How we keep the servers up
Most community servers are a rented box with a stock mod on it. When something genuinely breaks there's nobody who can go in and fix it, so they put the server on a restart timer and hope. We wrote our mods and we run the machines, so it's ours to deal with.
We wrote the mod, so we can fix the mod
The WaW and Black Ops 2 servers run mods we built. If the shop's broken, or the bank ate your points, or a map won't rotate, that's our code. There's nobody else to wait on.
It's our code
The shop, the bank, gifting, map voting, the stat tracking. We wrote all of it. So when one of them breaks there's nobody else we're waiting on.
You don't get kicked for a fix
A fix waits for your game to finish and it's just there on the next map. We're not clearing a server full of people to install something.
Chat translates itself
Type in your language, everyone else reads it in theirs. We couldn't find anything that did that for these games, so we built it and it's been running on the zombies servers since.
One save, three servers
Your bank, your stats and your leaderboard spot follow you between both NA WaW servers and the EU one. Join whichever has room.
Things that were broken, and what we did
A short list. Every one of these was either killing a server or wrecking somebody's game.
The Black Ops 2 crash
The BO2 server kept dying mid-game and it took us a while to accept the problem wasn't ours. It's a fault in the game itself, and there was no fix out there to install. So we made one. That's what the server runs on now and the crashing stopped.
Dog rounds that never ended
A hellhound would wander off and die somewhere the game didn't register, and the round would just never end. Zero dogs on the counter, no next round, Nuke did nothing. You sat there or you quit. Fixed on all three WaW servers.
A map that killed the server
One map took the whole server down as it loaded and dumped everyone into a lobby they couldn't join or leave. That one took a while to pin down. It's been gated off since.
The one that only hit long games
The server would die deep into a session, never early. So the better your run was going, the more likely it was to end that way. It came down to something we were putting on your screen, and once we changed how that gets drawn the long games stopped dying.
Up, but not really
A game can fall over and still sit there insisting it's online while nobody can get in. We got caught by that more than once. It's checked properly now and comes back on its own.
Exploits
People try things, that's fine. It's how you find the holes. Duplicating points and farming the leaderboard without really playing are both closed. If you turn something up, tell us instead of quietly using it. We'd honestly rather know.
The boring stuff that keeps it up
Nothing clever here. It just means a crash at 3am isn't still a dead server at lunchtime.
It restarts itself
If a server hangs or falls over, something notices and brings it back. Nobody has to be awake for that to happen, which matters because these things never break at a convenient hour.
Your progress is backed up
Backups run on a schedule, and another one runs right before any game update. A bad patch means we roll it back. It doesn't mean you start again.
Updates warn you first
When a game update lands you get a countdown in game before anything happens. No getting dropped mid-round by a patch you didn't know about.
What happens when you tell us
No form, no ticket number, no support queue. Just say what happened.
Say something in Discord
Roughly what you were doing and roughly when. That's usually enough for us to go and find it at our end.
We go and look
Most things we can confirm on the server side without having to come back to you. If we do need something more specific, we'll ask.
It gets fixed, usually within a day
Normally inside 24 hours, often the same evening. If something's going to take longer, we'll tell you why. You won't just get silence.
You keep playing through it
The fix goes on at the next map change. Getting one has never cost anybody a run.
Found something broken?
Tell us. Most of what's on this page started with someone asking "is this meant to happen?"