Source: tweet from @Elysium_dev:

"New ETA: 4-5 hours. Our head system admin took the day off of his real job to get servers back online asap. Updates again later"

Edit: and of course this kind of goes without saying, but it doesn't hurt to mention it once again: much love to the entire Elysium crew.

Edit 2: Minor text fixes.

All I care about is

a.) Is the server online

b.) Is the server working properly

c.) Is my account not hacked

If the answer to those questions are yes then I don't give a flying FUCK about anything else. Fuck your drama. Fuck all this BS about devs past behavior and Fuck Alex in his gay little ass! As long as I can play the motherfucking game the way it's meant to be played then Elysium and Crestfall can suck each others dicks every night and I don't care! If you don't like it here then you can FUCK OFF back to Kronos or retail or Club Penguin and shut the fuck up!! Im so sick of it. This place is overpopulated enough as it is. I honestly hope all of you crybaby fags leave and never come back!

There tends to be a lot of negativity on here, even if it's just the way people are wording the issues that they've discovered.

No, nothing is "ruining the game" and it's not unbelievable that "_____ hasn't been solved by now".

It can't be said enough, thank you Elysium team for all the work you do. I can't wait to finish my first day of classes this semester, and head home to grind it out in Redridge <3

Edit - Elysium staff, I hope you see this, we love you!

As some people have begun to figure out, I have decided to retire from the Elysium Staff. Multiple people have begun to create conspiracy theories about my disappearance and I’d like to make perfectly clear why I am stepping away.

It was always my plan to transition myself out of the Elysium team after the first few weeks of the server launch. I was able to help transition the team into this new environment and help coach them on what to expect. My decision to step away is in no way a reflection of the Elysium team. The Elysium team is smart, hard-working, committed, and, most of all, passionate about providing an incredible legacy experience for everyone. I’m passing off leadership to Fenrir, who was the longest tenured IsVV member on Nostalrius and has been my right hand man for nearly 2 years.

The job of QA lead is quite demanding and I was consistently spending 20-30 hours a week working to bring our players a better experience. I have a full-time job, a wife and a daughter, and hopefully more children in the future. I’ve had the tremendous opportunity to be serving the legacy player base as the QA lead with two different, incredible teams. I got the opportunity to sit in Blizzard’s board room and advocate for official legacy content. I’ve also began looking for an opportunity to switch careers into the video game industry and I hope that my experiences will prove valuable to a future employer. I’ve been really blessed.

Elysium is in good hands and I look forward to what’s ahead. I’m hoping that someday soon Blizzard delivers to their starving fan base the legacy content they deserve.

Thanks for letting me be a part of your legacy.

Nano

My dearest friends, it has been an excellent few months. Working on this project has been one of the highlights of my life. However, it is time that my story ends here.

To understand my decision, you must know a bit about my life. 8 years ago, I contracted an unknown, incurable eye disease. Every day of my life is filled with physical pain to the point that I cannot leave my home without being rendered unable to open my eyes. While there are very very few things left that I can physically do on the computer, working on this project was one of them. However, you must understand that due to the circumstances of my life, I do suffer quite a bit from depression.

When Elysium was still small, there was far less to worry about. I spent most of my time interacting with players and guilds, acting as an intermediary for the players and staff. After all, this is what I enjoyed the most. It is how I met many of the players that I today call my friends. However, as we merged, it became apparent I would have to take on a more serious position within the core team and helping to steer the ship through the storm. This was not my original intention with joining the project. I never had aspirations of doing more than giving the players a positive environment where their voices could be heard. As many of you know, our active population increased by over 40x, and no longer could I hear the individuals. In fact, most of the communication I began to receive from the community at this point was anger, insults, and hatred. I quickly began to realize that this was no longer a position I was interested in holding. However, in the end, I continued on. I knew it would be a hard journey to steer that ship into port, and I could not leave my teammates to do so alone.

Ultimately though, I have not come out unscathed. The pressures to satisfy such a large community, to perform my tasks, to cover every angle of this project as to not make a mistake... all while the only reward I am given is a huge sacrifice of time, money, hatred, ingratitude, and the multitude of daggers in the dark from every direction... it has taken it's toll on me. Combined with the depression I have to fight due to my confinement, I find myself dealing with more than I can bare. For that, I am sorry. I am sorry that I am not able to continue on, and provide you with this service. For my weakness, I hope you all will forgive me.

