Month: May 2019

Notice: Issues With Donation Store!

Notice: Issues With Donation Store!

It has come to my attention that there are some bugs in the donation store. These are bugs on Tebex’s (the company that runs the store) side and NOT ours. Therefore, I have reported the issues to them and we can only wait for them to get back to us.

Some people are reporting that our donation store shows a different price than what they actually get charged at checkout. So far, it seems to only effect users who were gifted a rank and are now trying to purchase an upgrade. Our store shows the correct discounted price for the upgrade, but at Paypal checkout it shows the full price of the rank. It does not seem to effect Stripe, but this is not confirmed yet.

I recommend that everyone watch their purchases carefully until these issues are resolved. Make sure you are charged the right amount!

Additionally, some people have noticed that an internal sale we were running for our existing donors could be accessed by buying Baron and then trying to upgrade your rank. THIS SALE HAS BEEN DISABLED DUE TO A SIMILAR BUG – DO NOT TRY TO EXPLOIT THIS SALE ANYMORE – YOU WILL NOT GET THE SALE PRICE!

Reward: Parkour Exploits

Reward: Parkour Exploits

I am offering a weekly vote crate key to anyone who reports an exploit on the Lobby parkour. I will give one key per exploit. Rewards will be given after the exploit is confirmed, proven to be reproduceable, and fixed by staff.

If you have a lobby parkour exploit to report, please PM me on Discord (click my name and message me).

If you would like a different reward, you may ask and I will approve them at my discretion.

Thanks!

Group Photo ~ 125 People!

Group Photo ~ 125 People!

I’m counting 125 people in this photo, but nearly 150 people were online so there may be more in the photo than I counted! Here’s the great photo, thanks everyone!

New Proxy – Better Hardware!

New Proxy – Better Hardware!

Some of you are already familiar with how our server is set up, but let me give the rest of you a bit of info: We rent two dedicated servers and a virtual server from OVH, all hosted in Canada. The virtual server hosts our website as well as Waterfall/Bungeecord, which is a proxy for Minecraft servers. This proxy allows you to connect to all of our different servers while logged into each other (without this proxy, /server wouldn’t work). Then all of our Minecraft servers (Atoll, Meadow, Summit, Valley, Creative, Events, and Lobby) get split up among the two dedicated servers. This setup allows us to support everyone who wants to play. If we only had one server trying to host everything, the CPU would be overloaded.

Up until today, the proxy was running on a virtual server that had 2 cores @ 2Ghz and 100Mbps of network bandwidth. We weren’t sure at first if this would be enough, but over the last 5 months it has held up pretty well! Unfortunately, starting this week, every player online started experiencing very bad pings and seemingly random times. We noticed that during these times that CPU load jumped as much as 400%! We aren’t sure if this is a 1.14.x issue, but that’s a potential suspect.

Since this issue was happening pretty frequently, and we didn’t want to drop support for 1.14.x clients, we decided to upgrade our proxy hardware! We’ve moved the website and proxy to a brand new virtual server with 4 cores @ 2.3Ghz and 500Mbps of network bandwidth. So far, things appear to be running very well – CPU load average is about 1/2 of what we were seeing on the old hardware.

We are hoping that this will clear up that ping spike issue, and also provide a better experience overall for our players. Since this is a major change, there may be bugs over the next couple of weeks that we didn’t catch at first, so please bear in mind reboots may be more frequent than normal.

We Are Waiting for 1.14.2

We Are Waiting for 1.14.2

Hi all. In case it wasn’t clear already, I’m making this official announcement to state we ARE waiting for 1.14.2. I apologize for the late announcement, I’ve been a bit busy.

Again, even after 1.14.2 is released, there is NO guarantee we will update – it all depends on how stable and efficient Minecraft is after it is released. We need to be able to run a server that will not have major bugs, will not crash, and can support at least 50 people on at once. I really want to update, but we will need to wait until those criteria are met.

Thanks for your understanding!

