The mad lads have done it! All of a sudden I'm getting some wild itches that I haven't felt before.
Undertaker making a return to its former amazing self? YESSSSS. Arcane Golem was one of my favourite cards in Hearthstone (Face Hunter Gang Hype) so that'll be a fun experiment. I'm a little concerned about game health, so I guess we'll see what happens there.
I think overall though, I'm more interested in what Hearthstone Classic will have to offer. Especially if we can replay Naxx-era Hearthstone at some point (it really is inevitable).
You fall into the second crowd, and that's great because so do I. But a majority of people fall into the first and keeping it as short and sweet for them and highlighting only the important parts is key to keeping attention. They should intrigue one into reading the full recap. If your bullet points end up being just as long as the text, there isn't much point in recapping it.
If there are bullet points you'd like to give feedback over, I would be more than happy to hear what you have to say about them! Feedback on exact issues is the only way to write them better in the future, generic feedback isn't that great though.
Anyone else concerned that there's only 20 cards revealed by the community/new sites? Afaik, previous expansions have had more than double that number...
They usually take a while to get them all up. I don't know why, but there are times where we're still adding them even during the reveal period itself.
I'm guessing a lot of it is left to last minute and people are slow to respond to their emails confirming they will be a part of reveal period. I can confirm though we weren't invited :
I actually left them obnoxious intentionally as a way to very easily identify which ones need to have custom names on them. Today has been a tad busy though so it hasn't been handled yet >.>
Bringing in another incident report, yeah! we had a couple hours of downtime this morning due to issues with our hosting provider.
What makes this scary was when I went to sleep the night before knowing that OVH's SBG-2 data center burned down to the ground. Not kidding, it caught on fire and is a total heap of trash now. It also took out a part of SBG-1. SBG-3 and SBG-4 which are the other two parts of that deployment were taken offline and OVH is currently working on getting what is left of SBG-1 and 3+4 back online over the next 9 days.
Now, this fire didn't occur where we host Out of Cards so that wasn't an issue. But when your host is OVH and you wake up to a dead server, what do you think my first thought was?
Event Log
All times in Eastern.
7:52 AM - Alarms sound that the site is offline.
7:52 AM - Automated notification of a hardware fault on our server from our data center.
10:31 AM - Site is back online.
What Happened
It turns out your server goes offline when they decided to re-cable all the gear!
OVH went through and replaced "a large number of power supply cables" due to a potential problem with their insulation. The maintenance required was critical and also took out networking for some time on the rack our hardware is in which extended our downtime.
In an ideal situation, we'd have better failover protocols and hardware in place if something were to happen at our primary data center. Unfortunately, it isn't justifiable at this point in time to have that with the costs involved. We keep regular multi-location backups so that we can be up and running somewhere else if disaster strikes within a fairly short time frame, having containerized infrastructure helps quite a bit with the agility here, but there will always be some downtime if that happens. We lost some ad revenue and I know it was an inconvenience for people trying to access the site. I think we'll all live though!
Today's downtime gave us an opportunity to confirm our disaster recovery situation and that our backups work properly. If you were to learn something from this situation its that you shouldn't wait until a potential disaster strikes to make sure you have stuff in working order. Your backups are only good if they actually work!
I feel bad for everyone who lost critical information in the fires today. Sometimes it isn't even the fault of developers or the IT department for having poor backup practices. Sometimes your CEO just doesn't think it is necessary to spend money on a backup solution elsewhere to keep your data synced to at least one outside source. It's always fun when that same person who said it wasn't needed starts screaming and asking why there aren't backups in place when something really goes wrong and puts the blame back on them. We call those people assholes.
I don't recommend torching your data center as a method to wake up though.
Those three are also pretty solid repeats! It just sucks because there is definitely a good chunk of repeat brawls people like to see, but if it becomes a yearly thing for all of them... are we going to end up in a spot where we have half the year just repeats of favourites?
I still want to see them let us choose what brawls we want to play. Or like, put a couple live at the same time. If we had one brawl that was new and untested, alongside an old but good one, it would be a cool way of making sure the week always had something good to play in the mode
She will be returning, and probably before the expansion hits. Her return was datamined and usually, when new products are added to the Hearthstone client, they get used before the next major patch hits.
Yeah, then Fandom bought and got rid of it all. Morons. I've see a lot of Curse peeps leave over the past few months too which is kinda impressive that Fandom really managed to kill everything that company was worth.
Gov definitely wouldn't pursue anyone over a small giveaway. If they did, I think Twitch streamers would be in a lot of shit :D
Countdowns should arrive this week with reveals starting as well. I don't have any inside confirmation on that, though I guess in fairness I couldn't say if I did anyway, but it lines up with the March 23 release date to start them now.