I also hope you will take my words to heart. All that the Elysium Team does, they do for you. There is no profit for them. You can treat them with respect, and they will do their job with pride. You can harass their every move, and they will take every step forward with a feeling of dread. The choice is yours whether or not they will enjoy the service they provide for you.

Despite the grim circumstances, I will always remember my time here with you all for as long as I live. As I said, I have made many friends, both within the staff and among the players. While I will no longer be using this Reddit account, I will maintain my discord account (Suzerain#2804), so don't be a stranger. I plan on playing on one of the upcoming TBC servers, so perhaps we will meet some time in the Outlands.

I consider my memories, my friends, and this goodbye to be my sole reward for the time I have dedicated, and it is more than I deserve.

Farewell,

Suzerain

Link to forum thread: https://forum.elysium-project.org/topic/34376-suzerains-resignation/

However it may end, you've done everything so well up until this point. You are smart, hardworking and thoughtful. All 62 of you.

You have %110 support from us.

Don't get caught in fear.

Whatever happens you are all winners.

WhiteKidney (system admin) formed a coup with 9 other devs/gms, created their own backup of Elysium Project (roughly 1 hour before shutdown), and deleted all of The Elysium Project. They did this for a few reasons which are highlighted below:

Crogge was generating currency and selling it to gold sellers. He was also copying characters (maybe generating too, we don't know for sure) including 2 R14's and selling them to account buyers/gold selling sites (we don't publicly know how many copy's, nor how much was generated - although WK seems to know from logs). WhiteKidney went through database logs of items/characters that were being created/deleted and found that something unethical was going on. 'Crogge wasn't properly removing the logs, and perhaps stopped caring' (WhiteKidney) and that is how WhiteKidney got solid proof of Crogge's corruption, and that he was generating currency and copying characters. Both of those accusations have been admitted by Crogge himself in the vod. Despite admitting to both of these accusations, Crogge is adamant that the money that was earned from these ventures was spent on hardware, and that he actually continued to ban gold sellers (even as he generated and sold gold to these very sellers).

Shenna, on the other hand, wasn't generating currency/copying characters but was directly skimming money from the Elysium PayPal. The Elysium PayPal (as per WhiteKidney) was being governed by Vitaly and/or his wife, and Shenna had complete access to the account at her freewill. These direct accusations have NOT been admitted by Shenna, but she HAS admitted to taking $2500-3000USD one time from the PayPal account, on top of $500-700USD per month.

Things to highlight:

-Regarding the deletion and backups of Elysium. WhiteKidney and his team at LH have backups 1 hour prior to server shutdown. From my understanding, WK believes that the best backups that Elysium has could be a few weeks old (Q&Aw/Esfand).

-WhiteKidney said that this has been going on for 7 or 8 months, but that he doesn't have a clue... lol? I think he means 'maybe it has gone on for longer, but I don't have a clue.'

-WhiteKidney originally stated that they had been planning this, 'for quite sometime', but later in the conversation stated that it has been about 2 weeks, and Phoosy then pipped up and said 'less than that'.

Moving forward with Lights Hope:

-WhiteKidney claims that roughly 80% of Elysium staff have left, but did not mention HOW MANY of those staff members joined them at LightsHope. Later, he has does make claims that roughly 80% of those that have left (80% of the 80%) HAVE elected to join LightsHope.

-All loot logs, character logs, system logs, db logs, command logs, will be made available in real time, to as many GMs/Devs as realistically possible.

-Donations will be 'fully transparent' (Pottu, LHDiscord).

-LightsHope anticipates a 1:1 relaunch, meaning: your characters will be identical to your ElysiumProject characters up to 1hour before server shutdown.

-Your characters will be available on both Elysium (which will still be lead by Crogge and Shenna), and LightsHope (which is the new project, lead by WhiteKidney and his team).

-LH is considering renaming Anathema and Darrowshire to Nostalrius PvP/PvE, respectively, to 'pay homage from where we came from'. EDIT: They will be renaming the servers at a later date.

