I spoke to a sales person today who said he could not say "officially", but Cortex is about done, and you will no longer be offering it.

I looked at my first sales ticket in Orbit, and realized I rented our first server nearly 4 years ago (12-23-2003). It was a Christmas present for my clan, and we have enjoyed every single minute playing on the best servers in the world. It's amazing how quickly time passes when you have practically "trouble-free" service from a professional company like The Planet.

On a side note: Unfortunately, after the merger with EV1, everything seems to have gone South for some reason. That in itself is very sad!

I would like to thank the many of you who were directly or indirectly involved with setting up, servicing, and maintaining our server for the past four years. Your support was appreciated by all my gaming friends, and we have thoroughly enjoyed playing on I365/Server Matrix servers.

As of tonight, I placed an order for a server with another company, and plan to send a cancellation notice to the Planet soon. To be honest, it's kind of scary leaving an established provider, only to sign up with an unknown. I hope I have done the right thing, but only time will tell.

Again, thanks TP for providing superior service to my group of old gamers for nearly 4 years. It's been a hoot!

God bless you all

Gator

Insomnia - R.I.P.

Like I said in another similar thread, If this indeed truth, I want to hear it officially because I am not going to pay TP for another month of service if nothing is coming down the pipeline.

This month coming is very important for our clan because of certain game releases.

I cannot stress this enough, we need to know if Cortex/I365 is going to be shut down.

There have been enough screwups around here, lets not mess this one up now. I've been a very patient and supportive customer.

Well said Gator, we've been with the TP for three and a half years and share a lot of the same feelings as you do. As of last night I also confirmed the cancellation of our server for lack of FIRM info on Cortex. We can't just sit around while our money is pissed away, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying something else at this point.

Thanks to Zach for trying is dangdest but unfortunately we just couldn't wait any longer.

Over and out.

Grim
www.sealteam6clan.com

I would say Creed they have told you, by the lack of updates or replys here. Very unfortunate, but the writing seems to be clearly saying, if you cant set it up and run it on your own, time to look elsewhere.

Guys,

Alright, first of all, I just got the word on this Thursday. Secondly, I was TOLD you guys would be getting an official communication for The Planet as our customer. I have raised and escalated this to several people in the company, including the VP of Marketing and the Director of Product Management and have seen no further communications other than the official word is not due out until after they meet Monday.

At this time, yes, it looks like Cortex and all gaming support will be EOL'ed, but those that have current implementations will be "grandfathered" into support only - no updates, new games, or the like will occur. Now, the reason I say "it looks like" is because they are supposed to have their final meeting and final decision on this on Monday or Tuesday of this coming week. Pending that meeting they were going to have the final official word.

I'm kind of upset that someone in the company told you guys something that was not final and official yet and hence probably upset you enough to freak some of you out and worry you that no one else has stepped forward to tell you a single thing. Well, the reason I've given no official update was because nothing has been official. Does that mean it has a chance to go the other way? From all early indication, no, BUT we still do not know the extent and directives of when and how all of this will be done and what will and won't be available, etc, if they move forward. So for someone to give you an "official" word of what is happening is WAY TOO premature at this point. I hate it when communications is not clear and people go flying off the handle spouting out anything they think they have heard instead of waiting till a more official communication comes along.

The point is that it was way to early for any one to tell any of you anything and for that, on behalf of The Planet, I am truly sorry. You deserve the full communication and direction from those that can give it you (our Senior Management and VP's) and to get the communication from anyone else is below the level of standard that we at The Planet try to achieve. I realize that what you know is out there now and probably taints your view regardless of what communications come out next. But I hope that you at least give us, The Planet, the necessary time to properly position the expectations of what they will decide after Monday/Tuesday of this coming week to clearly understand what will happen with Cortex and the Gaming side here.

Again, our sincere apologies for the early and premature communications. We promise to have a lot clearer communications to you in short order. And we do and have appreciated you and your business here.

Sincere apologies and kindest regards,
PD2

My hats off to PD2 Paul for trying to keep the communication lines open. He seems to be the only one at TP fighting for Cortex. But it could be a lost cause if upper management has already gotten their minds made up. With the loss of the prior Cortex people, and the costs to replace them and further development, the ROI must not be enough for management to continue.

TP had a good thing going at one time with Cortex, too bad they are letting it slip away

Again PD2 a big Thank You for all of your help, even tho it appears in essence management forced you to try to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Yes, VERY much appreciated Paul, you could have taken the easy route like the rest at TP seemed to do and just hide or stay away from here, instead you came in and took the heat unjustly, but kept trying to get us answers, 2 thumbs up for you buddy.

Another question for you that you might be able to look into, are they also abandonding Cortex as a GCP too and if so I know its a long shot but what about source code release for those of us with it who could possibly continue to develop and use it for our own needs?

