We'll have the option available when account management gets an overhaul. All cosmetics need proper preview options so you can see not only what they look like but also how they will appear on your profile. =)
Life was so much easier when we just had forum titles to deal with, lol.
We’ve heard your feedback: higher levels of the reward track just take too much XP to reach. We originally included event reward XP when calculating our intended cadence of rewards. We’ve rethought this and recognize that the rewards track should stand on its own and not require event XP bonuses, making rewards predictable and consistent across an expansion. We will still have in-game events, of course, but they will remain consistent with our existing approach to event rewards instead of rewarding bonus XP for the rewards track.
I've been reading up on some forums, and I felt the need to say this because nobody seems to understand: data is expensive. You can't just "save all the data in a bunch of data centres" because that costs too much. A 1 terabyte hard drive already runs upwards of $140, and you also have to pay for security and bandwidth and a whole bunch of stuff. If people could save their data everywhere, then they would.
EDIT: Should probably point out that I don't work in IT. My knowledge comes from my friends that do.
Relatively speaking, data storage isn't that expensive, neither is bandwidth, compute sure as hell is though.
It is cheaper, in the long run, to run your own drives and hardware RAID in a couple of different places if we're just talking about files, but you're better off using an object store like Amazon's AWS S3. They worry about all the stuff that can go wrong and your data is built with the loss of two data centers in mind. (The odds of 3 data centers losing the same files in three places at the same time? I'll take that risk). Even with that in mind though, anything critical you are storing on S3 you should also mirror somewhere else. It could be an on-premises NAS or Google / Azure clouds - never trust a single service.
If you need a database though, that's when things can get pricy. Depending on the workloads you're dealing with, you're going to need comparable hardware in your second location if you want to do a real-time replica (which ensures little to no data loss when the primary fails). You'll also need to do backups (at least daily) to dump into storage but storage itself is cheap so that's not a big deal.
If your business relies on its data, it is in your best interest to make sure you can recover when a failure happens. Failures are ALWAYS a when and not if situation. You can be as proactive as you want but even that is not enough to give you a 100% guarantee that you are safe. If a business can't afford the cost to make regular backups of their essential data, I don't think they're doing a very good job as a business.
The only thing that Out of Cards doesn't have is the ability to instantly switch the site onto a fresh set of hardware. There would be some downtime involved since our compute isn't distributed. I don't consider it essential at this point, though it would be nice, because we're talking about a relatively small amount of downtime. I'd prefer us to have zero, but that's a spot I'm willing to penny-pinch on for now.
Only because I hate that 90% (I have no real source on that number) of giveaways online are all fake.
Well, okay maybe that isn't the only reason but I sure do hate those assholes. I do think its just good practice to get people to follow their own rules :D
Winners were drawn and contacted. I listed them in the comments on the Path to Ascension and we'll have an article up today with their names in it and some commentary on our HS giveaway.
The mad lads have done it! All of a sudden I'm getting some wild itches that I haven't felt before.
Undertaker making a return to its former amazing self? YESSSSS. Arcane Golem was one of my favourite cards in Hearthstone (Face Hunter Gang Hype) so that'll be a fun experiment. I'm a little concerned about game health, so I guess we'll see what happens there.
I think overall though, I'm more interested in what Hearthstone Classic will have to offer. Especially if we can replay Naxx-era Hearthstone at some point (it really is inevitable).
You fall into the second crowd, and that's great because so do I. But a majority of people fall into the first and keeping it as short and sweet for them and highlighting only the important parts is key to keeping attention. They should intrigue one into reading the full recap. If your bullet points end up being just as long as the text, there isn't much point in recapping it.
If there are bullet points you'd like to give feedback over, I would be more than happy to hear what you have to say about them! Feedback on exact issues is the only way to write them better in the future, generic feedback isn't that great though.
Anyone else concerned that there's only 20 cards revealed by the community/new sites? Afaik, previous expansions have had more than double that number...
They usually take a while to get them all up. I don't know why, but there are times where we're still adding them even during the reveal period itself.
I'm guessing a lot of it is left to last minute and people are slow to respond to their emails confirming they will be a part of reveal period. I can confirm though we weren't invited :
I actually left them obnoxious intentionally as a way to very easily identify which ones need to have custom names on them. Today has been a tad busy though so it hasn't been handled yet >.>
Bringing in another incident report, yeah! we had a couple hours of downtime this morning due to issues with our hosting provider.