-LightsHope is beginning to go through all logs to delete copied characters, and generated currency.

-LightsHope is optimistic that the servers will be up within 12hours-a few days, but are moving as fast as they can and somethings are out of their control (they are waiting on delivery of the server [it has already been ordered]). EDIT: Login servers are live. Game servers are up 15-40minutes from 10:36AM EST. EDIT: Elysium server is live. Anathema/Darrowshire will be up as soon as possible.

-The lead Burning Crusade developer from Elysium, (Staden) has left Elysium, and has joined the LightsHope team, so development for tBC is continuing.

-The hardware requirements will demand about 500EU per month.

EDIT: WhiteKidney claims to have every single log of every generated account and currency, and that every occurance will be deleted from LightsHope.

EDIT: There are no plans for LightsHope to create a 'fresh start' server. (LightsHope discord announcements. Phoosy)

Believe it or not this is a tldr of what has gone on. I've listened to vods, and sat in streams for over 3 hours. This is a short summary of all that I've heard from Esfand & Ash's Q&A, Esfand & WhiteKidney Q&A, and the vods provided by MonkeyNews' stream. I've tried to write this as neutral as possible, and not direct my words in any direction.

There is a lot more information, that precedes today, that I have not included (ie. Shenna renaming as Akira and returning to Elysium), but if there is any other information that pertains directly to Elysium or LightsHope, that happened today, please provide solid proof in terms of screenshots/videos.

TLDR: WhiteKidney led a coup that shutdown Elysium, because of unscrupulous activity from Crogge and Shenna. Crogge and Shenna were selling currency and characters, and skimming money off the PayPal. Two projects will now exist: LightsHope (a completely separate entity from Elysium, lightshope.org), and The Elysium Project.

Proof:

https://imgur.com/a/hq9jT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huH76MviuCs&feature=

Links:

http://lightshope.org/

https://twitter.com/lightshopewow

https://discordapp.com/invite/mraKxcU

https://elysium-project.org/

https://twitter.com/elysium_dev?lang=en

Efand's Q&As w/ Ash & WhiteKidney https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Co4vCA8D7o

This was compiled from 6PM-930PM EST. EDIT: I listened to Phoosy's Q&A in the LightsHope discord from 12AM-2AM EST and have since added some additional information.

Greetings,

In response to the latest gold seller/buyer leak — we’d like to confirm that these accounts were verified as being Elysium accounts, they were verified as having bought gold from known sellers, and their accounts have now been closed with no option for appeal.

Buying gold severely compromises each realm’s economy, and gives people with more disposable income an unfair advantage in game. It gets your account banned eventually, and the only person who benefits in this scenario is the gold seller. They do not care what happens to your account after you’ve bought gold.

That being said, however, I would like to stress that we do not condone any type of hacking or database manipulation. We would hate to experience the other side of this scenario, and must insist on the community to help us defeat the gold selling market, by not buying.

Remember, gold sellers only exist because there is a market. Once they don’t have a market — the battle is over. Change starts with you.

Tyche

Some screenshots have been recently shown, exposing some of Elysium's private chats. Here is one: <link removed so they'll stop deleting my post eye roll>

Notice what is said about me towards the bottom.

I did not lie about Vitaliy in an attempt to sacrifice him for PR purposes. He was in those chats. He said things that are incriminating. Asura and Whitekidney were investigating him and claim logs surrounding him were deleted. I don't know if Vitaliy did it, but there was too much against him to just ignore it. Even if he is innocent, he needed to step down for the mistakes. I wrote the post, Shenna reviewed it, and approved it. None of it is untrue and I am beyond furious that she would tell the staff that I lied about any of it. I have no idea why she would make such claims, other than with the intention to sacrifice my reputaiton in exchange for Vitaliy's. No thanks on that point.

Additionally, there was a staff metting today. Half of the team is ready to crucify Shenna for her actions yesterday. In particular, both lead GM: GM Nightmare and GM Hades have quit the team.

One positive thing I have gained from all of this is a new respect for Crestfall. I used to dislike them, rivalries being what they are. However in the short time I got to work with them I've come to understand they are the professional leaders we lacked on Elysium (except for Mesh, if she had stayed I don't think any of this would have happened, rip Mesh). I wish them luck, and maybe we can work together once I'm done beating my head into the wall after this week is over.

