This is what bothers me somewhat, without meaning to dig it all up again, constantly being told we don't know the facts, whilst at the same time the person telling us this doesn't give us the facts, not only that but he also admits often he doesn't understand the technology himself. It's understandble that a GM can't be expected to be a technician/administrator also, but on that note it's a bit unfair him telling others they're wrong about things (i.e. as others have pointed out such as Cromcruiach and Killder the DB stuff should be entirely possible to restore, this kind of issue just shouldn't arise with a properly run system). You can't claim someone doesn't know the facts without knowing the facts and details yourself, it certainly is speculation, that much is right - but it's educated and informed speculation which gives it a lot of grounds.I have seen GOA GM's complain about mis-information being spread by players who do not know the facts. The thing is as they seem unable to give us the facts then we are going to continue to wonder, summise and guess at what has gone on and how likely it is to happen again.
If you look at the postmortem for DAoC on gamasutra.com as well as various mailing lists and their respective archives such as the vworlds-tech mailing list you can actually learn an awful lot about not only how MMOGs work, but also specifically how DAoC works, Scott Jennings (works at Mythic as a dev.) amongst one or two others have gone on record in the lists to mention how some of the behind the scenes tech works. Take for example someone who develops radar programs, could anyone at GOA honestly claim they know more about DAoC's client/server protocol, or internal memory structure than someone like that?
Telling us that we don't know how it works is particularly harsh, the chances are some of us - as technicians, administrators or even software engineers actually do know how it works, certainly a lot more so than someone who's basically a PR frontman who might wander over to see the technical team now and again and say "Hey Bob, how's it going with this problem?" only for the technician to give a cut down answer suitable for someone less technically knowledgeable.
There's a lot more information about how DAoC and MMOGs work under the hood out there than many people might imagine, from postmortems and other articles on Gamasutra, MMOG developers joining in technical discussions with the development community, people digging into the code and figuring out how it works - freeshard type projects and cheats etc., to the more underground method of leaked source code or the more honest method of open sourced code. Or just finally and more simply, just the standard documentation surrounding technology used by a lot of these games - i.e. MySQL.
The way GoA is handling this crisis will completely destroy the economy. It's like Kuwait, people are rich so you pay 35 Euros for a cup of coffee.