Yeah getting the sourcecode would be good. Pssst, I might have the Cortex license wizard written in .NET and easily decompiled. Not saying I do have it, but I might,

It would be nice if they open-sourced the code for other people to develop on the side or use for their person servers. Not sure if they will since they have a lot of money invested in the code.

First, thank you for all the nice words guys. I have been really trying to get things straight here. I think it can best be said the way I said it to some of the management team - HELLO! These guys are paying CUSTOMERS too and deserve some sort of communications from The Planet!

As you guys can tell, I cannot stand it when communication is lost between people. To me, even the worst products and services can always be tolerable or be given some merit if the customer service and communications to the end user and customer is high, accurate, and always in ready supply. For me, I see you all as our customers and in a similar category as the Top 10 through Top 100 customers at The Planet - you put your pants on the same way and for that matter, you pay your money the same way too. For that, you deserve the same level of communications and service as any other customer here.

As for the code for Cortex and releasing it as Open Source appears to be some of the things up for discussion and decisions on Monday/Tuesday. Hence why I thought it was extremely premature for anyone within The Planet to release any info to you guys because this is what happens with incomplete information. I'm sure we will have an answer to the Open Source availability of Cortex soon enough. And just so you know, my personal opinion is just like yours - file it under a GNU license setup and release it to all that wish to continue its life!

Guys, thank you so much again for the kind words - it does mean a lot to me personally. If I get any additional info on this situation I'll be sure to give you guys an update.

Best Regards!
PD2

It was a stupid buisness venture anyway.

The planet tricked alot of loyal customer's when they introduced insomnia. They sat around here and asked gsp owners for suggestions and then flipped there script and marketed it to those same gsp's customer's.

I'm glad to see it fail. Not for the customer's but for back stabbing planet.

It was a great idea for clan leaders who wanted to run multiple game servers and have a nice control panel. I heard that a lot of GSPs were angry when Cortex was launched and many even pulled all of their servers out of TP as a response.

Anyone who relies solely on Cortex as their only game server control panel and data center, should not be in the business anyway. My guess is those same people had TP do their customer support also. Client opens a ticket saying the server is lagging, then the server owner opens a ticket in Orbit and says the server is lagging. When the TP techs respond, they copy and paste that back to the client.

Well it appears the ball of yarn has unraveled a lot further since I was here last.

I guess today or tomorrow we hear the final word but I already have my mind made up.

Thanks are indead in order for PD2, who has been helping me already for sometime now with a custom server order, as well as keeping up up to date in here. Thanks for trying Zach but it seems you never had the support you needed to get anywhere.

I can still remember when Logan left and I realized there was only one big reason left to stay, and that was Kevin. I was shocked when he shipped out and the storm clouds have been looming ever since.

Doc is definatly right that this is a great setup for clans, and that is what I represent here. We have a great setup but dust that is piling up is really too much.

It would interesting to see Cortex go open source, but that alone is not enough to keep me here. Mistakes have been made on The Planet's behalf and nothing was ever done to correct them.

So I guess this is it. We have had servers here since May 6th 2005 and I am glad that we had such a great start here. Time to continue on writing this story.

Well today is gone with no official word, so that leaves tomorrow.

Has there been any update here?

I think there was some more talk about it down in the Cortex forum.

The thread you are looking for:
http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?s=&a...st&p=583813

Thank you PD2 for your efforts!

You are welcome grimgrinch. Thank you even more for being our customer!

PD2

Well this is sad to hear. I have been a Cortex customer for a long time now, and TP screwed up when they didnt get enough people to help reinforce I365 when it started its decline about 7-8 months ago. I have already moved onto Hypernia and I have to say that I like their service alot. The Remote Desktop alongside the ranked BF2, BF2142, and ETQW servers is very nice. So if Cortex really does go south, I would highly recommend Hypernia to all of you. There are some downsides with going with Hypernia. One downside is that all Hypernia does is really manage the servers, and hires data centers to mass collocate servers for them. Because of this you may look at about a 4-5 day setup time if you request the 100Mbit/s port on the server (a must IMO). Anyway after it was setup though it was very easy. They set it up in a way that you cant modify any of the ranked files, and that you must use BF2CC or 2142CC (theres a seperate config folder for the ETQW ranked stuff). When you purchase the server, they automatically install 1 ranked BF2, 2142, and ETQW server using FireDaemon. Then you can ask them to install more ranked instances later. Pretty much all of the unranked server stuff you can install yourself, and if you have trouble with it, they will do it for you. The only time I had to ask them for an install was for a COD2 server which only took about 30 mins between the time I submitted the ticket, to the time it was fully installed in FireDaemon. It shows that they have an excellent support team since all they pretty much do is Game server host. Anyway I thought I would let you guys know how they are like. And RIP Cortex.

Liltechdude

PS- for $350 a month, you get a Dual Clovertown Server (8 cores!!!), and I think 3,000GB of bandwith (To tell you the truth I dont think they moderate the BW). It blows TP away in price.