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Hey @Boeroer, I'm not sure your availability as of this message, but I was wondering if the forums were still chugging for you right now or if they happen to be stable. I noticed my phone getting alerts between 12:30 and 12:45 showing the forums going up and down multiple times, so it looks like it was pretty unstable around the time of your post (maybe a tad before). I'm curious if the forums struggling then happened to be the culprit. Otherwise, we have been trying to help boost the server allotment to help accommodate the large influx of new users and unregistered guests as we were reaching nearly 2k concurrent users which with 60k queries per minute at times which was stressing the server. We've also been deleting some bad actor IPs we suspect of attacking the forums to leave room for all you good actors to do your thing It's currently looking like we have about half as many users right now as compared to the 2k peak, so I'm hoping the forums are a bit more stable for you now (as they are for me at the moment) than they were earlier, but I'd still be curious to know. As for the reacting to posts failing @Chilloutman and Boeroer, is that a consistent issue you are noticing or is it seemingly random? Thanks a bunch for the reports and for helping us to make the forums a more enjoyable experience!

Hey @Trinmob89, I'm sorry you are running into the same issue. I may have already been told about you having this issue as someone from our Player Support team asked me to test the site to make sure applications were still coming in and indeed they still are and does allow us to submit on various browsers and PCs. We aren't quite sure why you and Notserpent are running into this issue, but our backend web developer is trying to figure out what the cause might be. In any case, you did the right thing reaching out to the support channels as they will get your resume submitted for you One question that did come to mind was if you happen to use any VPN software? I'm curious if that might affect our system from interacting with users. Hopefully we can get this sorted out so you and others don't run into this issue in the future. Thank you for letting us know about this issue and for submitting an application to join us on our adventures in making worlds for our players!

Hey folks! Just checking in on how things are for you. Things seem to be a bit faster on my end, but I am still seeing the forums go down a couple times a day (for about a minute) from all the spamming some of these bad IPs are doing. We are considering the possibility of adding a limit to the amount of actions per second users can do to help a bit as it seems some of these spammers are sending nearly a thousand requests within a few minutes. That said, we also don't want to limit all of your experiences either, though I doubt yall are clicking on links or posting as much as that. In any case, hearing how your experience has been the past week would be great to hear if you have the time. Thanks a ton everyone and sorry for any slowness you've been experiencing.

Hey folks, Thank you for letting us know! We've been seeing the same thing ya'll have been reporting, so it's nice to get confirmation of all the loading time issues (and time outs). We recently updated the forums early last week and on top of that, it seems like we've been getting hit pretty hard by a bunch of spam accounts and "guests". As a result, our backend webmaster has gone through the system and deleted a large amount of the spam IPs on Saturday as a temp measure to help alleviate the server stress a bit. That said, he is still looking at other ways to help optimize our browsing experience and also considering increasing the backend scaling to help the server in times of heavy load. As you notice any changes whether good or bad, we appreciate the notifications so we can continue to make adjustments to make the forums have a smoother and more enjoyable experience. Thanks as always everyone

Great blog @Gorth! My start in gaming was my (at the time) new step-dad's Nintendo Entertainment System with Super Mario Bros. 3 getting me into consoles. Not long after, my blood-related dad got me into PC games with DOOM and Wolfenstein share ware via the old hard floppy disks people shared (got ours from my uncle). I wasn't aware of Interplay or Black Isle, but I did play KotOR 1 for the first time on my friend's Xbox and immediately fell in love. Ended up getting it on PC and when I saw the sequel nearly died until I saw that it was made by some company named Obsidian instead of Bioware. At the time I was like, "Oh man, it's not Bioware? This game is probably going to suck..." To my surprise I enjoyed it even more. Being able to corrupt my companions, especially taking the time to corrupt Mira just felt epic compared to only seeing Bastilla corrupt in the previous title. Years later, I end up seeing South Park and the Stick of Truth and seeing Obsidian and saying, "Oh yea, I forgot about them." I played that game and looooved it, especially Butters as Professor Chaos. It wasn't until my old co-worker from Best Buy reached out to me to play a new game he was a part of developing called Pillars of Eternity that I would forever remember the name Obsidian. He is the one who ultimately helped get me into the gaming industry within Obsidian and I am forever grateful as it's allowed me to work with amazing, creative people both in the studio and within the community. After almost 8 years, I still can't believe the things I get to do and the people I get to do it with. Another thing that your blog resonated with me was your experience playing Fallout, as I started playing it a week ago and only JUST beat that game technically this morning around 1AM and continued to start up Fallout 2. I can't wait to continue the adventure tonight

Hey @mkreku, I'm sorry you've been running into this issue with the Authentication System. I'll have our back-end web developer look into that issue so that you and others have the proper ability to remove the two-factor authentication as needed. In the meantime, I've gone ahead and removed the 2FA from your account so if you would like, you can set it up again without having to use the recovery codes. Thank you for bringing this authentication issue to my attention and sorry again for all the inconvenience its been causing you over the past couple of years.

