Downtime Again??
This will be a bit technical, if you're not too bothered about what happened, please skip to the next header.

On Friday 5th May at approximately 7am server time, Lioden started lagging very heavily. We initially thought it was just a small blip and that it would all sort itself out. Upon further investigation we discovered that our database had corrupted pretty badly, which we believe was caused by the disruption earlier in the week with the physical data centre migration.

The admin team very quickly went into alert mode; we discussed a plan of action. We weighed up whether it would be worth a 24 hour downtime for DNS propagation or whether it would be quicker to wait for our host to diagnose and repair whatever was going on. We also had the option of a new database server. The database server was sold to us under the promise that it would take 8 hours - we asked to be fast-tracked as we wanted to get the game back up ASAP. We were then told 4 hours (this was after 4 hours of downtime already, after first thinking it was a temporary blip and then having to diagnose the problem ourselves).

20 hours later, we finally get the message that the server is up and running. Throughout this time we took turns in sleeping and staying up to see if the server would come up, so the communication between admins was unfortunately very disjointed for a time.

Had we known sooner that our total downtime would be upwards of 25 hours, we would have switched hosts immediately. We are extremely unhappy with the customer service we received while trying to get our server fixed/moved.

Since we are on a new server, expect some lag for first 24-36 hours of your gameplay as your data is being cached.

What will happen next?
We will be moving host. We do not want to give this company any more money.

We are temporarily staying put until we can set up a server with another company. We will then be requesting a refund for all of our pre-paid services (we like to pay a year in advance). We will schedule game maintenance for later this month, on a week day, early in the morning (server time) so that we can switch hosts.

In 5 years of Lioden's life (and in 15 years of having our websites hosted) we have never experienced something like this that was also handled so poorly by the hosting company, and we aim to never experience this again.

I lost out on time playing!
If you go to the main News page, we have set up a Downtime Care Package for you! This bundle gives Food & Toy bundles and Nesting material based on the number of lionesses you own, along with a bunch more goodies (some GB items as well). We can't apologise enough for this downtime - it has been completely out of our control. Your lions should be also maxed out on happiness and hunger.
This item will be available until tuesday.

Have you lost our messages again? >_>
Thankfully we were able to retrieve some messages. We only have from Tuesday when we came back up, up to a certain time on Thursday evening, but we have been able to restore at least a partial backup this time.

If you purchased GB and your new GB are no longer on your account, please send a PM to Abbey #1 with your PayPal transaction ID and we will refund it for you.

BACKUP RESTORATION TIMES:
Rough Estimate on backup times, as depending on specific Lioden feature, they are stored at different hours:
4 and a half hours before rollover for main backups, 3 hours 50 minutes before rollover for lions, 4 hours 15 minutes for Hoard.

This means userlogs, inboxes, lions and other things can be restored from different times and there might be some discrepancies.
If you notice "ghost notifications" just delete them please, we tried to restore inboxes but the data was still corrupted a bit.

What about May Event and our lost progress? What about the storyline?
If you guys will struggle with the event tiers due to downtime we'll see about tweaking them as the month goes! May Storyline will help you gather some Tokens and Manticora Beetles!
Unfortunately we were unable to code or work on it ... again. So we might launch it within a day or two and include it in May news post along with a notification that it was launched.

Friday Update
Unfortunately thanks to the downtime our Friday update was cut short. We were able to implement a couple of nice moderating tools, including a tool to make moderator posts stand out more when they want to get your attention ;)



We will be working very hard to bring you a much bigger coding update next week.

Bug Fixes
* Roasted Lamb notice showing on all lions when applied to king has been fixed - it will now only show on your king.
* When cubs are born, the cub number given by the ultrasound bat will be removed - you will need to visit the bat for each new pregnancy to find out the accurate number of cubs.
* Patrolling males are no longer chaseable, killable or reserve-able.
* We have attempted a fix of aging lionesses dropping to negative fertility - please let us know if you still experience this bug.
* We have also attempted a fix of lionesses not going into heat immediately for the tutorial.

Terms of Service Change
We have made a minor change to the Terms of Service based on a confusing situation that has arisen lately. In order to address this properly, here is the new rule regarding referrals which will apply from now.

"While the referral rewards and monthly referral contests exist, referring a friend to the game should not be incentivised in any way. This includes, but is not limited to, offering in-game or off-site rewards for signing up and rolling over enough to earn the referral points. Anyone found to be incentivising referrals will have any referral points revoked."

Remember that the event ends on May 31st at 11:59 pm, and all your currency will be stored in your account until next year.

There are new avatar Tags made by Shad, for May and Misc, check them out as always!

Raffle Lioness

We had to run the Raffle again as the progress from yesterday was wiped. Our apologies.
Congrats Khorshid (#8241)! You have won the last raffle lady!
New lady with the Sunset over Entabeni BG is up for impressing in Special Lioness area in Explore or in NEWS section under News Post List! ;D She has first Margay marking!

Polls
Poll LINK - We plan to add a new Mutie on Demand item for 2017's Black Friday sale (don't worry, we're not replacing previous MoD, we're just adding new stuff), We had some ideas so maybe you can help us decide which exactly would go well on Lioden?

Twin MoD - Another 6 piebald designs, completely new and unique to the new item. We'd call it MoD: More Piebald or something.
Somatic Black Patches - basically what I'm linking below - would look like somatic breaks that you can see on horses etc. I am open to suggestions on their shapes. Visually it'd look a bit like Melanism cutouts.

Real life black patch on a lion - LINK - Front leg :D