If reveals take place this week, we get a final dump Tues or Weds next week and then a client patch that takes us into the pre-release weekend.
I'm not exactly ready to screw up the sleeping schedule, but let's get to it!
That's actually a Canada-wide thing, the skill-testing question! Quebec on the other hand, you need to do a bunch of stuff to legally run a giveaway there which includes but is certainly not limited to:
Telling the government about it a month in advance
Pay the government a fee based on the value of the giveaway
Provide rules in French and English
This is why they are usually excluded; I won't tell if you don't tell. If the Quebec government wants to take me to court over it, they can be my guest. The only people excluded in our site giveaways are those in China since they can't redeem codes from outside the region, not that we have very many mainland visitors.
I hate that there is technically a lot of laws that go into giveaway-related stuff. I get it, running lotteries that aren't governed just all become scams and if you look at Twitter or any other social platform, there are all these people running giveaways but never actually give out a prize or "give it out" to another account they own. Man, free followers would be nice!
I'd love to see better laws around it all. The current ones, IMO, are too restrictive so everyone just ends up operating in a dark grey area since the burden of the overhead in running proper giveaways is too much to deal with. Not that it really matters though since I don't think anyone is actually going to go after someone handing out a $20 steam card or a $50 card pack bundle, lol.
Sidenote: Back when the old site got acquired by Amazon, we weren't allowed to do any more giveaways which is why that stopped. I don't know how many people actually made that connection, but it was corporate policy at Amazon to require a lengthy process to run any kind of giveaway including legal council so it was seen as too much of a burden. The corporate world sucks the damn soul out of ya.
It depends on how much you value your time. You might have some fun which is great, but imo it isn't going to keep most people around, especially with it not really having any other players to play against.
Yeah! We run a script on the backend to do all the syncing so it can sometimes take a minute. I thought we had this explained better but it's possible it got lost in the few updates we've done (we could do a better job at explaining AND promoting premium imo).
Glad everything got worked out though and thanks for the support! Keep in mind that Twitch Prime subs have to be manually redone so when it runs out, feel free to click that button again. <3
Oh. My. God.
The mad lads have done it! All of a sudden I'm getting some wild itches that I haven't felt before.
Undertaker making a return to its former amazing self? YESSSSS.
Arcane Golem was one of my favourite cards in Hearthstone (Face Hunter Gang Hype) so that'll be a fun experiment. I'm a little concerned about game health, so I guess we'll see what happens there.
I think overall though, I'm more interested in what Hearthstone Classic will have to offer. Especially if we can replay Naxx-era Hearthstone at some point (it really is inevitable).
There are two crowds:
You fall into the second crowd, and that's great because so do I. But a majority of people fall into the first and keeping it as short and sweet for them and highlighting only the important parts is key to keeping attention. They should intrigue one into reading the full recap. If your bullet points end up being just as long as the text, there isn't much point in recapping it.
If there are bullet points you'd like to give feedback over, I would be more than happy to hear what you have to say about them! Feedback on exact issues is the only way to write them better in the future, generic feedback isn't that great though.
Bruh, that is one hell of a stretch.
Sucker is in quotes because he called himself a sucker.
For. Real.
Riot is killing it on that front and that was a whole separate discussion I wasn't able to have today.
They usually take a while to get them all up. I don't know why, but there are times where we're still adding them even during the reveal period itself.
I'm guessing a lot of it is left to last minute and people are slow to respond to their emails confirming they will be a part of reveal period. I can confirm though we weren't invited :
If only I mentioned that in the article :P
I actually left them obnoxious intentionally as a way to very easily identify which ones need to have custom names on them. Today has been a tad busy though so it hasn't been handled yet >.>
Hey all,
Bringing in another incident report, yeah! we had a couple hours of downtime this morning due to issues with our hosting provider.
What makes this scary was when I went to sleep the night before knowing that OVH's SBG-2 data center burned down to the ground. Not kidding, it caught on fire and is a total heap of trash now. It also took out a part of SBG-1. SBG-3 and SBG-4 which are the other two parts of that deployment were taken offline and OVH is currently working on getting what is left of SBG-1 and 3+4 back online over the next 9 days.
Now, this fire didn't occur where we host Out of Cards so that wasn't an issue. But when your host is OVH and you wake up to a dead server, what do you think my first thought was?
Event Log
All times in Eastern.
7:52 AM - Alarms sound that the site is offline.
7:52 AM - Automated notification of a hardware fault on our server from our data center.
10:31 AM - Site is back online.
What Happened
It turns out your server goes offline when they decided to re-cable all the gear!
OVH went through and replaced "a large number of power supply cables" due to a potential problem with their insulation. The maintenance required was critical and also took out networking for some time on the rack our hardware is in which extended our downtime.
