From the time I had played the Alpha test for RO, I was very interested in the game. I moved on to play the Beta and quit when it became P2P - I strongly disagreed that the game was out of beta and I did not like the way Gravity ran things. It was a mess, buggy and full of bots and assclowns. I think it's safe to say I'd have chomped 90% of them given the opportunity

Anywho, I'd wanted to run a server at the time but nothing decent was available. I played RO in single player for awhile on the now defunct YARE emulator but this is obviously not a very good alternative... Years down the road I played on a few servers here and there but all went down after maybe 4 months tops, and all had immature fools as administrators. I stopped playing for a few years.
I eventually landed on a decent server that I played on for a good while, and eventually ended up GM there. Deliverance was started to get away from the absentee administration there whose inaction was having ill effects on the server. We did not advertise, but a small fraction of the awesome population there followed. Heck, they were on our forums for a month before we even opened. With a consistently strong staff and administration with a whole lot of time (typically 8 hours deli/day as a student at the time) it can safely be said that Deliverance was the best mid-rate server available at some point. And our greatest asset was our awesome population. Word of mouth brought more and more people in, and assclowns were routinely...removed. Since then, we've overcome some massive problems (growing pains, player drama shitstorms, crashing issues) and continued to offer a no-wipe environment for well over 4 years now - which I'd wager is unparalelled in any RO pserver. I am proud and honored to have played a part in the enjoyment of this game by so many people. At the time of writing, over 60,000 accounts! Messing around with YARE, I could never imagine something like this being possible.
Things have changed. I am working a full time career job, and I live with my fiancee now. I have had some ongoing problems as well eating up the majority of my time. I've chosen not to share too much about my life and have not disclosed this. I've started work on upgrades 4 times and nearly completed them each time only to have been forced to stop so long that the version becomes obsolete. It's been really frustrating for me to see the server suffer from my inactions, and having been on the other side of the coin as a player, I'd be pissed too. I've held onto hope for too long and made you wait for too long. Now that the infrastructure is fully upgraded and secure, it's a perfect time to pass things over. I'll be showing Nad & Bob how I do things and the natural process will be for them to improve on the things I do inefficiently or incorrectly. Nadrielle and Bob have their work cut out for them, but all hope is not lost. There are still over 600 active accounts! We started with 30 and word of mouth covered the rest. I have to give major props to those of you who are still loyal. You guys are the ones who have always motivated us to work hard when assclowns got us down. You've stuck around longer than I would've - I'd have left and started my own server...oh wait.