gonna chalk up a quick response post because right now i'm having trouble reading the text[light text clustered together doesnt mesh well with me - no hostility to you]
but a lot of these big bad 'oh no' potential happenings are hinging on the fact that Feral Heart will reach a playerbase so big it could crash the server.
I believe the amount in question is well above 1,100-1,400 people, as that was the nearly consistent playerbase it had from 2011-2014.
Not to be rude but, Feral Heart doesn't have much to offer and I really can't see the Registration opening to a functional level being able to get enough people to crash it in the first place.
The time this would've happened has long past, the solution of opening the Registration is really just to keep the community afloat.
I could be wrong, but I doubt it. Games like these have a shelf life, and as is Feral Heart is almost ten years old. The fact that is has been around for so long is astounding in of itself.
As for the availability of Razmirz - Easy solution, maybe not so easy to implement.
Get additional help.
Or wait.
It's what is done on countless other games and servers, just having someone there as a backup so they can switch the server back on in case of emergency.
I myself was an emergency contact for a friend's Garry's Mod roleplay server while he was out on business for two months. Worked out fine then.
I would understand if you're hesitant to trust anyone with this kind of power and privilege, since, yes, depending on your control panel and how permissions work with it, there could be problems.
Taking down the server for a period of time wouldn't prevent it from crashing at other times due to overpopulation. Straight up, that's very obvious. Not even putting off the inevitable - It just wouldn't do anything other than kill the game faster.
I also brought up 'curbing the population', because the vibes I'm getting from this are similar to the ones I got during the great General Chat incident. Where the Staff Team weren't able to keep up with a simple General chat. That's a discussion for an older time, but nonetheless this reminded me of it.
I have to ask though - How does hoarding accounts kill anything other than the database? Does the source code also have the keys to the database itself and potentially wiping it, or deleting older accounts?
Because I know that isn't true, or at the very least, it's halfway.
I do recall a conversation with a friend who hadn't used her accounts from 2011 for years, and in 2015 was able to access all ten of them. Whereas other people were off for the 1 to 2 year amount of inactivity time and had theirs deleted.
So is the database wiping bot just flawed in the coding itself, is it actually a manual process, or what?
Because the hoarding/making excessive accounts is still not a valid excuse on its own merits if there's nothing explained/listed to back it up.
All that's been said are vague explanations that explain very little, or, are statements that brush over small details that are actually somewhat important. They've never been expanded upon, and if they have, they've long since been buried and were never brought up again.
at this point i'm just trying to get a clear answer, which you did kinda.