Peace out.

PS: Tyche the Elysium CM is formerly GM Ajinn. He was rushed through the ranks to replace Snow as the Head GM for Elysium. Instead, we caught him abusing his commands. He made himself two characters with thunderfuries on Anathema, boosted himself to level 45 on Elysium the week it launched. Summoned his guildies into Onyxia on Elysium the week it launched so they could loot him for gold/have the items sitting and waiting. All of this was done via his IP address, though he insisted he was hacked. We removed him from the team instantly. When I announced I was leaving, Shenna brought him back against the will of all of the core members. After he was brought back, his story changed from "I was hacked" to "I had permission from the admins to do it all". Been wanting to say this for a long time.

We wanted to thank the Elysium team for fixing the goblin technician aggro bug in BWL. As of yesterday they no longer stick to their top aggro affinity target, and instead have a proper threat table. This bug has existed since Nostalrius and it's nice to see little things still being improved.

We are here to play the game we love. My only annoyance with the recent scandal is we likely will see a delay in AQ being released. The vocal minority has gone rabid over this circle jerk and it feels like the Elysium team has let it get to them. Everyone with <Pretty Good> would like to remind the Elysium team that we appreciate your volunteer work, and we aren't going anywhere. Thanks for giving us a reliable and populated server to play the game that we love.

<3 Problazer

Dear Community,

Let us discuss what has caused this downtime in complete disclosure.

Two days ago a player on our server received a gift of an unusually large amount of gold. We were instantly made aware of this, began our investigation and quickly discovered that the gold was not genuine. Last night, we found an issue with the hardware and decided shut down for unscheduled maintenance. A little while after, our investigation on the gold showed us that an individual gained access to an account with modification privileges on the Anathema character database. As a result, we decided to immediately shut down all of our services to evaluate the damages, their extent and if this individual had more access.

Our System Admin and devs have isolating the breach, revamped our security, and reverted alterations. There was a lot of data to sift through and Anathema PvP is still under some investigation. Preferring to remain safer than sorry, we have kept the servers down until this afternoon to ensure beyond a shadow of a doubt that all is well. Anathema will return as soon as we are comfortable.

Before anyone starts to panic: We have secured the breach. Your data is safe (use the .account password command in-game to change your password, just in case), and any damage done has been discovered and reverted with no need for a rollback.

We have made contact with the individuals whom gained access, and they did not have the intention of harming us. Rather, they were more interested in testing our security measures. In fact, they have agreed to help us to find any remaining security breaches. As a result, we welcome Auya to the Elysium team who is tasked with making sure we are never in this position, ever again!

All in all, it has been a crazy 24 hours, but everything seems to be in hand. We will take further steps to secure our system as best as possible. While we very much doubt there will be any further issues from this event, we will let you know immediately if any should arise. The community is our primary concern, and we will not let pride prevent us from telling you the truth. Should we get ANY hint of a database leak, we will let you know immediately. However, as of now, we have no reason to be concerned this is the case. We will, though, take this opportunity to once again stress the importance of enabling your two-factor authentication. No matter what kind of attacks we may suffer now or in the future, 2FA will secure your account.

We thank you for your patience with us during the downtime, and hope today’s adventures in the world of Azeroth will make up for the time lost!

Elysium Staff

Link to forum post: https://forum.elysium-project.org/topic/33369-explanation-for-20170117-downtime/

So last night I played in the PvE server just to try out this legacy hype. The feeling I got was interesting because I found myself actually struggling a bit and was amazed at the mobs power at low levels. I realized the beast I was facing once I entered fargodeep mines. I will be honest here and I don't know if I should be ashamed to admit this or what but I died more times here than I ever did questing in whole career of retail wow.

In goldshire I looked for the easy flight to sw but there was none I had to end up walking and next to me was like 10 other people walking to sw as well. I don't know it was pretty darn exciting. Almost every single quest had a party invite and I can say I had an amazing time.

