Greetings again, everyone!
Very sorry for the lengthy downtime.
As many of you are aware, since around mid-January, PWO has been suffering from some major performance issues. Our entire server had begun to lag, and database connections were dropping or timing out at regular intervals. This led to various Playerdex issues; the game being extremely slow and crashing frequently; and the Forum feeling like we were wading through treacle.
After extensive testing, we decided that PWO was in need of new, upgraded server hardware. This was achieved earlier in the month; and for the past several days, the Staff have been testing out a new PWO Server. With testing going well, and major performance improvements confirmed, we decided to announce downtime 48 hours in advance; and set today for a full migration of all PWO Services to the new hardware.
I'm pleased to state, everything went smoothly. The PWO Forum, Playerdex and game are now all moved over to the new home, and we hope you enjoy a much speedier, more reliable experience across the board!
Unfortunately, moving the server has also meant we've needed to patch the client to correctly connect to the new location. While PWO 1.98.3.4 was
meant to include functionality to try alternate connection paths if the initial connection to the server failed, apparently, this patch wasn't included in all the PWO Installers we had made available for download. As a result, we can't confirm if people will be able to connect to the new server using existing builds of PWO. Thus, we have now released an updated, patched version of PWO 1.98.3.4, which has been fully updated to connect to the new server. We highly encourage everyone to download and update the new PWO 1.98.3.4 as soon as possible, to avoid any unforeseen issues:
https://www.pokemon-world-online.com/download.php
As part of this update, I took the liberty to rebuild the PWO Installer using the original compiler. PWO should once again now be installable on computers prior to Windows 10, with official support going back as far as Windows XP. Not that I recommend using unsupported Windows versions; but if you for some reason have an ancient PC you can't upgrade, at least you can once again come back and join us
And now we get to the good news:
As an apology for all the recent performance issues, Luminance and I have agreed to give
any players who have been active in PWO since 17th January 2025 a free membership extension! If you have played PWO since 00:01 17th January 2025, and you still have membership that was active as of 23:59 18 March 2025, your existing membership has been extended by a further 7 days. If your membership had expired, or you had no membership before this date, you have instead been given a new 3 days membership, for free! This is already activated, and will expire on the 22nd March 2025 at 23:59:59.
The server will be back online shortly after the posting of this announcement. It's my pleasure to welcome you all back, and keep on Catching 'Em All!
