November 8, 2017 update—
Second spell wave. The last wave of spells has been sent out. We tried to include each of your characters if you had more than one, but if you notice one of them is missing the spell or if we possibly missed you entirely, please send me a message. As you cannot sell specialty spells, also let me know if you would like the spell removed from any of your characters.

Bandwidth. Our bandwidth usage is still high, but we have implemented some changes that hopefully will decrease bots visiting our site (which is how 90% of our bandwidth usage is currently being eaten up). We will continue to monitor the situation over the next couple of days, but if we do not see an improvement we will continue to do all we can to try and remedy this issue. If we get close to our limit again, we will let you know ahead of time in case we are in danger of experiencing more downtime.

In case of downtime: To access our cbox by itself, use this link. Save it or bookmark it if you would like to access it in the future more easily, and also if the site is down for any reason; we will always try to post updates in the cbox if the site goes down.

---

November 4, 2017 update—
Downtime compensation spell revealed! The first wave has been sent out; if you have not recieved yours yet, please know we're working on getting them out as we are able! Twenty have been sent out so far, and the rest will be on their way within the next few days.

Time of Darkness
Low Intensity Transformation. Enshrouds the user in rolling shadows while making their eyes glow. This is purely aesthetic, as the shadows do not hide the user but roll off of them like dense clouds. His influence grows. (Note: can be used with other spells as an added visual effect.) This spell was given as compensation for downtime during a holiday event in October 2017.

November 1, 2017 —

Welcome back, all!

You may have noticed the last few days that the site was unavailable because we had reached our bandwidth limit. After some investigating, it seems we used about ~1-2GB of bandwidth a day. To try and reduce this for the future, we have set a cache freshness on most files to one month. This might sound pretty long but our images and files don't change very often anymore, so we're going to try with one month to start; and if anything significant does change, we will let you know to refresh your cache so that you obtain the new files.

We have also hosted our ad on Imgur instead of locally. Hotlinking can eat up bandwidth and recently we had a lot of advertisements posted, so to reduce any bandwidth generated from that, we have hosted the ad image offsite. When posting ads in the future, please remember to use the new code—and don't let this incident discourage you from posting more ads, if anything, now you can post more!

The bandwidth increase was pretty steady as it grew and it was never something we felt like we needed to keep an eye on before, but had we been watching it, we would have been able to prevent the site downtime. We will be keeping an eye on things to make sure it doesn't happen again.

We're very sorry for the inconvenience it may have caused for you, and also that we had to miss Halloween (and Zevruu's birthday—happy belated birthday!). We hope everyone had a fun and safe time; and if Halloween isn't your thing, that you had a nice, relaxing break from ORIGIN :)


As compensation, we have designed a unique spell for users who were affected during the downtime. Expect this to be revealed and sent out within the next month.


Thank you for your patience,
— CJ