Problem is now this morning I tried to log into retail and felt really bored... I wanted a challenge.. and apparently the challenge is in my level 8 legacy character. I was one of the doubters but I am glad I tried this out and I plan to continue it really matches the hype.

Hi guys. I've been a free (as in freedom) software user and advocate for years. Let me explain current shady situation.

Nostalrius core is a derived work of mangos which is a free software licenced under GNU GPL2. GPL license is very clear about current situation. Licence terms says you can use it without releasing source code of the software but once you release it (like giving it into Elysium) you are basically giving "every single right" to user. That is what free software is about. User is Elysium right now and they are holding every right of the Nostalrius core in their hand according to license terms. They can modify, release or use it however they want to. Nostalrius cannot claim any ownership about GPL licensed code and cannot ask Elysium to stop using their GPL licensed code.

It is clear Blizzard is somehow involved in this. It doesn't make any sense, Nostalrius staff was so happy when they provided their core and database to Elysium, and suddenly they are asking Elysium to remove data and stop using their core without a single valid reason. I don't think Elysium need to show any respect to Nostalrius at this point. They obviously betrayed the vanilla community.

TL;DR Elysium is holding every right to use Nostalrius core and there is no reason to use old core.

Greetings Elysium Community,

We have some great news to share with you, but here’s a brief emulation history lesson first! 

Vanilla WoW was first released in 2004, and it’s now been more than 10 years since official support has ended. After these 10 years, the WoW emulation community has been unable to deliver (in totality) the same finalized product that took Blizzard 5 years to develop. This is despite all of the passion and dedication of multiple development teams.

So what has caused such a delay in finalizing a stable, and accurate, WoW emulator? Initially, each team was developing its own core privately, and closely guarded its secrets. This caused individual development teams to work separately, rather than together for one goal. Often projects would shut down, and that hard work would be lost.

Everyone tried to keep up with Blizzard’s timeline, but things weren’t done properly. Developers started working on Vanilla, then, without finishing, jumped straight into working on TBC. Then moved on to WoTLK, etc — and the cycle of leaving unfinished projects behind continued.  

Additionally, some projects were driven by ideology, while others endeavored to profit from illegal game servers.

For the past 10 years, many projects have been selfish and cared only about their own survival. Developers drove players into flame wars on message boards, stole other team’s code and hid their own, and launched DDoS attacks on rival servers. 

The emulation scene is as competitive, combative, and selfish as it was back then. Despite their passion for coding and development, no open-source project has succeeded, while commercial projects continue to divide the community, driven by their financial interest. 

However, the winds are changing. Right now, emulation isn’t about “playing WoW for free” like it was 10 years ago, but more about restoring a Vanilla WoW experience that no longer exists. After Nostalrius shut down, new developers who’ve never had anything to do with WoW servers before became interested in the emulation cause. 

Ideologically, we’re in an incredible spot. We have community support, we have dedicated fans and developers, and we have a strong working team to finish what we have started.

Which brings us to our big announcement today:

The Elysium Project will be joining forces with the team over at Crestfall to combine our efforts and finalize development of Legacy WoW!

From this point on we will be sharing our passion, experience, developmental, administrative and marketing assets in order to share and grow our community.

Combining our team’s experience in data security will help us protect our work from the constant threat of hack attempts from other projects and various interests. 

This collaboration will deliver to you, our dedicated community and players, the experience you have been craving for the past decade: stable gaming servers that will stand the test of time, without the fear of having to transfer characters around or start from scratch. 

Together we hope to set an example for other projects, and hopefully the wars amongst the community will finally be over.

We cannot stress this enough: we're not in this for money or fame. All we want is to deliver an amazing legacy experience. This may include, down the road, having dedicated teams for each expansion of the game.

We’ve had the support of our players for many years, and now is the time for the WoW development community to step up, bury the hatchet, and get to work — together. Finally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRsiQQbPlJ8

Please keep this in mind, I've noticed that there are many people acting entitled and complaining about the launch so far. These guys do not owe us a damn thing, they are doing this because of their love for the game and the community surrounding it.

Yes, in an ideal world it would be great if they launched the fresh server now; but remember that there are actual people working on this game who want to enjoy the holiday season just like the rest of us.

Please have some patience, all the issues will be ironed out eventually.