What makes this scary was when I went to sleep the night before knowing that OVH's SBG-2 data center burned down to the ground. Not kidding, it caught on fire and is a total heap of trash now. It also took out a part of SBG-1. SBG-3 and SBG-4 which are the other two parts of that deployment were taken offline and OVH is currently working on getting what is left of SBG-1 and 3+4 back online over the next 9 days.
Now, this fire didn't occur where we host Out of Cards so that wasn't an issue. But when your host is OVH and you wake up to a dead server, what do you think my first thought was?
Event Log
All times in Eastern.
7:52 AM - Alarms sound that the site is offline.
7:52 AM - Automated notification of a hardware fault on our server from our data center.
10:31 AM - Site is back online.
What Happened
It turns out your server goes offline when they decided to re-cable all the gear!
OVH went through and replaced "a large number of power supply cables" due to a potential problem with their insulation. The maintenance required was critical and also took out networking for some time on the rack our hardware is in which extended our downtime.
In an ideal situation, we'd have better failover protocols and hardware in place if something were to happen at our primary data center. Unfortunately, it isn't justifiable at this point in time to have that with the costs involved. We keep regular multi-location backups so that we can be up and running somewhere else if disaster strikes within a fairly short time frame, having containerized infrastructure helps quite a bit with the agility here, but there will always be some downtime if that happens. We lost some ad revenue and I know it was an inconvenience for people trying to access the site. I think we'll all live though!
Today's downtime gave us an opportunity to confirm our disaster recovery situation and that our backups work properly. If you were to learn something from this situation its that you shouldn't wait until a potential disaster strikes to make sure you have stuff in working order. Your backups are only good if they actually work!
I feel bad for everyone who lost critical information in the fires today. Sometimes it isn't even the fault of developers or the IT department for having poor backup practices. Sometimes your CEO just doesn't think it is necessary to spend money on a backup solution elsewhere to keep your data synced to at least one outside source. It's always fun when that same person who said it wasn't needed starts screaming and asking why there aren't backups in place when something really goes wrong and puts the blame back on them. We call those people assholes.
I don't recommend torching your data center as a method to wake up though.
Fixed the typo!
We'll have the option available when account management gets an overhaul. All cosmetics need proper preview options so you can see not only what they look like but also how they will appear on your profile. =)
Life was so much easier when we just had forum titles to deal with, lol.
To piggyback on this comment to provide a sour, this was a part of their big announcement 3 months ago
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/2302-blizzard-responds-to-the-hearthstone-rewards-track-less-xp-required-gold-bonus-next-week-more-xp-gains
I'm pretty certain I don't teach math and I've been celebrating Pi Day for as long as I can remember.
A great reason to have some delicious Apple Pie for dessert and maybe have a Pizza =D
Happy Pi Day all!
Relatively speaking, data storage isn't that expensive, neither is bandwidth, compute sure as hell is though.
It is cheaper, in the long run, to run your own drives and hardware RAID in a couple of different places if we're just talking about files, but you're better off using an object store like Amazon's AWS S3. They worry about all the stuff that can go wrong and your data is built with the loss of two data centers in mind. (The odds of 3 data centers losing the same files in three places at the same time? I'll take that risk). Even with that in mind though, anything critical you are storing on S3 you should also mirror somewhere else. It could be an on-premises NAS or Google / Azure clouds - never trust a single service.
If you need a database though, that's when things can get pricy. Depending on the workloads you're dealing with, you're going to need comparable hardware in your second location if you want to do a real-time replica (which ensures little to no data loss when the primary fails). You'll also need to do backups (at least daily) to dump into storage but storage itself is cheap so that's not a big deal.
If your business relies on its data, it is in your best interest to make sure you can recover when a failure happens. Failures are ALWAYS a when and not if situation. You can be as proactive as you want but even that is not enough to give you a 100% guarantee that you are safe. If a business can't afford the cost to make regular backups of their essential data, I don't think they're doing a very good job as a business.
The only thing that Out of Cards doesn't have is the ability to instantly switch the site onto a fresh set of hardware. There would be some downtime involved since our compute isn't distributed. I don't consider it essential at this point, though it would be nice, because we're talking about a relatively small amount of downtime. I'd prefer us to have zero, but that's a spot I'm willing to penny-pinch on for now.
In an ideal setup, Out of Cards would be distributed in a few locations and we'd run Chaos Monkey.
https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey
I've always wanted to run infrastructure with that running.
Are you visiting this page?
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/expansions/forged-in-the-barrens
That is the exact page you need to be on for it and it seems to have just credited me for it np.
