The Scavenger Appears! (Plus Comcast issues...)

[Matt]

Congratulations on hitting the 300,000 kill milestone for the Summer Event!

As a reward, the Scavenger will now appear in the Summer Badge Shop, who will appear next to the Silver Badge NPC. You'll be able to trade him silver badges for weapons of your favourite colour...

(These announcements will only be made for important milestones, just to make sure everyone knows)

If you wish to discuss the event or see more information, please go here:

https://www.pioneer2.net/community/threads/ephinea-summer-event.3083/

On another note, we've received a message from our hosting provider about problems with Comcast connections recently. Ephinea's main server is hosted in Chicago and their quoted text is as follows...

Comcast has been struggling in Chicago recently with overloaded transit/peering connections (for a couple of months, but particularly within the last two weeks). This has caused packet loss for many Comcast customers at times. We have been working hard to optimize the traffic to Comcast as much as we can in order to limit the amount of loss that is seen.

Most recently, Comcast has been particularly bad about overloading its connection to Tata (in the Tata->Cogent direction). We have completely excluded that provider from the outbound route selection now, but since Comcast is also overloading connections to other providers, this isn't a full resolution. We are continuing to work on our selection system to have it better juggle which provider is better moment-to-moment and client-to-client.

When packet loss is seen to a client, that client may observe it in the form of poorly-responding interactive sessions, slow or interrupted data transfers, skipping in game servers, or choppy audio in voice servers.

We'll have more information for you as it arrives...