Thank You Patrons!

Thank You Patrons!

Our Patron members are huge supporters of the Altitude server. Their automatic monthly donations provide stable and predictable income for the server that allows us to rest a little easier knowing that we will have the funds necessary to keep Altitude open every month.

Finding a good way to thank our Patrons has always been tough, though! We don’t have many in-game perks to offer players. So, today, I am excited to tell our Patrons that their names are now shown on the homepage of our website as well as the Patron page on our donation store!

Thank you to all of our Patrons: Skizator, KushPinata, astrayalien, Codyc1, darkdeath29, Jim_was_here, sillygoatj, ChaoticNerd, ScorpionAC582, Thorny_, Darkmeyr, Rabbacake, Flamed_, tale_zero, and ThatCatGirl.

See the website at: https://alttd.com
See the store page at: https://donate.alttd.com/patreon

Notice of Return Policy Change

Notice of Return Policy Change

On May 9th 2019, Paypal changed their policy so that sellers do not get refunded the transaction fees if they issue a refund. You can read the official notice of this change here: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/upcoming-policies-full. For this reason, we no longer offer refunds on Paypal transactions. This new policy is in effect starting today, May 12th 2019.

We have offered an alternative payment gateway for over a year now called “Stripe“. It has proven to be a trustworthy and reliable gateway for payment processing. We will continue to honor our old return policy on all Stripe transactions, and we strongly encourage users to use Stripe at checkout instead of Paypal! If you would like to read our return policy you may do so at https://alttd.com/tems

Thank you.

Votes Now Work Across Servers!

Votes Now Work Across Servers!

Starting today, all survival servers will store votes in a shared SQL database. This way, if you have votes spread across multiple servers, the network will still be able to give you your daily and weekly voting rewards. Whichever server you are on when you send your last vote (5th vote for daily rewards, 36th vote for weekly rewards) will give you your reward.

I.E. If you vote 4 times on Valley and then go to Meadow and vote 1 more time, Meadow will give you a daily crate key for voting 5 times.

Please note: The rewards (vote crates) are still specific to each server (if you get a key on one server, it won’t show up on another – it must be used on the server you received it on).

Also, the SQL database does not have any of the old data, so any current streaks will be reset. You can request a staff member to manually give you a key today or tomorrow if you should have received one.

Worldborder Extended!

Worldborder Extended!

Since we are not updating yet, I want to give you all new land to explore/mine/whatever else you do. So, I’ve extended all of the servers’ worldborders by 1,000 blocks in all directions (Old border: +/-10,000 New border: +/-11,000). That’s almost 25% more land!

The extended worldborder is already active, enjoy!

We Are Waiting for 1.14.1

We Are Waiting for 1.14.1

Good morning everyone!

I’d like to give you all a bit of an update regarding 1.14.x on Altitude. We DO want to update to 1.14.x – we’ve always run the latest version of Minecraft on our server, going all the way back to 1.8.3 (here is our first trailer: https://youtu.be/5Hx-zjJe0Dw). However, it is clear that 1.14 has some major issues that Mojang needs to resolve including poor performance, chunks failing to load, and lighting glitches. Dinnerbone has tweeted that 1.14.1 should be released “soon” to fix these issues (https://twitter.com/Dinnerbone/status/1121807490235211776).

Due to these issues, we will be waiting until at least 1.14.1 before updating our server. We cannot risk running a version that will reduce the number of players we can support, or introduce bugs that will ruin everyone’s experience on our servers.

Please note that this does NOT mean we will be updating once 1.14.1 is released. It is possible that 1.14.1 will still contain bugs or performance issues that prevent us from updating. We also do NOT know how we will update – I know some people are concerned about whether the world will be replaced and the answer is: I do not know. I cannot decide how we will update our world until everything else is working – there are many things still being worked on that could affect our options. Right now, 1.14 isn’t even working correctly with native 1.14 worlds, so don’t worry about it and just enjoy the server as is.

Thanks!