And you think server downtime is bad. Spare a thought for players of Japanese/Korean MMO M2, which thanks to a little accident has actually been deleted. Forever. Like, it's gone, and is never coming back.
The game, which was developed by Japanese studio Sankando, was undergoing maintenance on October 21 when integral code was deleted from the game's databases. The kicker being this code wasn't stored or backed up anywhere else. With that code missing, the game couldn't function, so the whole damn thing had to come down.
Or so Sankando and the game's operators in Korea, Hangame, say! That's a pretty bush league mistake to make, which has some people suspicious as to the true motives of the game's removal.
I'm erring on the side of it being real, though. I mean, a game that sucks might be a problem, but the most embarrassing thing in MMO history doesn't sound like a very effective cover story.
＜更新11/15＞【M2 -神甲綺譚-】サービス休止について ｢M2 -神甲綺譚-｣のサービス休止について更新いたしました。[Hangame, via igxpro & GI.biz]
You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at plunkett@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.