Flight Rising's eighth year in operation starts with blast—or in this case, some blasting powder—as the dragons of Sornieth flock to assist Velya and the Dragonhome Preservation Guild wind their way through ancient caverns just recently unearthed...

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Eight Years? Eight Years?!

It's hard to believe another year has gone by, but our eighth anniversary celebration is upon us. Flight Rising is as strong as ever, with a whole ton more in store. We can't thank you enough for all the stories and laughter and artwork and creativity you've shared with us. Here's to a great eight!

Let's take a trip down memory lane and reflect back on some of the cool stuff that expanded Flight Rising last year:

• We launched the Silhouette Scroll, which applies a permanent toggle to a dragon that allows it to change its pose to the other artwork available for its breed.
• At long last, the Hoard and Vault were revamped, adding many new functions and increased usability.
• Our newest ancient breed, the tiny tricksters of Shadow, the Veilspun, came out of hiding.
• The World Map Revamp was launched, improving and expanding the world of Sornieth with rich, animated artwork and brand new locations to discover.
• The revamped Marketplace was deployed, bringing us ever closer towards our goal of refactoring the Flight Rising codebase and improving features in the process.
• After feedback from the Flight Rising community, we made adjustments to the Eye Type system, allowing natural eye types to be acquirable both randomly via breeding, and also as eye vials in the Marketplace.
• Boreal Wood turkeys changed their migration pattern and now appear year-round in the Coliseum.
• We had a great time with another Item Caption Contest.
• Multiple new feats were added to Fiona's Fantastic Familiars.
• Redrock Cove, Sandswept Delta, and Forgotten Cave saw revamps, adding more varied enemies and loot to their rosters.
• Pinkerton's Plundered Pile received a visual makeover.
• Several new familiars, scenes, apparel items, and vistas were released.
• We expanded the number of dragon slots in the Lair and Hibernal Den.

The following genes were launched:

• Mosaic
• Breakup
• Koi
• Braids (Gaoler)
• Stained (Gaoler, Banescale, Veilspun)
• Underbelly (Veilspun)
• Laced (Gaoler)
• Edged (Gaoler)
• Tapir (Banescale)
• Striation (Banescale)
• Clown (Banescale, Gaoler, Veilspun)
• Eye Spots (Banescale, Gaoler, Veilspun)
• Falcon (Banescale)
• Peregrine (Banescale)
• Ripple (Banescale, Gaoler)
• Current (Banescale, Gaoler)
• Giraffe (Banescale, Veilspun)
• Hex (Banescale, Veilspun)

A number of quality of life improvements were implemented, including:

• After exalting a dragon, players now have the option to return to the lair (the exact lair page the dragon was on) or view the exalted dragon.
• Dragon apparel selection has been updated. Category tabs have been scaled down to make room for more search results. To aid apparel browsing, without loading excessive items, each search page will now include up to 120 results - a 5x increase.
• You can now search for familiars by nickname in the Bestiary and Familiar Select pages. The Bestiary also displays nicknames.
• The Higher or Lower Fairgrounds game has been updated. In addition to many behind-the-scenes improvements, game button placement has been modified so that it's easier to progress through rounds.
• You can now choose whether attaching an item to a private message or Crossroads trade will automatically select a single item or a full stack. This option is listed as Item Select Quantity under account settings.

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Sitewide Effort: Dustcarve Dig

As the main attraction for this year's festivities, we've kicked off a limited sitewide event called the Dustcarve Dig. This event is unlike any that we've run on Flight Rising before, so without ruining some of the surprises around the corner, we'll detail a bit about how it works.


Premise

Velya (first featured in our Ancient Fascinations lore story) and the Dragonhome Preservation Guild have had enough on their plates with the sudden influx of visitors and adventurers to the Colonnades of Antiquity, but now they're grappling with a seismic issue that may upend Sornieth life as we know it. In order to unearth the secrets surrounding this recent event, they've kicked off a massive collaborative project called the Dustcarve Dig, and are going to need the help of every flight to see it through.


How it Works

Working through a series of planned milestones (phases), Flight Rising players will be asked to find and contribute vital supplies to help Velya's dig team tunnel deep into the earth. These supplies will drop randomly any time players perform normal tasks on the site. Almost every feature has a chance to yield these important items, and the dig team will need vast amounts of them to make progress. Thankfully, there are a lot of you!