We are moving the giveaway date as announced this morning. You now will have until March 24th to finish all your ratings and comments.
I like this answer.
But yeah, it is a random chance to win with more chances the more tickets you have
Only because I hate that 90% (I have no real source on that number) of giveaways online are all fake.
Well, okay maybe that isn't the only reason but I sure do hate those assholes. I do think its just good practice to get people to follow their own rules :D
Update: Our giveaway for the site has been updated. We will now be ending it on March 24, not March 18 as previously announced.
More information on the change will be posted on the homepage today.
Winners were drawn and contacted. I listed them in the comments on the Path to Ascension and we'll have an article up today with their names in it and some commentary on our HS giveaway.
Winners: NerdyMcNerd, JFK, Draketh
Drawn at: 2021-03-11T22:30:07.040913+00:00
Total Entries: 115
Adding 2 entries for ToxiChris.
Adding 1 entries for MachineGod.
Adding 1 entries for Urahata.
Adding 1 entries for simon002.
Adding 5 entries for Draketh.
Adding 1 entries for R.
Adding 2 entries for tnrg.
Adding 1 entries for NebuchadnezzarHS.
Adding 2 entries for LilUziGurt.
Adding 2 entries for EpicPickle.
Adding 1 entries for darkoprk.
Adding 1 entries for FrankRazor.
Adding 3 entries for Theodrinus.
Adding 1 entries for minuano28.
Adding 1 entries for ReverendArvide.
Adding 1 entries for bananenparty.
Adding 5 entries for JFK.
Adding 1 entries for Bilot.
Adding 3 entries for juanlufc5.
Adding 4 entries for Psymon.
Adding 3 entries for LethalSpectre.
Adding 1 entries for Knifemare.
Adding 5 entries for Grumpy000.
Adding 4 entries for NerdyMcNerd.
Adding 3 entries for Karmin.
Adding 4 entries for Demonxz95.
Adding 2 entries for MisterGuedes.
Adding 3 entries for Psychopomp.
Adding 1 entries for Kiyo.
Adding 1 entries for TkGuardian.
Adding 3 entries for Pyronix.
Adding 1 entries for Drageren.
Adding 2 entries for FenrirWulf.
Adding 4 entries for Zolgear.
Adding 3 entries for RangersHL30.
Adding 2 entries for Thresh.
Adding 4 entries for GerritDeMan.
Adding 4 entries for sto650.
Adding 1 entries for DarkFrostX.
Adding 2 entries for Amaringo.
Adding 5 entries for Topandito.
Adding 1 entries for CaptainDG.
Adding 3 entries for SAYONARAARIGATO.
Adding 2 entries for linkblade91.
Adding 4 entries for Pekulik.
Adding 1 entries for TripleAwe13.
Adding 4 entries for TrussHS.
['TheDarkLord', 'TheDarkLord', 'TheDarkLord', 'ToxiChris', 'ToxiChris', 'MachineGod', 'Urahata', 'simon002', 'Draketh', 'Draketh', 'Draketh', 'Draketh', 'Draketh', 'R', 'tnrg', 'tnrg', 'NebuchadnezzarHS', 'LilUziGurt', 'LilUziGurt', 'EpicPickle', 'EpicPickle', 'darkoprk', 'FrankRazor', 'Theodrinus', 'Theodrinus', 'Theodrinus', 'minuano28', 'ReverendArvide', 'bananenparty', 'JFK', 'JFK', 'JFK', 'JFK', 'JFK', 'Bilot', 'juanlufc5', 'juanlufc5', 'juanlufc5', 'Psymon', 'Psymon', 'Psymon', 'Psymon', 'LethalSpectre', 'LethalSpectre', 'LethalSpectre', 'Knifemare', 'Grumpy000', 'Grumpy000', 'Grumpy000', 'Grumpy000', 'Grumpy000', 'NerdyMcNerd', 'NerdyMcNerd', 'NerdyMcNerd', 'NerdyMcNerd', 'Karmin', 'Karmin', 'Karmin', 'Demonxz95', 'Demonxz95', 'Demonxz95', 'Demonxz95', 'MisterGuedes', 'MisterGuedes', 'Psychopomp', 'Psychopomp', 'Psychopomp', 'Kiyo', 'TkGuardian', 'Pyronix', 'Pyronix', 'Pyronix', 'Drageren', 'FenrirWulf', 'FenrirWulf', 'Zolgear', 'Zolgear', 'Zolgear', 'Zolgear', 'RangersHL30', 'RangersHL30', 'RangersHL30', 'Thresh', 'Thresh', 'GerritDeMan', 'GerritDeMan', 'GerritDeMan', 'GerritDeMan', 'sto650', 'sto650', 'sto650', 'sto650', 'DarkFrostX', 'Amaringo', 'Amaringo', 'Topandito', 'Topandito', 'Topandito', 'Topandito', 'Topandito', 'CaptainDG', 'SAYONARAARIGATO', 'SAYONARAARIGATO', 'SAYONARAARIGATO', 'linkblade91', 'linkblade91', 'Pekulik', 'Pekulik', 'Pekulik', 'Pekulik', 'TripleAwe13', 'TrussHS', 'TrussHS', 'TrussHS', 'TrussHS']
Oh. My. God.
