Hello and welcome to Avernic!

Development has been a little slower than I originally hoped, so I’ve taken some time to decompress and work on a few other things in the meantime – one of those being the website.

In this post I want to briefly explain:

• How we deploy the game and client

• What the website is actually for

• How web accounts, voting and the store fit into everything

Server & Client Deployment (quick overview)

Server

On my development machine:

• Game server is compiled

• Game server is obfuscated

• New data is collected (combat definitions, items, etc.)

• The obfuscated server + data are zipped

• The zip is uploaded to the deployment system

On the dedicated server:

• A short countdown runs and shutdown hooks are honoured

• The new build is unzipped over the existing files that need updating

• The server is started in a development mode for the team to verify the update

• Once checked, the server is restarted in online mode so players can log in

Client

On my development machine:

• Client is compiled

• Client is obfuscated

• Client is deployed to AWS

• Cache is zipped and deployed to the file server

• File server restarts and begins serving the new cache

That’s the “boring but important” side. Now onto the bit you actually see:

As many of you will have seen, when you try to register you’re met with a message along the lines of:

The website is intended for:

• News (updates, development blogs and events)

• The store

• The vote system

• A way to contact players outside of the game and Discord

So why is it set up like this?

One account, one name

Your in-game account is the “real” account.

The website account is just an extension of it, created from in-game so we always know it’s actually you. Nobody can grab your name on the site and pretend to be you.

• You register from in-game using ::register email@address

• The website account uses your in-game name as its username

• That link is permanent: game ⇄ web

Security first

You never enter your in-game password on the website.

The website has its own login and password, and it only ever knows:

• Your in-game name

• The email you chose to link

That’s it. If anything ever happened to the website, your in-game login is still safe.

Why you’d want a web account

ou don’t need a web account to play, and you don’t need one to vote.

You do need one if you want to:

• Use the store

• Post or reply on the forums

• Contact us directly through the website

Voting will still work without logging in, but if you vote while logged into your web account we can make that more feature-rich over time (better tracking, promotions, extras, etc.).

Because everything on the site is tied to your linked web account, anything you buy, earn or are gifted through the site is always delivered to the correct in-game account, even if you or the game are offline at the time.

In short: the game comes first; the website is there to support it, not replace it. The one thing that will always require a web account is the store.

Why the store requires web accounts

The short answer is: safety, speed and accuracy.

A web account lets us:

• Always link a purchase to the correct in-game account

• Avoid mistakes from mistyped names

• Keep a clear history of what you’ve bought and received

We run our own store instead of using a generic RSPS shop because we want:

• A direct connection to the game for fast, reliable delivery

• Fewer third-party sites involved with your payments

• Better control if something goes wrong (missing items, wrong package, etc.)

Some of you from Ancestral will remember that we had to use an external payment gateway there, which meant extra fees and slower support when something went wrong. This time, the controls are in our hands.

Because it’s our own system, we can see exactly why something may not have delivered and fix issues quickly on our side – whether that means adjusting items, adding store credit, or undoing a purchase when appropriate. We don’t have to wait for another company.

So requiring a web account for the store isn’t about locking things down; it’s about making sure every purchase is correctly tied to you, delivered reliably, and can be properly sorted if there’s ever a problem.

Thanks for reading,
Elfinlocks
on behalf of the Avernic team