UPDATE: Linden Labs has agreed to leave the sims open until March 9th to allow renters in that sim to retrieve any potential items or objects they wish to recover from the sims before the items are lost for good. If you have irreplaceable objects or simply want to take some pictures of places you liked, in either Lost Vegas South or Vampires Asylum, please get them in the next 24 hours. And thanks to Linden Labs for stretching the closure date to try to be courteous to the community. - Info from Jolene Merlin.

Hey all, as you may have noticed the Vampires Asylum and Lost Vegas South Sims have gone off the grid. This is something we have been putting low key warnings out about for a few months now.

Effectively though, several months ago we received a message from an individual who had come online and stated that Karoline Merlin had died in real life. We were unable to confirm this as a fact so we did not, at the time, push forward with a large effort to memorialize her or to spread the news around because for all we knew it could have simply been someone playing a twisted and rather evil game.

Regardless of that there have been multiple attempts from myself, and Melanie and many other members of the CCS Community to get in touch with Karoline since then, to my knowledge there have been no replies from Karoline to any of them, so as of around December we started giving quiet warnings that there might be a problem with the sims.

Regardless of that, apparently today the sims have gone offline for good according to Linden Labs, further information, of course, is not theirs to give us, but I think its safe to assume that at this time, its entirely possible that the person we knew as Karoline Merlin has passed on.

This is unfortunate as Karoline was fairly young, only in her early 40s to my knowledge, and she worked very hard with CCS for several years, working closely with both the Damnation and CoLA chains, as well as supporting the CCS network in her time with us.

I'm sorry to have to think of her as dying an untimely death, but it seems that this is all we can assume at this time, unless we are otherwise corrected beyond this point.

So, my apologies for not taking a moment to "remember" Karoline before right now, but I simply had no way to know for sure, and did not want to reinforce what could have only been a rumor.

So, if what we believe has happened has truly come to pass.....Rest In Peace, Karoline. And thank you for everything, you were a great help to us and you will be missed.

Hey all, the 3.0 beta API has been distributed to Black Operations, Messer Company, NGA and Breach as of this time today.

Its now time to start talking to the user base about what API 3.0 does, and how it is going to affect the CCS game in total in the near future.

Its been an ongoing dilemma with the CCS weapons market for many years now, as the players have leveled through the game, the weapon development companies attempt to increase their effectiveness to stay competitive within the median average level of the game. In some cases these experiments in staying effective have produced some wildy out of standard weaponry.

Over the last six years the CCS development team has had to work with multiple developers in attempting to get weapons pulled back down to sane damage and effect standards in response to concerns from the player base.

API 3.0 is all about making that entire problem a moot issue from here on out. And while it is going to change the weapons you own and how "powerful" they are, you must understand that these changes will be equal amongst all weapon developers and no weapon developer in the system can develop above the hard coded ceiling in the new API. This means while it seems like weapons you've bought have become "less useful" the point of this API change is to ensure that the weapons stay "effective" without allowing any one weapon in CCS be absolutely dominant in CCS combat over other types of weapons.

This has been a long development process, attempting to come up with a solid solution and answer that is both fair to our partner developers and fair to the players that play CCS and purchase weapons from those developers. But we are now nearing completion and should be rolling over to API 3.0 here soon after we get our beta development feedback from the developers we've shared the beta API package with.

It has always been my belief that weapons should sell based on their quality, not based on what the API does, the API should be that extra kick that makes a weapon that suits a particular users style more attractive to use, and not the sole reason someone uses a specific weapon in total.

API 3.0 achieves this reduction of "enhancement priority" forcing people towards whatever weapon is currently "the best" for damage output and CCS combat dominance and allows all our developers to provide weapons that all function in their own variant and different ways, but are all bound under the same development limitations.

So this isn't exactly a "universal nerf" of all CCS weapons, but a total balance of all CCS weapons and with that we also gain quite a few more things with the new API.

The new API is far more secure than API 2.5, unlike API 2.5, which simply allows objects from approved users to send messages to CCS users, even if that object is illegitmate, nothing in API 3.0 can even talk to CCS without having a valid, database resident profile for the object. So if someone has one of my prims, and is trying to send API commands or dynchan strings with that prim...it simply will not work at all, because that object is not registered with the API system and resident on the CCS database. This means far more security in regards to lack of potential for exploit linked to API usage, so not only are all legitimate weapons becoming more "balanced" the chance for illegitimate objects "cheating" in CCS combat is cut down to nearly impossible.

API 3.0 also internally controls "weapon stacking" by pre-defining how many "hands" or damage sources, are in use, when using a certain type of weapon. If you have two API 3.0 swords equipped, then attempt to attach another API weapon to "stack" the weapon, the API in the 3rd weapon will "know" that you already have two weapons attached, and will auto-detach itself.

So in large part, the new API brings in a new era of legitimate "enhancement" to CCS combat itself. The weapons themselves are "fair" because everyone has to develop under the same limitations. There is no chance for someone to use a rogue API object to "cheat" in CCS combat, and we've completely removed the potential to "stack" API objects to exploit in CCS combat as well.

So thats more or less the "short" version of what API 3.0 is doing and what its going to mean to the player base.

If you'd like to discuss the API or ask questions about it, please feel free to add your thoughts in the API 3.0 Discussion Thread on the forum.

Except there is no debate, merely a poll for you to vote on.

Now believe me I know people will want to discuss why they think so and so weapon developer is out of bounds but please, lets not start a forum discussion on the situation. Simply vote and let me see what the data is without the white noise of arguments and differences in opinion.

In other news this will largely be irrelevant very soon, API 3.0 will be going into beta testing within the next week and our most active developers will be the first to get their hands on it and help us shape it to be the helpful, self balancing system it was designed to be. Maldoror Bowman, an API developer himself, and a member of the CCS Development Team, is heading up the efforts to polish off the 3.0 API for beta testing, and once its passed muster, it will be set up with digital signature security and pushed to the live developer market.

And in other note, the reason I didn't list all 45 licensed developers in the poll is because I wanted to concentrate on developers with multiple weapons in the market, and not all of our 45 developers are active weapon developers, some develop RP enhancement aids, others only have one weapon that is CCS enhanced, so I just listed out the major market developers on the list to get an idea from the players what they think.

Thanks for taking the time to vote, and regardless of who you vote for, the new regime is coming soon! The API is dead! All Hail the API! (3.0)