The mad lads have done it! All of a sudden I'm getting some wild itches that I haven't felt before.
Undertaker making a return to its former amazing self? YESSSSS.
Arcane Golem was one of my favourite cards in Hearthstone (Face Hunter Gang Hype) so that'll be a fun experiment. I'm a little concerned about game health, so I guess we'll see what happens there.
I think overall though, I'm more interested in what Hearthstone Classic will have to offer. Especially if we can replay Naxx-era Hearthstone at some point (it really is inevitable).
There are two crowds:
You fall into the second crowd, and that's great because so do I. But a majority of people fall into the first and keeping it as short and sweet for them and highlighting only the important parts is key to keeping attention. They should intrigue one into reading the full recap. If your bullet points end up being just as long as the text, there isn't much point in recapping it.
If there are bullet points you'd like to give feedback over, I would be more than happy to hear what you have to say about them! Feedback on exact issues is the only way to write them better in the future, generic feedback isn't that great though.
Bruh, that is one hell of a stretch.
Sucker is in quotes because he called himself a sucker.
For. Real.
Riot is killing it on that front and that was a whole separate discussion I wasn't able to have today.
They usually take a while to get them all up. I don't know why, but there are times where we're still adding them even during the reveal period itself.
I'm guessing a lot of it is left to last minute and people are slow to respond to their emails confirming they will be a part of reveal period. I can confirm though we weren't invited :
If only I mentioned that in the article :P
I actually left them obnoxious intentionally as a way to very easily identify which ones need to have custom names on them. Today has been a tad busy though so it hasn't been handled yet >.>
Hey all,
Bringing in another incident report, yeah! we had a couple hours of downtime this morning due to issues with our hosting provider.
What makes this scary was when I went to sleep the night before knowing that OVH's SBG-2 data center burned down to the ground. Not kidding, it caught on fire and is a total heap of trash now. It also took out a part of SBG-1. SBG-3 and SBG-4 which are the other two parts of that deployment were taken offline and OVH is currently working on getting what is left of SBG-1 and 3+4 back online over the next 9 days.
Now, this fire didn't occur where we host Out of Cards so that wasn't an issue. But when your host is OVH and you wake up to a dead server, what do you think my first thought was?
Event Log
All times in Eastern.
7:52 AM - Alarms sound that the site is offline.
7:52 AM - Automated notification of a hardware fault on our server from our data center.
10:31 AM - Site is back online.
What Happened
It turns out your server goes offline when they decided to re-cable all the gear!
OVH went through and replaced "a large number of power supply cables" due to a potential problem with their insulation. The maintenance required was critical and also took out networking for some time on the rack our hardware is in which extended our downtime.
In an ideal situation, we'd have better failover protocols and hardware in place if something were to happen at our primary data center. Unfortunately, it isn't justifiable at this point in time to have that with the costs involved. We keep regular multi-location backups so that we can be up and running somewhere else if disaster strikes within a fairly short time frame, having containerized infrastructure helps quite a bit with the agility here, but there will always be some downtime if that happens. We lost some ad revenue and I know it was an inconvenience for people trying to access the site. I think we'll all live though!
Today's downtime gave us an opportunity to confirm our disaster recovery situation and that our backups work properly. If you were to learn something from this situation its that you shouldn't wait until a potential disaster strikes to make sure you have stuff in working order. Your backups are only good if they actually work!
I feel bad for everyone who lost critical information in the fires today. Sometimes it isn't even the fault of developers or the IT department for having poor backup practices. Sometimes your CEO just doesn't think it is necessary to spend money on a backup solution elsewhere to keep your data synced to at least one outside source. It's always fun when that same person who said it wasn't needed starts screaming and asking why there aren't backups in place when something really goes wrong and puts the blame back on them. We call those people assholes.
I don't recommend torching your data center as a method to wake up though.