There is currently a major change to the authentication server in testing and if all goes well it will be deployed on Monday the 31st sometime between 9 and 12am CEST, the exact time will be announced on Sunday.
The expected downtime is 30 minutes, however, due to the nature of those changes and the extent it is quite likely that we'll run into some issues which could extend the downtime. Also expect a couple restarts of the authentication server throughout the day, the gameserver should only require 1 restart.
For most players nothing will change but after this update account sharing will be prevented automatically in many cases: you will be prevented from logging into another account with a computer that has already been used on an account within the last 30 days. The definition of the same computer for this automatic prevention is quite strict and it will thereby favor fewer false positives over the prevention as it is not meant to prevent someone who really wants to to it but just reduce the amount of "accidental" or "didn't know sharing wasn't allowed" kind of sharing.
The two factor authentication email should also be required less often afterwards (the first login after this change might trigger one for quite a few people though).
In technical terms the change moves the ban handling as well as computer to account assignment from the gameserver to the authentication server, aside from it just making more sense this way, a nice side effect will also be the reduction in live objects on the gameserver that the garbage collector has to deal with.
The expected downtime is 30 minutes, however, due to the nature of those changes and the extent it is quite likely that we'll run into some issues which could extend the downtime. Also expect a couple restarts of the authentication server throughout the day, the gameserver should only require 1 restart.
For most players nothing will change but after this update account sharing will be prevented automatically in many cases: you will be prevented from logging into another account with a computer that has already been used on an account within the last 30 days. The definition of the same computer for this automatic prevention is quite strict and it will thereby favor fewer false positives over the prevention as it is not meant to prevent someone who really wants to to it but just reduce the amount of "accidental" or "didn't know sharing wasn't allowed" kind of sharing.
The two factor authentication email should also be required less often afterwards (the first login after this change might trigger one for quite a few people though).
In technical terms the change moves the ban handling as well as computer to account assignment from the gameserver to the authentication server, aside from it just making more sense this way, a nice side effect will also be the reduction in live objects on the gameserver that the garbage collector has to deal with.