And we finally have the winner! Win of the Chicken Campaign went to the Architects. Congratulations all! Next Campaign will start already today at 6 pm. Get ready!

Why was Shadow Cities down so long? At approximately noon yesterday Amazon EC2 datacenter that we're using to host the game started showing problems with increased latency with EBS volumes. The servers recovered for about an hour but then failed completely in a spectacular manner. This failure proved to be the most serious in AWS history taking down some of the most popular sites and services.

Shadow Cities was hit hard and unfortunately was situated in a datacenter that was the slowest to recover from this problem. This morning, when the rest of the datacenters proved to be in stable state, we started rebuilding our servers in one of the recovered datacenters and are now back online.

Our upcoming technology platform for the global launch is more distributed than our current version spanning multiple availability zones and providing increased availability when it comes to normal AWS service disruptions. This service disruption was a bit more critical, however, as it took down most of the availability zones in US-EAST-1 region.

Due to these unfortunate server problems with Amazon we also had to wait a while to get the top Mages of the Campaign, but here they finally are:

Top Mages on the World Leaderboard:
1. Hoomikko of the Animators, 100 Potions
2. CocoSan of the Animators, 50 Potions
3. Reign of the Animators, 50 Potions
4. Hiljaisuus of the Architects, 50 Potions
5. Farafara of the Architects, 50 Potions

The top 3 banishers of the Campaign:
1. Captain of the Animators
2. CocoSan of the Animators
3. Hoomikko of the Animators

The top 3 spell dodgers of the Campaign:
1.  Hoomikko of the Animators
2. Jokeri of the Architects
3. CocoSan of the Animators

During the Campaign we introduced a new Dodge spell feature, which enabled Mages to dodge spells casted on them by warping/dewarping. Please, answer the poll and share your experiences on how this feature worked with your network connection during the Campaign. This will help us develop Shadow Cities into a better game.

[poll id="4"]