Good Morning, afternoon, and evening my dudes! I wanted to let everyone know that I set up a Discord server for myself and a few other old Unity members awhile back. If you're ever interested in coming and hanging out with us on Discord I'll set the link below.

I hope everyone is doing well! It's obviously been a long time since Unity was a thing, and we're all a bit older now. But we would love to see what you guys are up to! Drop in and say hello. (:


https://discord.gg/yeVFt8r


Captain Cats

I know there's been a lot of negative feedback about the decision to shut down Unity, whether it be temporarily. Personally, I had nothing to do with making the decision. And if it were up to me, I would keep Unity up and running.

People don't realize the cost and time commitment of running a server. I know Cats has said this before, but I feel like it would be worthwhile to have someone other than the owner to validate the claims.

Server hosting is expensive. More expensive than you may realize. Unity isn't some ♥♥♥♥♥♥ server run out of somebody's basement. The monthly cost of Teamspeak and TTT alone is ~60$. That isn't including the long term investment of buying scripts/plugins-- which many of you may not have realized even cost money. And don't forget about the website, DarkRP, and CS:GO servers. The monthly cost of all these is >100$. For those of you who say we get a lot of money through donations, each time we get a founder/platinum donator, it pays for one month. Only one. The rest is paid out of pocket by Cats.

I know it sounds odd to mention the last 3 servers, because I'm betting some of you probably believe there hasn't been a lot of progress on them. And I'm not saying you're wrong.

The fact is, Cats is the only one doing the coding of all these projects. By himself. Yes, people offer to help, but the fact of the matter is--

1. It's hard to trust someone enough to let them into the backend and mess with files, especially if we don't know if they are mature enough not to be vindictive if something goes sour (which has happened in the past) and
   
2. It's hard to know if the person even knows what they're doing. I'm a programming major, and even I'm not confident enough with my skills to not mess up the server.

I'm not belittling the moderators, admins, trusted, or anyone else who helps to manage the server, because your jobs are just as essential. So don't think I've forgotten about you.

So, not only is he coding/running TTT/CS:GO/DarkRP/website stuff by himself, he also has a job. He's an adult. I know a lot of you might be underage, and not understand the importance of being able to support yourself, and that's ok. Even I don't know what I'm doing.

Between his job, and Unity (which is essentially a second job), there's not a lot of time left. People have social lives, and need time to relax.

8hr workday + 8hr sleep + 1hr commuting + 2hr meals + 1hr hygiene + 1hr pooping = 21 hours.

This is a rough estimate, but you can see how this might be at least somewhat accurate. That leaves 3 hours for video games, dating, and social life. And I know a lot of users spend 3+ hours on the server per session.

We're a community based around video games, founded by a person who likes to play video games, for the purpose of having fun playing video games. Can you honestly expect the owner of such a community to not want to play video games in his spare time?

I love this community. I really do. It's gotten me through a lot of hard times, and I've had a great time with all the members I've met. And Cats does too. Whether you believe it or not, he's always expressed his vision and dreams for Unity, wanting it to become something great.

But right now, Unity is stagnating. There's not a lot of progress being made. And that's nobody's fault. Everyone gets busy. Everyone has lives outside Unity (I hope). Users are expecting new content and plugins and servers, and none of that is happening. And it can be frustrating.

But right now, Unity can't move forward being the way it is. It needs work. And when Cats says he's shutting it down temporarily until he gets stuff figured out, I know he means it. It's his dream.


TL;DR: Server is expensive. +100$month. Server is time consuming. People have jobs and lives, and no time. But Unity isn't going away forever.

*I hope this didn't seem condescending to anyone, for that wasn't my intention. And if it did, I'm sorry. I just wanted to try and give people a different point of view, a look behind the scenes.


-Grizz
Unity Director
Unity Admin
Unity Member

I'm sure throughout the day some of you have been angry. And some of you have been confused. I've recieved messages from people telling me that they understand, and that they wish me good luck.

But that wasn't really the purpose of this. The purpose of me making an announcement describing how and why I'm shutting down Unity was to weed out the people whom really did not support me. And who stuck around to stick around. These people were toxic to the community. They created an elitest group on our server shunning people out constantly. They would pick and choose who to punish when it came to rule breaking.

These people have no notion of what Unity is, what Unity costs, and how myself and many others have put years of our time and work into this.

I announced to my Administrative staff team over a week ago that I wasn't shutting down this community. And that I was going to be re-vamping it. Because I had taken a break, and it was time to come back. And I wasn't lying. If you stuck around today you've probably been with Unity for awhile. And you probably know what I'm talking about.


I apologise for some of the people that I let onto this staff team. Some of them amazing. And some of them were a mistake who turned Unity into something that it isn't supposed to be.


And in regards to this...


This message says it all. This message is the reason why I couldn't have these people in my community any more.

If you're internested in seeing what I have in store for Unity that's up to you. If not, I understand. We've had some good times. But if you're going to act like a 13 year old. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and have a nice day!

- Captain Cats

Our TeamSpeak server is now back online. I apologise for the downtime.

Also, I realise that things have been slow here at Unity for this past month. There haven't been many Terrortown server updates. And there haven't been any announcements from me in awhile concerning Unity.

I'll be making an announcement within the next couple of days concerning the future of our community and the direction that we'll be taking.

"Our Chicago router has crashed twice today, leading to several minutes of downtime on each occasion. We are relatively certain that this is a hardware problem with one of the CPUs in the router and we have asked our hardware vendor for a replacement.

Uptime is very important to us. For the time being, in order to make sure that services will not have further unscheduled interruptions, we will be reactivating our old router in Chicago and moving our Internap connections back over to it, taking the new one offline entirely until its faulty CPU has been replaced. This will cause another brief interruption for your services sometime this evening, but it should be shorter than the others.

Update @ 9:17pm CDT: We are still waiting for the facility to move us back to our old router. In the meantime, the new router has crashed again.

We are continuing to wait, so we can get back onto the stable router."

We shouldn't have any more issues after tonight.