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Introducing the Empires Community map. Now you can see just where all our members live and game. This map is viewable to all. However only our valued members will be able to add there own personal map marker. There will be a link added to the left in our modules section for any who would like to go take a look. Shortly we are hoping to have a small image on our front page. All information on how to add your marker can be found in our member’s real life forum here.
Posted by BinkDeBook on Wednesday, March 04 @ 18:32:22 EST (221 reads)
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Warhammer Offical Guild Launched
The Empire is proud to announce the formation of the Empire of Ironfist with Kaldor as it's Magistrate. Warhammer is based the on the Warhammer universe and we have made our home on the Ironfist server playing Order. Quite a few of our members started playing in Beta and during early access so we had an excellent base to start from with many Emps, both new and old, joining us at release. Currently we have over 30 guild members and we will continue to grow. At this time we are doing a mix of PvE. PvP and raids to level both our characters and the guild. The majority of the guilds actively played characters are level 25+ and the guild is closing on level 15 at a rapid pace. Thus far we have made great strides in game and will continue to do so.
Posted by BinkDeBook on Sunday, November 09 @ 17:08:15 EST (288 reads)
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Age of Conan Launched
The Empire is proud to announce the formation of the Empire of Set and Criselli as it's Magistrate. Age of Conan is a mature rated MMO based on the Robert E. Howard’s Conan universe which launched late May. (Note: The game is rated M for partial nudity and graphic violence, but all Empire Rules apply.) We started with roughly a dozen Emps and have been steadily growing. Currently everyone is concentrating on leveling up our characters and a few of us have started to tackle the Elite dungeons scattered thoughout the world. After toiling over many fallen foes and resource nodes our PVE city has been established with a keep. We will have plenty of Free Trials available for other Emps to come on over and try it out as soon as the Devs enable them.
Posted by BinkDeBook on Wednesday, June 11 @ 19:33:33 EDT (396 reads)
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Empire of Elendilmir Celebrates its One Year Anniversary!
Last March our Kinship started with a group of around 12 of us who had played the game since Beta, and today we have grown into a Kinship with around 90 members playing about 250 characters. Our success is due to the efforts of all of our members, and the willingness of everyone to be Emps. Thank you to all who have given so freely of your time and resources to help make EoE a great place to game. The past year has been a pleasure, and we all look forward to many more years of adventuring together in the lands of Middle Earth.
Posted by BinkDeBook on Sunday, March 30 @ 15:21:26 EDT (388 reads)
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Happy New Year!
As a global community spanning 13 countries and almost every state in the USA, The Empire is home to gamers from many time zones. Whether the clock has already struck midnight where you live, or is about to strike midnight or is on midnight exactly.... Happy New Year!!
May the New Year bring each of us health, prosperity and joy. May it also include renewed efforts on all our parts to help provide those same things to our fellow men and women.
For those far from home, for those involved in conflicts either public or private and for those who can't wait for the past year to end we wish you peace and a 2007 that you will hope goes on forever.
Happy New Year Emps!
Posted by Relentless on Sunday, December 31 @ 18:52:49 EST (447 reads)
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Happy Holidays!
It's that time of year again in our Empire. A time for cheer, a time for light, a time for friendship in a worldwide community that knows no twilight. No matter where you are, no matter what you celebrate, no matter what language you speak, we are all bound together by the camaraderie of our Empire.
To YOU, our most important member, on behalf of all of us... Happy Holidays!
Posted by Relentless on Sunday, December 24 @ 17:05:12 EST (426 reads)
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Happy Birthday Empire!
For those of you who enjoy keeping track of these sorts of things, The Empire was officially formed on 11/21/01 as a game guild called The Empire on the Igraine server of Dark Age of Camelot.
Now, years later, The Empire has evolved into a multigame community capable of supporting guilds in several games simultaneously and surviving the collapse of any game world. To date we have been in eleven different games as a community.
This is the fourth generation of our website and if you total the posts of all of them The Empire is nearing 90,000 posts by its members and is nearing approximately its 2,000th member (it is hard to tell exactly because of the overlap of members from one website edition to another).
Our members have come from *at least* 15 countries and just about every state in the United States... I do not recall any Emp ever being from Rhode Island (so we have something to improve upon!).
The Empire has had a long list of active and retired officers that have allowed it to prosper and evolve to suit the needs of its members. Those officers carry a wide variety of ages, ethnicities, genders, political viewpoints, occupational backgrounds, socioeconomic standings... and in some cases differ so radically that one would think in any other circumstance they would barely be able to speak to each other. Yet, for the sake of our Empire and our Members they work together and remain both polite and constructive at all times.
You will never see me beating my chest and shouting with pride about an item my character picked up or an amount of gold I have in a game bank. There is no quest in any game that I lust to complete, no game reward ever worth bickering over.
For me, and obviously for many of you, the only thing that warrants a sense of pride and accomplishment is The Empire Community and its lasting reminder that given the right environment, the right leadership and an awfully large amount of effort.... anyone can get along with anyone else for months, or years or even decades.
When The Empire began Id ask to recruit someone and they would ask how long we had been around. I'd reply "so far a few months but we plan to be here in 20 years." Most of them would laugh at me, some of you may even have been some of the ones who had laughed. Well, as we close in on our 5th Birthday as a Community, I think 20 years may actually have been setting the bar a bit too low.
Happy Birthday Emps!
Posted by Relentless on Sunday, November 19 @ 09:24:10 EST (407 reads)
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Be Sure to Vote!
If you are able to vote in the elections being held throughout the United States today please stop reading this and go do so!
