Howdy, everybody. It's been a minute. We've had a few staff changes since the last announcement (...in August of last year), and since we've been proactively targeting staff recruitment to try and get a handle on the mounting staff workload, I figured it'd be good to go over all the changes since then.
But first, please welcome our newest administrators and moderators!
I will be taking the Discovery game server down for a few hours over the coming fortnight.
I will use this time to migrate the game VM to a different host. This new host is a different hypervisor on different hardware, which is better located, which should offer better connection times (e.g. ping) for most of Europe & the Americas, and provides better single core performance, so I'm hoping it'll be able to handle slightly larger groups of players in close proximity better than we've had before.
I'll probably also use it as a convenient opportunity to perform other unrelated maintenance.
I estimate this work will take 3 or so hours and provisionally schedule it in the window of 00:30-06:30 UTC on Saturday 16th.
The web server should still function during this time, so the forums, development tools, wiki, etc. should still work - but obviously the forum integration with the game will be out of action.
If you've restarted your launcher and FL since 22:46 on Monday 11th, there should be no need for you to take any action - when the game server returns it should appear on the server list for you immediately.
In the mean time, if you're curious and want to compare connectivity, the current game IP is 95.217.88.9, and the new game IP will be 88.198.43.188. Those of you with test server access can go and try it today.
Yesterday, we've had a micro-patch being deployed which permanently fixed the issue with CapitalClassFixes.dll.
If you were affected and couldn't get it to work, or weren't willing to add exceptions to your firewall, now is the time to join us back in the Sirius Sector!
No doubt you have noticed lately the massive uptick in automatic bans from the server - this is due to CapitalClassFixes.dll, a file shipped with Discovery Freelancer, wrongly being identified as malware and/or an unwanted program, and being quarantined by your AV. While this has been an issue we've grappled with since the release of 5.0, it seems a recent windows defender update has massively increased false-positive detections of this DLL. Just this morning I've gone through and unbanned some thirty accounts.
We're hoping to release a micro-patch very soon with a new version of the CCF DLL that will hopefully reduce false-positive detections. In the meantime, if you suddenly have issues connecting to the server, double-check that your antivirus (Microsoft Defender or otherwise) has not quarantined CapitalClassFixes.dll or any other Freelancer / Discovery file. Mark the Discovery folder as an exception in your antivirus if you haven't already, and if necessary perform a reinstall of the Discovery files. A full guide has been helpfully written by @Venkman here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2324254
We've also noticed a large uptick in spammers hijacking older or unused forum accounts. While most tend to be accounts with an old sign-in date but little to no forum activity, others have several hundred posts and belong to former members of the community. Likely some spamming organization is making use of one of several data breaches over the past few years to gain access to DiscoveryGC forum accounts and bypass the account activation procedure. You can check which data breaches affect your e-mail address at https://haveibeenpwned.com/ , but in general if you aren't using a UNIQUE, STRONG password for your Discovery forum account, I recommend changing it as soon as possible.