, there first.

Outage time:

9:00 am EDT (New York time)
2:00 pm BST (London time)
11:00 pm AEST (Sidney time)

Once migration is complete, as long as you're using the domain name to connect to Sinfar (sinfar.net:5121), no actions will be needed. If you're connecting using IP address, try the domain name instead.

Thank you again, to everyone who helped make this possible. If you have any questions, please direct them to any of the three of us, and we'll talk more once the migration is complete.

[Mavrixio]

Removed the (WIP) part of this tread!... The transfer is completed. everything is now running on Nelak side and all accounts have been transferred (discord, Patreon, domain name...)

Officially, Nelak, LockOn & ABadger are the new owners.

Personally I will continue offering support as long as needed and pop in game as player but I won't be in charge of the directions that the server takes.