We brought you news two weeks ago regarding the state of the ozfortress servers and that we were investigating solutions. With a few of those solutions in mind, we have 4 ozfortress bookable servers ready for use and testing, but we want to set some expectations, along with providing you with all of the information you need on operating them, and what to do if something unexpected happens or if an issue arises.

When testing the new servers, we will be keeping an eye on stability and routing above all else. Provided that this solution is stable, without routing or ping issues, and is achievable long term, we will be able to quickly expand our max server count up to 8. Many of you will remember we previously had 16 servers, however, between less of a need for 16 servers to be ready at a moments notice for off-season cups, and keeping monthly server costs achievable, this is a good compromise.

This sounds all well and good right, but what happens if this solution does not prove to be reliable and/or usable? Good question. In the past, we had the old ozfortress dedicated server box that was initially funded in 2009 by the community. With minimal upgrades over the years, keeping it up to spec at a hardware level would have been costly, and thanks to various providers over the years, we were able to colocate (host the physical server on their network) the servers affordably. But it became apparent after routing issues prior to October that we needed to start looking at other solutions.

As there will be a testing phase (which we aim to end before the start of the season), we will need your help! If you find an issue with the server; stability, ping, routing, plugins, configs, anything - let us know immediately via #admin-support. We will work with you to not only ascertain the scope of the issue but to have it resolved before season play if possible.

So, how do you use them? Thankfully, we have two pages for this. See our Book a Server page for how to book a game server or our Server Configs page for using the configs. Also for changing the map, you can refer to our Map Schedule page.

Thanks,
The ozfortress staff team.