This is not a statement aimed at discussing politics or campaigning for one candiate or another... this is only a simple reminder that for the next 24 hours the entire power of the United States govenment is returned to the hands of its people... and tommorow most of us will once again be powerless until the next election.
No matter what you believe in or who you believe in, it is your moral obligation to at least go out and do your duty as a citizen by taking part in the process and casting your ballot for the candidate(s) of your choice.
*Let's show 'em that gamers are a significant voting constituency to pay attention to in future elections!
Posted by Relentless on Tuesday, November 07 @ 17:35:06 EST (328 reads)
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One Thousand Active Members!
As our community continues to expand and evolve we have welcomed in another new generation of recruits. Our community now has surpassed the 1,000 active member mark here on our website.
I'd like to take a moment to thank all of our present and former officers for their contributions large and small, daily and from time to time which have allowed us to maintain our steep trajectory of growth and our firm adherance to the core values our community is based upon simultaneously.
Some may think 1,000 members is a lot but the quantity of members matters very little without the foundation our membership stands upon. We should each be somewhat proud to be part of one of the largest gaming guilds in the world, but we should be much more proud of being part of the best community of gamers in the world.
Long Live The Empire,
- Relentless
Posted by Relentless on Monday, July 17 @ 10:41:28 EDT (402 reads)
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What happened and what we are doing about it
Okay folks now that we have had a chance to interrogate the server and speak with the actual ISP staff some more facts have come out and a theory has developed a bit. We have some bad news and some very good news....
A few days ago the site was in fact hacked by someone operating out of the country of Turkey or making use of some kind of proxy that originated from there. The hackers do in fact appear to be actual terrorists or at least terrorist sympathisers who were attempting to make use of our bandwith and webspace to broadcast their own messages for whatever reason.
When the site was hacked initially some additional files were uploaded by the hacker including a videofile that caused the site to "server push" video to anyone who clicked an accept key. The text of the site was also replaced by a lot of hate speech written in arabic. In an apparent attempt to maximize the bandwidth alotted to their file load the hackers turned on an automated server process called "pruning" which systematically erases data from oldest to newest. They set the alotted data to 0 so the site would gradually eat itself and hold nothing but their files so that the full alotment of bandwith could be allocated to their video garbage and not reach server caps put in place by the ISP to curb traffic.
That pruning process deleted a tremendous amount of data from our site. However, the only site on the server which was hacked was ours. Other sites on the same server were not hacked, the ISP staff is investigating why that would happen and they are contacting ALL relevant authorities to handle the matter (including forwarding copies of the uploaded data to thos who best know what to do about it). That part of the matter is now totally out of our hands.
As to restoring the data, since our site was the only one hacked, the ISP is unable to rollback the site using a backup without causing considerable damage to the other sites on the server. One of the reasons we have been able to offer our community free web services is because the ISP has donated bandwith and webspace to us for our own use (mostly because they believe in the goals of The Empire and some of their staff have been Emps in the past). We understand and respect their decision not to increase the impact of the hackers by damaging sites of their paying clients and accept the fact that we will have to restore much of our own materials manually.
So far we have restored all of the data except for the past two months and one week. We are still sifting through backups to see if there is a way to restore more of the data but at this time the results do not look promising. Therefore, for now we ask that everyone act as though no additional data will be restored... if we are able to restore more we will consider it a welcome bonus... if you see an important post is missing and you are able to repost it please do so in the meantime.
Our ISP is taking steps to make our space more secure and our techies have already made some tweaks to increase the security of our site including the outright removal of the entire pruning module and the implementation of site specific backup protocals.
While we are safer today from hackers than we were before the attack we still do not believe we are safe enough. Phpnuke does have some inherent security flaws and our techies are exploring ALL options at this point. The most promising option seems to be a complete rebuild of the site using a new CMS called joomlah and an entirely new forum system module as well.
We are currently evaluating joomla in a private development environment that will not affect the live version of our site, consider the project an alpha phase test. If the product meets our needs we will eventually need beta testers to assist us in testing the product before taking it live and replacing this site with it.
Our goal is to port all of the data from this site to the new one and to make a significant number of upgrades along the way including direct desktop RSS availability of the site, an upgraded live site chat room, a comprehensive site badge system similar to the one seen in games like CoH, a forum system capable of hosting subforums and much more.
We are very serious about our stated intention to be sure that The Empire does not only fully recover from this attack but in fact gains greatly from the opportunity it has been given to expand and upgrade our infrastructure. Now is the perfect time to suggest site upgrades and ideas for a future site... before rather than after any decisions are made.
On a final note, no Empire was hit harder by this attack than our members and allies in Corvaall. Unfortunately because of the timing of the attack the data loss in those forums was nearly complete and total. We are still working hard to restore any of the data that we can but in the meantime I have actually had to build entirely new forums for usage. It is with a sad heart that I ask you to please help me to rebuild the forums for your Empire by reposting any missing data including character templates and guides. Also if any new forums are needed or changes would be helpful please let me know and I will as always do my best to assist you.
Keep your chins up Emps, the bright sun in our logo still shines and still represents the excitement and our eagerness to explore the unknown. Together we will overcome these obstacles and in short time we will have a whole slew of new features to thank the hackers for. Their role in our Empire is now an important one, they have prevented us from getting lazy and comfortable and spurred us toward improvement.. for that we owe them our thanks.... and a nice visit from the authorities.
Anyone experiencing any kind of access problems should send a PM to Relentless as soon as possible. Ill make any corrections that are necessary.
Posted by Relentless on Sunday, February 26 @ 02:29:34 EST (352 reads)
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