Account Services Update and Downtime on August 5

Glorious Ashes Community!

Our platform team has been hard at work on new features, architecture and system optimization, as well as creating a smoother migration path for users who are still migrating to our new website. In order to accommodate for these changes, we’ll have downtime on Monday, August 5, 2019 from 9AM PDT to 9PM PDT. During this time, users will be unable to log into the website and forums. Although users will be able to continue reading the forums, users will not be able to make posts.

We hope that you enjoy the below changes, and we’ll keep you notified of our account services status on our support Twitter and Discord!

Referral Feature

The referral feature has been re-enabled.

• Referral codes can now be used on registration.
  • Referral links will be added in the future.
• Referral code page now shows the number of users referred, and legacy referred users will now reflect immediately.

New Features

A number of new features have been added to account services.

• Inventory view has been optimized to show details and unique IDs for each item a user owns.
• Account username no longer acts as the default in-game display name.
• Forum username can now be changed from the profile home page, once every 30 days.
• Two-factor authentication has been optimized with a new recovery key and activation flow to make it easier for users to remove two-factor from their account, or transfer it to a new device.
• Error messaging reevaluated to be more clear.

New Architecture and Systems Optimization

AWS allows us more flexibility to modernize our architecture. The first big change in this was to distribute our systems to better accommodate load.

• Database tables were restructured to optimize the calls we are making. The end result is less calls to the database, which directly translates to increases in speed.
• Unified error messaging, tooltips, and info popups give a better understanding of what is happening when a user makes a change to their account.
• Transaction processing and item fulfillment hardened and rebuilt from the ground up.
• Distributed architecture across serverless environments lets processing for certain tasks be offloaded to dedicated worker machines.
  • This makes things like migration and linking of referrals much quicker, and will enable us to do more things with game integration and accounts integration with other websites and services down the line.

Optimized Migration Path

Migration has been rebuilt from the ground up to be less confusing, and far more usable.

• Users with accounts made before December 18th, 2018 now have a dedicated page where they can migrate their account into the new system.
• The new distributed architecture allows us to make most migrations close to instant.
  • Most users should see their account data populate within a few minutes after migrating (your experience may vary). 
• Users now have the option to change their username, password, and/or email during the migration process.