Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-25646419-20190206025212

The text below the line is a quote taken from this thread: https://www.blankmediagames.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=96667

Database sanitization  In order to properly delete accounts I had to fix the foreign keys on over a dozen tables to have them properly cascade and delete all of the data related to a user throughout the entire database. This is why you may have noticed 4+ hour downtime for 4 nights in a row a few weeks ago. There were many tables not properly setup from other programmers or improper foreign key design from years ago. This is all fixed and working properly now.

Out of the 8million+ accounts in our database many of them were highly inactive and only played a few or 0 games. Since the first days of ToS we hadn't removed any accounts but we felt that the database is getting quite large and it didn't make sense to keep 4 year old accounts that only tried out ToS for a few games and quit. The benefits of removing these accounts are that it will require less down time when we need to do database updates (anytime the server is down for a large amount of time it is because DB updates on large tables are very time consuming), more storage space in the DB for future users and protecting inactive users who may not want their information stored forever but probably forgot they ever tried out ToS. No paying accounts are being removed regardless of their inactivity.

Unity Encrypted Login & Registration(Next Patch)  Our Unity login and account registration paths are now encrypted to prevent botters from being able to run 3rd party clients and logging in to our servers. Eventually forum account registration will not exist and all registration will go through the Unity encrypted path (which will create a forum account for you).

Ranked Leavers(Next Patch)  We have been getting reports of ranked players frequently leaving matches early because the ELO loss of certain factions is low. Leaving a match early (still alive) will now result in a maximum k-factor loss of ELO regardless of role/faction. For bronze this is 30 ELO and for masters it is 15 ELO.

Steam Refunds(Already live)  Our servers will now automatically detect if a linked steam account has refunded and will freeze the account. This is because once an account is linked users get the 2k Town Points, premium status, double merit points and unique skin. There was potential for refund abuse by linking, refunding and continuing to play on a different platform such as web.

Classic Tickets & Unity Ads(In development)  We are working on a system to grant a classic ticket for an ad view on Unity. The ad views are verified through Unity to prevent any botting abuse. With this system and the changes to encrypted login/registration paths we hope to bring back some form of F2P on Unity (mobile only for now as Unity does not have ad support for web). Since iOS does not allow referral codes that give free rewards (weird rule we didn't know about) this is the best solution to allow new mobile users to try out the game.

Forced Password Resets(Already live)  We have the tech in place to force password resets via the registered email of each account. With the data breach we will need to enforce account ownership to prevent abusive players from logging in to inactive accounts. We are discussing how to do this in the best way possible for users who may not have access to their registered email anymore.

DocExer & Unity  DocExer has been working on fixing many Unity bugs and crashes. Unity has this great future that auto reports crashes to us so we are able to solve many crashes with each patch. It was expected that the Unity version would have a lot of crashes and problems on launch since it is an entirely new code base that hasn't been thoroughly tested for years like the AS3 code base has but it is starting to become very stable with fewer and fewer crashes being reported.

We had to take a break from Unity for a few weeks to deal with data improvements, support for password resets, account deletions and many other things but now that most of that is wrapped up we are back to work on the Steam port for Unity. We hope to have it live in the next few months. 