In an ideal situation, we'd have better failover protocols and hardware in place if something were to happen at our primary data center. Unfortunately, it isn't justifiable at this point in time to have that with the costs involved. We keep regular multi-location backups so that we can be up and running somewhere else if disaster strikes within a fairly short time frame, having containerized infrastructure helps quite a bit with the agility here, but there will always be some downtime if that happens. We lost some ad revenue and I know it was an inconvenience for people trying to access the site. I think we'll all live though!
Today's downtime gave us an opportunity to confirm our disaster recovery situation and that our backups work properly. If you were to learn something from this situation its that you shouldn't wait until a potential disaster strikes to make sure you have stuff in working order. Your backups are only good if they actually work!
I feel bad for everyone who lost critical information in the fires today. Sometimes it isn't even the fault of developers or the IT department for having poor backup practices. Sometimes your CEO just doesn't think it is necessary to spend money on a backup solution elsewhere to keep your data synced to at least one outside source. It's always fun when that same person who said it wasn't needed starts screaming and asking why there aren't backups in place when something really goes wrong and puts the blame back on them. We call those people assholes.
I don't recommend torching your data center as a method to wake up though.
Those three are also pretty solid repeats! It just sucks because there is definitely a good chunk of repeat brawls people like to see, but if it becomes a yearly thing for all of them... are we going to end up in a spot where we have half the year just repeats of favourites?
I still want to see them let us choose what brawls we want to play. Or like, put a couple live at the same time. If we had one brawl that was new and untested, alongside an old but good one, it would be a cool way of making sure the week always had something good to play in the mode
She will be returning, and probably before the expansion hits. Her return was datamined and usually, when new products are added to the Hearthstone client, they get used before the next major patch hits.
Maybe next week?
Yeah, then Fandom bought and got rid of it all. Morons. I've see a lot of Curse peeps leave over the past few months too which is kinda impressive that Fandom really managed to kill everything that company was worth.
Gov definitely wouldn't pursue anyone over a small giveaway. If they did, I think Twitch streamers would be in a lot of shit :D
Countdowns should arrive this week with reveals starting as well. I don't have any inside confirmation on that, though I guess in fairness I couldn't say if I did anyway, but it lines up with the March 23 release date to start them now.
If reveals take place this week, we get a final dump Tues or Weds next week and then a client patch that takes us into the pre-release weekend.
I'm not exactly ready to screw up the sleeping schedule, but let's get to it!
That's actually a Canada-wide thing, the skill-testing question! Quebec on the other hand, you need to do a bunch of stuff to legally run a giveaway there which includes but is certainly not limited to:
This is why they are usually excluded; I won't tell if you don't tell. If the Quebec government wants to take me to court over it, they can be my guest. The only people excluded in our site giveaways are those in China since they can't redeem codes from outside the region, not that we have very many mainland visitors.
I hate that there is technically a lot of laws that go into giveaway-related stuff. I get it, running lotteries that aren't governed just all become scams and if you look at Twitter or any other social platform, there are all these people running giveaways but never actually give out a prize or "give it out" to another account they own. Man, free followers would be nice!
I'd love to see better laws around it all. The current ones, IMO, are too restrictive so everyone just ends up operating in a dark grey area since the burden of the overhead in running proper giveaways is too much to deal with. Not that it really matters though since I don't think anyone is actually going to go after someone handing out a $20 steam card or a $50 card pack bundle, lol.
Sidenote: Back when the old site got acquired by Amazon, we weren't allowed to do any more giveaways which is why that stopped. I don't know how many people actually made that connection, but it was corporate policy at Amazon to require a lengthy process to run any kind of giveaway including legal council so it was seen as too much of a burden. The corporate world sucks the damn soul out of ya.
Not an issue =D
It might come in handy if someone else runs into a similar issue down the line and finds it by chance.
You can find your comments on your profile:
https://outof.cards/members/h0lysatan/comments
Nothing to look at your responses to a particular piece of content though. You best hope its a recent comment :D
Truth! Dead out the door when they had a pay to play motto.
It depends on how much you value your time. You might have some fun which is great, but imo it isn't going to keep most people around, especially with it not really having any other players to play against.
It'll be dead on Monday.
Yeah! We run a script on the backend to do all the syncing so it can sometimes take a minute. I thought we had this explained better but it's possible it got lost in the few updates we've done (we could do a better job at explaining AND promoting premium imo).
Glad everything got worked out though and thanks for the support! Keep in mind that Twitch Prime subs have to be manually redone so when it runs out, feel free to click that button again. <3
Probably a good call!
My assumption based on the last expansion is:
This would give everyone at least 24 hours to finish all their reviews before the giveaway ends, but there definitely isn't much wiggleroom!