Heyo! so there's a bit of an issue I've been having, and I thought I'd report it here. About a week or so prior to this day, just after the server restarts had ceased, I was wandering around with one of my characters in Red's Map Pack and my path took me towards the map of Advance - however, upon entering the map, I was stuck on the loading screen for quite a while, after which time it told me that it had "failed to connect to the map server". I thought "Alright, this is fairly common! I'll just persist until it works."
Unfortunately, after several futile attempts, it was still failing to connect - so I went and deleted the map, which as far as I know, should have taken me to "the void" as it usually does, and from there I could teleport back to home. Much to my dismay, that didn't work. No matter how many times I tried, it gave me the same error. I attempted reinstalling the game about five times (literally), tried uninstalling and reinstalling the map pack, deleting the map again and again, yet nothing had worked. It was done; my character was gone.
By that time, I had pretty much given up - so I just went into the character creator and re-created my character. I got him all duplicated exactly the same as the original was, and for a while everything was fine. During the week between now and then, I had been occasionally plying at getting the original back, but always getting hit with the same "failed to connect to map server" message - no matter what I tried. Well recently, I was browsing the forums and I saw a screenshot which I thought to be in Red's Shrine - so I said "Methinks I'll visit the shrine and see what's happening therein!" I took the recreation of my character that I lost, as I'm rather fond of him, and I went to the Cape of Lost Worlds. To my total obfuscation! upon entering The Grounds, I got the "failed to connect to map server" error again - and after persisting several times, I was still getting the aforementioned error. With a sigh, I deleted the map and tried it several times again, only to keep getting the same exact error.
It would appear as if I've lost both characters to Red's Map Pack - which is a shame - both because I really liked those characters and because I really liked Red's Map Pack. I'm not sure if the recent server downtimes have had anything to do with it, but I hope there's some kind of solution available. Until that time, I'll just recreate the character again.
Thanks in advance for any help. :3