First off, I apologize for this coming this late. I was out of town this
last week and I spent all day Sunday driving home (~17.5 hours) and
didn't have access to post this sooner.

There are a couple of things I want to address. First off, both Aonia
and I have been reading both the forums and the feedback/PVP-discussion
channels on Discord. A big thank you to those of you that expressed
disappointment and criticism without resorting to abuse and insults. We
do value your input here and we are hearing you. We want you to know
that we will never want you to hold back criticisms, disappointments or
anything as long as it is done like this, without the abuse and insults.
So earnestly, to those of you that did so, thank you again for that.

This Ascension proved to overall, be much more competitive than the past
few years. Each event had more people participating, had leads change
consistently, and felt like either side would take it at any time. We
had over 100 players participate in the final Ascension, which is the
most I've personally seen in a long time.

We, unfortunately, did not anticipate the extreme amount of lag that
occurred. We realized that lag could be an issue, and made several
changes - including delaying the start of the event to apply what
hotfixes we could - but not to the extent that it was. This is entirely
on us and we are taking full responsibility. It is unacceptable that it
occurred and it was a failing on our part.

Here are a few things we are working on to help reduce lag in the
future.

1) Adjust GMCP - we're looking at how we send GMCP messages and
attempting to optimize how it is built and sent to players.
- We may additionally add 'opt-in' parameters for GMCP which will limit
how much information is being sent. Details on this are not fully worked
out and may not be needed, but it's something under consideration.

2) SSC curing optimization - Something we've already started, but we
have a mortal coder working on SSC optimizations to speed up how that
works.
- We're also looking at beast focusing here, and that may result in
changes to how it interacts with SSC.

3) More caching - One of the things I did while implementing the
BODYSCAN EXPERIENCE report was to cache the value and only calculate it
when needed. This will reduce the number of calculations done
considerably and speed things up. The XP cache likely has little impact
on something like Ascension but moving towards this model will help
things overall. Things like prestige, resists, buffs, etc are all
recalculated every time they're used so moving towards more caching will
reduce that significantly.

4) Target and refactor any particularly slow things. This is something
that will be ongoing and while we have a few initial things to look at
such as a few issues with beasts. This will be ongoing.

5) We are investigating our servers to ensure that no problems are
originating from them in addition to our codebase.

What I do promise to do moving forward with both myself and anyone else
that's working on code is to make speed a priority, especially as they
pertain to PVP and large scale events.

We recognize that whilst addressing the lag problems is the most
important thing, we also believe that it is vital that we make
recompense to the people who lost this Ascension. Apologies made only in
words are less powerful than those that come in the form of action.

To this end, we have been in discussion with both Parhelion and Ixion
regarding the matter. It has been agreed between us, and all parties,
that the fairest thing to do is to raise Ixion as a True Ascendant in
addition to Parhelion. We will hold an event this coming Saturday, 18th
July, wherein he will receive this in an in-character manner.

We hope that in conjunction with the work we are doing to reduce lag in
the future, this will address the very valid concerns and feelings that
were brought to us, as well as ensuring that the incredible amount of
work that went into the contest is not wasted due to something out of
everyone's control.

With sincere apologies,

Aonia and Orael

Penned by My hand on the 12th of Kiani, in the year 565 CE.