Fortress Forever is now accepting beta applications!

Simply go to this link and follow the instructions there.

The question I've heard most lately is "Why now?", with just plain "Why?" in a close second. There's a few good reasons.

Previously, we had something on the order of 200 beta testers. Only a handful of them were still active after 2.3 was released. This first and foremost was a security risk - that's more accounts that aren't being used that could be easily compromised. Moreover, it made things an organizational mess.

We had been talking about what to do about the situation in the dev forums and decided the fairest and best thing to do was to simply clean out the beta and start fresh. We archived the old forums and cooked up some new ones. We set standards that we are going to hold our testers to. We've upgraded our organization and security in countless ways.

All of our old beta testers are on a list available to us, and those that wish to reapply may be welcomed back depending on numerous factors that I am not going to get into. A few of our best took the beta reorganization as the chance to relieve themselves of a responsibility that they no longer had time for - to you guys (and all of our past testers), we wish you the best in your new endeavors.

That's the why. As for the "Why now?"...

2.4 is shaping up and we have, as usual, a lot of fun things in store. The Orange Box port is coming along gradually and that is going to, frankly, introduce a whole world of new problems. The more eyes on the problem, the better. The FF Team is getting their act together and we're trying to hold ourselves to a standard representative of the excellent legacy that we are trying to keep alive - the very spirit of Fortress.

So what are we looking for in a tester? If you're a talented FF player who can conc circles around the enemy defense, well... we have a lot of those guys already. You're very much welcome to apply. If you have no experience with Fortress games at all, that is equally - if not more - important to us. We want to get a wide variety of perspectives on our beta team.

In other news, I'm busting my butt as usual trying to get the good word out about Fortress Forever. Any good P.R. guy will tell you that you never go into specifics until the deal is sealed, so I won't. Keep your eyes on the front page and our forums. Things are only going to get better from here.

Our forums are back online thanks to the hard work of Scuzzy and the rest of our team!We're glad to be back.

We still have a few remaining issues.

First and foremost, we regret to say that our password database is effectively broke beyond repair. As such, everyone - regular users, betas, and devs - have to reset their passwords. If you go to our forum you will see further instructions at the top of the page related to this issue. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Secondly, you may notice that practically all of our staff is listed as "Retired FF Staff". Please be assured that everyone on the team has not just gotten up and left. This is a temporary solution as the fine people in charge confirm the identity of each of our devs one by one and reauthorize them for developer status.

A general message to the community: we are accepting beta applications. Keep an eye on the forums and see if anything pops up related to that. Past testers are welcome to reapply as well.

Well that's it guys! Thanks for sticking around during this tough time. We appreciate the support of the community and we're getting our butts back to work on all things Fortress!

    Our forums are currently undergoing unscheduled maintenance. The FF team apologizes for the downtime and we will have them back up and running as soon as possible.



Update:

    Among the few problems we're having, I've been told that our forum database has been corrupted.
    Thankfully, we learned our lesson from that huge forum mess-up that we had a few years ago and we have been doing nightly updates. We're only going to lose, at most, roughly the last 12 hours of posts as we restore from the backups. Our forum database is roughly 1 GB in size so this backup is going to take a while. Please be patient.

Update #2:

    It looks like the database restore is going to take much, much longer than we had hoped it would. We're looking to get the forums up by sometime tomorrow morning. We've sent an announcement to this effect on the FF Steam group. By the way, if you're not a member of the FF Steam group, that's usually the place we send out news first. It's as good a time as any to join!
    I personally will be getting into Fortress Forever and hopping onto a server. We don't have the forums to use so we may as well play the game!

Update #3:

    The backup was restored successfully. I really do wish it were simply a matter of flipping a switch and turning the forums on, but there's still some stuff that has to be done.
    It's also been brought to my attention that our wiki is down. This is probably because it is tied into our forums. (An account on our forums also gives you an account on our wiki.)
    In short, we're probably 90% back, but we're going to have to work some stuff out here still. As always, we at Fortress Forever appreciate your patience and loyalty while we try to get all this crap sorted out.
*nbsp;   Lastly, I know a lot of you people must be sittin' bored out there with nothing to do besides play FF. Well, I was recently delighted to discover the Hulu has a whole bunch of episodes of NOVA, one of my favorite shows. If you live in the States, check it out (or proxy in) and enjoy.