Many of you were probably shocked when receiving today's notices, sent from an alt of mine, no less, that Damnation is closing.

The reasons for that are purely financial, they don't have a bearing on my role in CCS and as a developer for CCS.

During the past three months, I lost both pillars of my RL income. Trying to make ends meet proved futile, with Damnation and North Gate costing $295 and $125 respectively, plus VAT, since I'm in Europe.

So, with much regret, I had to let the island go at extremely short notice. As of right now my Melanie Milland account is suspended for nonpayment, but Suz and I have taken CCS meter development offline years ago, so that is no hindrance for development.

I am, however, not turning my back on CCS and SL. Not owning sims eases a lot of the tremendous financial pressure that has forced me to devote all my time to scraping up money to pay my bills. Relieving that pressure will actually give me more time to concentrate on what I want, rather than what I have to do.

I plan to add IFF (Identify Friend Foe) code to the Meter for testing, hopefully by this weekend. Also, I can invest a little more time into tracking down the skill spam issue to make a new general release meter a reality quite soon.

Please rest assured, I'm not running off on CCS, I just can't continue to spend over $4800 per year on overpriced sims in SL. I'm likely to rent a small spot for a lab and continue working on CCS there.

I'm sorry to have to drop Damnation, it has been my clan home, home to many over the years and it has seen truly epic roleplay in the years of it's existence. An album of pictures of Damnation exists, please do contribute images you may have to help us remember it's good times.

Just a heads up. We've identified a few problems with the roll out of CCS 1.0.5, one of those problems appears that due to API 2.5 still being the API standard, a few individuals who I won't directly name have taken it upon themselves to attempt to disrupt the release by abusing the dynchan.

Now...I should bring up that the only reason this can be done is because the API is still in the process of being swapped over to the new system.

I could have very easily shut down API 2.5 and told people to like it or lump it. But I wanted to be considerate of our players and the money they have spent on weapons over the years, so I set up the 2.5 to 3.0 release scenario to be a slow shift, also with the intention to give our 3rd party developers a 60 day period to update their weapons to the 3.0 system before shutting down 2.5 entirely.

One thing certain individuals can still do is mess with meters via the API 2.5 dynchan...mostly just meter resets, level up notices and the like, nothing horrific...its also possible for these people to go into high volume combat regions and spam the dynchan and cause region performance and CCS performance to tank as well.

Now, this isn't me dodging the responsibility that the meter will need to have further testing and potential patches if we identify problems with how our system is working. But the recent problems reported to me are all mostly attributed not to actual problems with the meters, but a few...rather unfortunate individuals that have made it their business, while in SL, to attempt to disrupt CCS at any level possible. And I could go into a long winded explanation as to why they do it, but I won't bother, because in the end it really won't matter what I say, people will believe whatever they want to believe. But I can assure you that their issues with CCS are mostly based in self interest and the fact that they were denied access to the API and/or banned from Second Life for selling modified viewer executables designed to allow individual users to exploit CCS.

Anyways, simple facts are the only reason this is happening at all, is because the API 2.5 door is still open, we do have the 3.0 API done, its being encrypted and as soon as we can get the bulk of the weapon base shifted over to it (keep in mind some older developers may not update their weapons at all and we do not have any control over that..they just may no longer be in SL at all), we will shut down API 2.5 and this becomes a non-issue from there.

So overall most of the problems currently being seen with the 1.0.5 meter can be attributed to a small handful of people making a minor effort to attempt to make 1.0.5 look like "it doesn't work" and or "isn't secure"...when the only reason they can do that is because I've tried to be considerate to our players in regards to the money they've spent on weapons. I could very well have shut the API down entirely til the 3.0 API was implemented and told you all to fight with rocks and sticks...but I didn't feel that was very considerate as approaches go.

So...no good deed goes unpunished right? Hopefully this gives people a frame of reference on some current issues as they've been reported with the 1.0.5 meter. Its not the meter, its just a bunch of assholes abusing a door we had to leave temporarily open to try to show everyone how smart they are.

Advice to region owners, should you notice any CCS oddities or bad performance, check your region list for names you don't really recognize, I'd be interested in the names you find to check them against the data I'm getting server side.

Anyways, sorry for the bumpy road here, and...sorry that people, are, sometimes, assholes. But we're working as fast as we can to make it a moot issue. CCS 1.0.5 was one part of the solution, the other part is finally getting API 3.0 out to replace 2.5....and from there, it won't really matter how clever someone is.

Been a bit of a short amount of news due to being relatively busy with the "having to do stuff to live indoors and eat every day thing"...regardless I have some upcoming stuff I want to do in regards to Second Life and what not.

First thing on the list is...of course, CCS, the goddamn update thats taken two years is nearly completed. I expect to be ready to roll with this sometime in May barring major problems.

Second thing on the list is before I actually release the update, I want to have a closed door CCS Community Meeting with all our long term sim owners and a few key CCS players from each of their communities to have a little chat about what my ideas for CCS going forward in 2014 are, and how I feel they're beneficial to the players and the games fairness and longevity going forward into the future.

Thirdly on the list is mostly down to the CoLA folks, but I'm going to be in process of a full mesh overhaul of CoLA, SMD, Pasademon Point and North Gate soon...this will be one of those things I'll basically hammer in all at once once the assets are done. Some GMs have proposed doing an interim event which causes some pretty widespread destruction to the sim prior to replacing it with a far more up to date build as far as current gen tech goes....so if you have some thoughts on that, feel free to bring them up in the forums.

Target Date for the Sim Owner/Long Term Player - Community Meeting I'd like to shoot for is : 10 MAY 2014 @ 1400(2PM) Hours PST(SL Time).

Format for invitation to this round table is going to be simple. If you are NOT an administrator on an active CCS sim, you will not be invited UNLESS an administrator that has scheduled themselves to be there has listed you as an invited player advocate.

Simple way to get involved in the CCS Community Meeting is for a sim owner/admin to send me a notecard in Second Life, with the subject: MEETING DELEGATION, in the body of the notecard, list your own name, the name of any other sim administrator from your sim that would like to be involved. You may invite up to two Player Advocates to join you as well, but they must be listed in your Meeting Delegation notecard that indicates you do intend to attend and be part of the discussion. I am trying to keep this meeting down to a small amount of individuals to save time for everyone so please do not attempt to bring along entire clans. One sim administrator and one player advocate would be optimal, in this manner, at least we can ensure there won't be 500 people standing around all talking over each other.

Anyways, get your notecards to me, and again, please, if you are not a CCS sim owner/administrator....do not send me a notecard asking to attend. If you feel you are a player that can add a level of insight and helpful discourse to the meeting, please contact a sim owner/admin that you know and ask them to consider you as their player advocate.

Thanks all, sorry for the long periods of silence but I can't really tell people stuff when theres nothing to tell anyone. Thankfully we do have some stuff coming up that needs to be discussed, so I'd definitely like to discuss it with the people that have stuck by us all these years so they can know, and help shape, how the future is going to look as CCS updates and expands within the grid in 2014.