Here are the features that will yield event-related items:

• Starting a new nest by breeding two dragons.
• Hatching a fully-incubated nest.
• Performing any type of gathering skill.
• Collecting a transmuted slime/goo at Baldwin's Bubbling Brew.
• Exalting dragons.
• Performing swaps at Swipp's Swap Stand.
• Trading items for gold at Crim's Collection Cart.
• Answering trivia questions correctly at Tomo's Trivia Tablet.
• Bonding with familiars.
• Claiming an item from Pinkerton's Plundered Pile.
• Battling monsters in the Coliseum.

Once the requisite number of items have been turned in for the active milestone, it will be considered complete, and the dig team will take a much needed rest to prepare for the next phase. At that time, players who participated in the milestone will be able to collect rewards for helping.

(NOTE: You can identify when the event is accepting items by checking website's main page banner, which will indicate whether the dig is in an active state (green flag) or a rest state (orange flag with ZZZ).)


Participation & Rewards

It is purposely very easy to participate in the event, and the Dustcarve Dig will reward players in two ways:

• Per Milestone: If you turn in at least one (1) item during a milestone, you will receive a reward for participating in that milestone. There are five (5) milestones for this event, so if you turn in an item for each, you'll get five (5) milestone rewards in all.
• Event Conclusion: If you turn in at least one (1) item in at least one (1) milestone during the entire run of the event, you will receive a reward for participating in the event when it has fully concluded. We encourage all players to participate in at least one (1) milestone, because the event reward is very special!

Event Pacing

While the act of collecting and turning in items in a milestone will update dynamically, and milestones will conclude on their own, the act of kicking off new milestones is a manual process that the development team of Flight Rising will be controlling. This is primarily so that our team can be present for support, monitoring, and the fun of the event without necessitating any of our team members needing to stay up at odd-hours to watch milestones changeover or the event rapidly conclude. As we've said before, we don't exercise crunch at our company, and prefer our employees work fairly standard hours for their own well-being. This is part of that promise.

While we won't be able to give a definitive time that milestones will begin, you can expect that they'll likely be sometime early in the day when the majority of our team starts work and is present.

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Anniversary Gift

As a way of saying thank you and celebrating Flight Rising's anniversary, Galore will be giving out the following scene to all players, which will be collectible until Monday, June 14 at 23:59 server time.

It will also be possible to brew extra copies of this scene at Baldwin's Bubbling Brew for the same duration.

>.>
<.<

Me, too...

^.^;
;)

Maintenance in just under an hour!

No hints.

[redacted]

Me, this is me

Happy Monday, everyone! We hope your Monday is going well!

What're your Flight Rising plans for this week?

Quick reminder, we have a scheduled maintenance to kick off our 8th anniversary tomorrow, Tuesday June 8th, that starts at 08:00 server time!

New memories are found in the coliseum!

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Coliseum Scenes
Dragons who battle through the the coliseum now have a chance to receive a scene to commemorate their adventures! Scene: Sandswept Delta, Scene: Blooming Grove, Scene: Waterway, and Scene: Arena now have a rare chance to drop off opponents from those locations!

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Brightshine Jubilee Skin & Accent Contest
The ninth annual Brightshine Jubilee will begin June 27, and we're running a skin and accent contest in celebration! Click here for more information!

Human error happened!

A space was eaten between a datestamp and a timestamp, defaulting the start date/time to now and briefly activating Frigidfin Expedition as a result. This is now fixed. Our apologies for any confusion!

At approximately 02:30 Server Time this morning (about 6 hours ago) our hosting provider changed some routing settings to avoid that particular router. We are able to confirm that packets sent from our server to a sample of affected players are no longer traveling through that router, at least at the moment.

We hope that this improves things for affected players!

Sometimes it's as simple as equipment failure. Hardware has a lifespan, especially if any part of it or its connections are exposed to the elements. It could even be simpler than that—like an overly enthusiastic squirrel. I've seen that happen.

Hello all, I have a small but promising update.

We have collected very strong evidence that, for affected players, the path their traffic takes is passing through a specific internet router that may be malfunctioning. Specifically, it looks like there is high packet loss occuring at or near that router.

It does not appear that this router is owned by our hosting provider. The router is one hop outside their network, though, so depending on exactly what the underlying cause is, it may be possible for them to do something about it.

We have sent our findings to the hosting provider and will update this thread as the situation develops.

