Someone accidentally the Japanese MMO M2

Joakim Larsen 14 Nov, 2011 at 3:08pm ET Article published in Gaming

On the 21st of October, the Japanese MMO “M2” was taken offline due to what the producers, Sankando, described as a critical server issue.

However, sometime during the maintenance process, someone deleted the entire game from the server. No big deal you say, but here is where the interesting part comes in.

The company didn’t keep any backups whatsoever. Attempts were made to try and restore the game, but to no avail. Sankando now adds itself to the growing list of companies that have experienced critical data loss with no backups.

The letter that went out (translated):

There is something we must inform our valued customers of.

On the 21st of October, 2011, at 20:00, we undertook emergency maintenance on the server due to a critical issue.

Service was to resume promptly, but work performed by Sankando could not restore the game’s data. It is tremendously regrettable, but unfortunately we have no choice but to end service. Thank you all for enjoying M2 for so long! Our heartfelt apologies for it having turned out like this.

M2’s userbase is admittedly not very large, but the game based itself on microtransactions, where players spend their hard earned money on in-game items.

Comments

14 Nov 2011 ~ 3:46pm Bandrik I doubt I've even heard of M2 before, but... man, that just sucks. At least, for the gamers. A massive clusterfuck of nearly epic proportions on the gaming company's side of things.

Can you imagine what kind of internet riot would be had if this happened to a MMO with a larger audience? Like oh, say, World of Warcraft?

No Sword of a Thousand Truths would save the developers from being Leeroy Jenkin'd alive by the masses of angry video game nerds the world over.
14 Nov 2011 ~ 4:01pm Chooch ouch!
14 Nov 2011 ~ 4:51pm QCH WOW...
14 Nov 2011 ~ 5:09pm ardichoke Everyone say it with me now... 3,2,1 - 3 backups, 2 different media, 1 off-site.
14 Nov 2011 ~ 5:35pm QCH Don't forget... test deployment of said backup to make sure a) you know how to do a recovery b) the backup actually works c) determine how long to do a recovery for future reference.

I've seen too many "backups" that are either corrupt, the wrong files were backed up, or no one knew exactly how to do a recovery. I'm sure a few people her at Icrontic know what I'm talking about.
16 Nov 2011 ~ 2:00pm Senso This would not happen on larger games simply because the games are already spanned across multiple servers for both access and play. This was just poor planning on the game developer's part. Seriously, what was the thought process behind not running backups?
17 Nov 2011 ~ 10:15am Zach Almost sounds like a really bad video game ponzi scheme. Depending on the amount of money they had made by this point, I am curious to think how much profit they keep by not having to pay for server upkeep or even employment if the company just shut down the entire thing.
17 Nov 2011 ~ 10:45am CrazyJoe Whatever profit they made (if any) they would have continued to make that profit if they kept the game up, so now they will not be making any more. So I seriously doubt they'd do something like this on purpose for a "bad video game ponzi scheme." That'd be like saying, "Think of all the money Blizzard could keep if they shut down WOW and stopped having to pay for employees or server upkeep." Any profitable business would want to stay in business to continue making profit.
17 Nov 2011 ~ 10:50am ardichoke Not to mention that a ponzi scheme refers to a very specific type of investment scheme where you take peoples money for something that doesn't actually exist. This game did exist and people played it. An actual video game ponzi scheme would be to take money for pre-orders of a game that you never actually released (or even started to develop for that matter).