Hey folks! Sorry for the state the forums have been in lately. From what we have seen, there has been a rather large increase in new members and even bigger increase in non-membered guests visiting the forums as of late, especially after Grounded went to PlayStation and Nintendo. We think the added traffic has been slowing things down a bit, so on Monday night (4/22), we bumped up our database service to try to help with performance. At the moment, I'm not noticing any slowdowns, but if you happen to run into any significant issues or slowdowns, please do let us know so we can look into it further and potentially increase the database service even more.

Hey Bart, It should look like how you see it now. I think you got lucky and missed the in between when it looked like what you see below.

Hey Sarex, Thanks for the heads up. We had a certificate for the MS Login expire and renewed the certificate on Tuesday. I also heard Fionavar was running into the same issue as you whereas I haven't seemed to run into this yet. I'll have our web programmer take a look tonight to see if he can see what might be causing the issue. If you have any updated in the coming days, please let us know so we can be better informed on the issue. Thanks as always and sorry for the trouble with the login system.

Hey Boeroer, How long is your session lasting? Your forum session cookie isn't supposed to expire for 5 days from your last visit to the forums. Any visit before then should refresh the cookie so you don't have to constantly log in every visit. You had mentioned on the 24th that you had to log in more frequently. Is it even more frequent than then, or about the same as then? Thanks for the info and sorry the forums have been goofin on you.

Hey everyone! Sorry for the trouble with the forums today. We ran an update that had some issues and it took awhile to fix. If you notice any additional problems, please let us know so we can take a look and get things back on track for you. Thanks and sorry once again

Hey yall, Seems like another new thing with no new changes having been added. Sadly for my account, it auto expires after a certain amount of hours for security purposes, so it's hard for me to measure. How fast are you finding it to log you out? I'll have our backend programmer take a look while we get ready to push another minor update. Thanks for the heads up!

Hey @Notserpent! I'm sorry you are running into trouble trying to submit an application for the internship program. If you would like, feel free to send us the following information (at least the things marked by an asterisk) by emailing us at support@obsidian.net and the Recruiting Team can manually get you added. *First Name: *Last Name: *Email Address: *Phone #: Address: *Are you Willing to Relocate?: Linkedin Profile URL: Website, blog, or portfolio link: Other than the above if you can attach your resume and any other documents you might have, that would be a big help. Thanks again for letting us know of your interest in joining us for the internship and I hope to hear from you soon!

Hey yall, While Stijn and I played around with some updates as well as adding an additional server, we aren't quite sure those actually were what gave the forums their legs again. From what we could tell, it seemed to be from an external source, so we are keeping an eye on it in the mean time. Thanks again for all your reports and your patience with the slog last week

Hey @LadyCrimson and @Gorth! Thanks for the heads up. Testing myself, I'm noticing the same thing, which is weird as we haven't made any changes in awhile. I've reported it to the web team to take a look and see what the heck is goin on. Hopefully we can get it sorted and back up to speed soon. Thanks again for letting us know and sorry for the trouble

Hey @Shai Hulud, I'm sorry if we missed your submission I looked up your registered email and based upon that looked it up in our support system. It seems you've been sending us emails but when our folks tried to reply back, we would get this auto-response back from the email system: Whether or not your email is actually full or not, I'm not sure, but for some reason our system seems to think it is and won't send our replies out to you. Regarding The Ultimate, if you want to try emailing my work email, I can send you a DM and contact you that way so we can go through your submission. If that works for you, please let me know. Sorry about the trouble this has all been. P.S. Thanks for the ping @Boeroer

Hey Spider, that's great to hear things are working for you again! Don't be afraid to reach out if anything else starts breaking on you in here

Hey @Spider, our web developer took a look at this and said he was able to properly see the videos when he had the cookies accepted. Apparently the links also worked for him as well. He was wondering if you might try deleting your current cookies for the forums and see if it pops up the initial cookie banner for you to reselect the cookies and see if that works for you. Please keep us posted on how that works for you Thanks!

Hey @Spider, Thanks for letting us know about this cookie issue and sorry for the trouble it's causing. I have a meeting with our web developer tonight, so I'll be reaching out to him about this to see what the issue might be and to see why the links are broken. If you notice any changes, please let us know, otherwise, I'll update you here when we have a fix in. Thanks again!

Should be much more visible now

@majestic and @ShadySands thanks for the heads up. Looking into this

Ha, you know I will!

Hey @Boeroer, Sorry to hear about the phone breaking down I went ahead and deactivated the 2FA on your account, so you should be good to set it back up again from a new device when you're ready. If you run into any other trouble with it, just ping me and I'll see what I can do. Hope this helps!

While I have no thoughts or opinions to voice here on any of the topics mentioned on this page, I will say, I very much enjoy popping in here every few weeks to read the information and opinions posted in this thread. Thanks everyone

Hey yall! @BartimaeusI let the powers that be know of the scenario you posted about, so if it isn't already fixed since he was working on the issues, we'll get that fixed up soon @LadyCrimsonif you run into an issue with the request blocked message, can you message here as soon as it happens so we have a time stamp. We should be able to look into it and get that fixed. Unfortunately we had to update our firewall during the holidays due to outside sources and we are trying to white list a bunch of scenarios that we didn't think of that you guys are running into, so thanks for reporting all of these!