On fire? No.

That would require the forums to load quickly.

Hello all, yet another update.

We have received a notification from our hosting provider that they are going to be performing emergency network maintenance due to an equipment failure. Based on the times I have been given, this will occur between 11:00 - 12:00 Server Time. There are likely to be interruptions during this period.

While we don't have confirmation it is related yet, we are hoping that this is related to the issues players have been experiencing recently and will resolve some of the remaining problems.

Thank you again for your patience, everyone!

EDIT: Our hosting provider has extended the maintenance window through 13:00 Server Time.

Hello all, I apologize for the issues. It looks like there was a brief approximately 10 minute spike during which the issues returned, and then disappeared again.

Here is the current approximate timeline:

• 05:10 Server Time - Issue stops
• 06:00 - 07:45 - Maintenance
• 08:48 - Brief return of issue
• 09:00 - Issue stops again

None of the times when the issue started or stopped correspond with any changes that we or our hosting provider have made, to the best of our knowledge.

We are currently monitoring the situation to see if it returns.

Sorry about this, Glimmer & Gloom and Mistral Mahjong should be accessible now.

Hello all,

Thank you for your patience during the maintenance period. Our hosting provider has performed networking diagnostic tests on our server, and they did not find anything wrong with the server that would explain the slow loading issues.

Additionally, we have identified some monitoring charts that correlated strongly with the problem. A little after 05:00 Server Time today they suddenly showed a dramatic improvement. We are crossing our fingers that perhaps this improvement is permanent. If this is the case it would suggest that the problem is external to our individual server, which would explain why it has been difficult to identify the cause.

Additionally, the server has been rebooted, and its network cable has been replaced and moved to a new port.

Please let us know if there has been an improvement for you going forward.

EDIT: We are also seeing the issue with Glimmer & Gloom and Mistral Mahjong, we are investigating.

EDIT 2: Glimmer & Gloom and Mistral Mahjong should be accessible now.

Hello all,

We are going to be putting the site into maintenance from approximately 06:00 - 07:00 Server Time tomorrow, Thursday May 20, in order for our hosting provider to perform diagnostics. These times are approximate as we cannot predict exactly how long their team will need.

Thanks for your patience while we work through this issue!

Thanks for your reports, everyone. We have let our hosting company know that the change referenced in this post has not made an improvement.

Hello all, our hosting provider has made a change on their end at approximately 14:17 Server Time. Please let us know if you are still encountering problems going forward. If there is no improvement, we will continue to pursue other options.

The current cause is unknown. It could be something on our end, something on our host's end, something in between us and the affected players, our host and the affected players, or a failing router somewhere. We're still investigating and waiting for answers. That particular 502 error message wasn't the server malfunctioning, but a quick "did you turn it off and on again?" on some services to see if that fixed it.

The 502 was one of the engineers on our side giving the server a poke.

Update:

Not much to report in at the moment, unfortunately. We are still investigating this issue. We're collecting data, we've contacted our host, and we're waiting on more information. Hopefully we'll have some answers soon, but no ETA for those at this time.

Hello folks! Quick update for you:

• We're able reproduce the reported slowness.
• What we're seeing happens intermittently; meaning they work fine for a while and then some things load s l o w l y for a bit.
• It appears to be networking related. It looks like there is packet loss happening.

We're working on narrowing down where exactly this is happening (ie, internet backbone, hosting provider, our specific server, etc), but it could take awhile. Thank you for your patience, and as soon as we have more information for you we'll let you know here in the thread!

Hello everyone, thank you for your reports! We're looking into this and we need the following information from you:

• Connection type: Wifi, wired, mobile data, etc
• Network: School, work, home, VPN
• Anti-virus/malware software used
• Device type
• Browser
• Operating system

Obligatory question, because this one has gotten me a few times :

Everything is up to date? If not, please try updating your device/browser/OS and try again.

Hello folks! I'm going to go ahead and lock this thread, as the information being shared here will be more helpful for our engineers in the existing thread on this topic in the Bug Reports forum. Thank you!

Magnificent.

@Niomedes @probablyaflower @yesteryear @keet

I believe we have fixed this issue, please try again and let me know if you still have problems! You will likely have to refresh the page or start a new Crossroads to test.

Thanks -- we are able to reproduce this issue on macOS specifically, so we should have a fix incoming relatively soon!