Nocturnal Souls

7 December 2024

tl;dr

I’ve decided to end service for Nocturnal Souls. 27 March 2018 - 7 December 2024

My decision to end service has nothing to do with the v2 efforts but rather stems from my personal situation, where I can no longer manage the workload due to my personal obligations and current circumstances. We will officially shut servers off sometime during the day of 7 December 2024. We will seal the Discord channels at that time.

full details

As many of you know, we took a major hit when my home (also known as our server’s home) got hit by a tornado in late May/early June 2024. After attempting to restore and bring everything back online, we made the decision to maintain operations using an old backup and begin anew when “v2” came to life.

Since then, we’ve been digging into the latest iteration of the technology (LSB) and how we can bend it to build the ecosystem that you all know and love—not exactly following retail, but creating an environment where we can tell our own stories, have our own systems, and let players explore the wide world of Vana’diel at their own pace.

That work has been ongoing since early July and, mostly, has been going well. The core systems weren’t nearly as mature as we’d hoped, but after a few months, we’ve knocked out some hefty features: dozens of missing spells added, the same with missing/unavailable abilities, job points, gifts, and traits; RUN and GEO wired up end-to-end; a rockin’ v2 of our fishing system; our custom avatar and automaton AI; and most of our core systems migrated.

However, managing time and resources can be challenging when creating a plan and providing a launch timeline. I had an eye-opening moment this past weekend when I looked at the shiny graphic, color-coded roadmap I’d designed and laughed because it was just too unattainable.

As you’re all well aware, the whole team has their own careers, lives, and families to deal with, and life gets bumpy for everyone. This is a volunteer effort all around.

Personally, the thing that’s been keeping me from being at home (which, outside of seeing the tornado damage back in June, I haven’t “been home” in almost 4 years now) has seeped into my day-to-day time too. My available “hobby time” has slipped from a few hours a day to an hour or two a week or less. With that, I’m finding that I cannot sustain the speed necessary to build the community that I want to provide. Also, as I age (insert grumpy old man gif), I find I need to disconnect and take time for myself for my own mental well-being. After a long day of working two different jobs in front of the computer, it’s not easy to want to sit there another few hours hacking away at something under a looming deadline.

Over the past few days of asking and talking to a lot of people, I’ve decided to retire NocSouls as it stands. Nocturnal Souls, as a gaming community, has been around for almost 25 years. When we first stood up the server in early 2018 as a means to let a few members toy around with FFXI, we had no idea what we were creating and no real intention to be anything more than a playground. We had never considered it anything else until Itchy discovered our temporary landing page online and joined for the first time.

You have made the server and the community a wondrous place over the past six years. Thank you.

For what’s next, I’ll continue working on my vision of the server. Honestly, this is my therapy and outlet—I love building things—but without the pressures of a timeline or your growing needs for something new. Perhaps we will return someday, or maybe I’ll just sit in Zi’Tah and listen to the music. Who knows. 🙂

Thanks!

-Dera and the NocSouls Team