Alpha Servers Going Offline Temporarily

Herko

As announced by JC in The Repopulation forums

Alpha Servers Going Offline Temporarily

... and confirmed by Idea Fabrik (the provider of HeroEngine and HeroCloud) on the HeroEngine forums

The Repopulation's development servers live, Alpha servers taken offline.

Copperfield

not very independed if ask me :P

SpottyGekko

Is it "temporarily" or "indefinitely" ?

The Hero Cloud services which hosted the Repop alpha servers are going offline because Idea Fabrik (the developers of Hero Engine) can no longer afford to pay for the Hero Cloud infrastructure.

And they won't come back until Idea Fabrik have found a new source of funding. Even then, it's not certain that the Hero Cloud services will be resumed fully or even in part, because the new funds may not cover the continued provision of those subsidised services.

Theoretically, the Repop alpha servers could just be moved to a new server host, but I suspect that the game engine is too dependant on the Hero Cloud to allow the game to run standalone elsewhere. There's also the issue of backend integration, because currently all account management and billing is done via Hero Cloud services.

Finding new investors to continue funding Hero engine development may prove difficult. The engine has had no major MMO success stories in it's 10-year history, and MMORPG's have pretty much lost the allure of major profits that they had several years ago.

SWTOR was built on an unfinished version of the engine source code from 2006. SWTOR's version of the code has been heavily modified and probably bears little resemblance to the current version of the Hero engine. So much so that they are completely independent of current Hero patches and upgrades.