News

Okay, it's not for The Ivalice Chronicles, but it's not like I got a preview copy...

Anyway, it’s very nearly a legal adult here in the States, but finally the War of the Lions version of Final Fantasy Tactics has a home at Caves of Narshe. This is a project that I’d wanted to do for many years, and at times made some progress towards that goal, but life being what it is, we never quite got it over the line until now.

This is almost a complete redo of what we’ve had to offer for over twenty years in terms of Final Fantasy Tactics coverage, with expansions and reorganization of our game guides and data throughout. It’s the perfect way to reacclimatize yourself to the game, no matter where you last played it, with just ten days left before the new release drops.

Our team of help in preparing this coverage is smaller than usual, but their dedication made up for the numbers in a big way and as always I’m beyond thankful for the assistance. Here’s hoping that this is the start of more new things to help our friends and visitors enjoy their Final Fantasy experience; I’ve already done a couple behind-the-scenes tweaks since I released the new section early this morning to help make future work a bit easier. As always, please let us know if you find anything that isn’t working or you’d like to see changed!

Hi, friends - this is just a quick note to say that the heavy lifting on the server maintenance that has been going on since the summer is now largely complete. There are certainly a few things that have broken along the way that are on my list to clean up, but if you're reading this message it means we've fully transitioned to our new hardware and the site is not likely to fall over dead for at least another couple years. Probably.

If you see anything that looks bad, runs slow, doesn't work, et cetera, please let me know as soon as you can. If it's something potentially time-sensitive, like site slowness or rampant spambots, your best bet is to find me in Discord. Thanks as always.

Longtime friends of CoN, TheSpeedGamers, have announced a charity marathon stream of Final Fantasy games for next month, starting July 9 at 7pm ET and running through July 14. For this marathon, donations will be in support of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, one of my personal favorite charities. As of this post, the schedule is still to be determined, but expect a large slate, as previous Final Fantasy marathons from TSG have covered virtually every mainline single-player game and then some.

CoN is supporting TSG this summer as well! We will rebroadcast the stream live on our homepage throughout the marathon, and I'm certain it will be a topic of discussion on our Discord too. We've also just packaged up some donations to be given away for raffles and donation goals during the stream in partnership with ThePhoenixCave, with more to come! If you'd like to be a part of CoN's contributions, start by grabbing some of our holographic stickers before they're gone, or come talk to me in Discord.

Keep an eye out here for more information, and don't forget to tune in on July 9.

Source: TheSpeedGamers (TSG.tv), ThePhoenixCave

We here at CoN were notified over this past weekend about a potential past intrusion into the CoN database, which may have affected user information, including email addresses and passwords.

Please note that our passwords have never been stored in plaintext, and while there's evidence suggesting that we may have been susceptible to brute force attempts to unmask user passwords, we want to assure you that we are going to do everything we can to safeguard your accounts.

Let us first give our apologies for this happening; it's our belief that any information that was stolen was out of date, though we know that doesn't make this news much better. Nevertheless, we're taking additional steps to further enhance our security measures; yesterday, we rolled out changes in how we securely store passwords, effective immediately for all new users and set to update for older users upon their next login. The new storage method tracks to current best methods and reduces the chances of any passwords being reversible to nearly zero.

If you're already logged in, or once you log in next, we kindly ask you to update your password. For those who haven't logged in within the last two months, we've already reset your password, and you can regain access to your account through our 'forgot password' process. By doing this, you'll be utilizing our new, more robust security and also separating your CoN login information from anywhere else you might have used it online.

If you encounter any issues, have concerns, or questions, please reach out to R51 on Discord, via the forums, or via email for assistance. As we always say, there are web professionals behind the running of this site, and we'll always answer questions about how things work here and even what you can do to keep your accounts secure elsewhere.

It's nearly 2024 and we probably don't need to tell you this, but now's the time to make sure you're not reusing passwords. If your password was unique to CoN, then we still suggest you change it but you don't have much else to worry about. If you have used your CoN password elsewhere, this is still a good time to make a change for the better. We will continue to look out for your account as best we can, and if you meet us halfway, we'll all be in good shape for the future.

I'll spare everyone a long-winded update given that I'm now a day late and still recovering from traveling with a summer cold: you may well have noticed that yesterday, July 31, marked the 25th anniversary of Caves of Narshe. It's plainly obvious that many of the strengths of this humble site that kept it going for so long have waned, but I know well how loved our core content remains, though perhaps its audience has dwindled over time.

As always, I want to thank everyone who reads this at any point for their support, either implied or expressed, over the years. I am still happy to keep the lights on around here because of it, and because I know that we provide things that you can't find easily elsewhere (and if you can, they probably stole them from us, the rogues). While I'm not cranking out the new fancy stuff very often these days, and when I am it might be a shade on the dry, techy side, you all should know that if you're reading this we remain of a community and I am thrilled to have my place in it with you all. Or at least most of you all. A lot of you are pretty weird, truth be told.

I have missed out on being able to provide a lot of pomp and circumstance for this big milestone, and I wish I'd done better, but I always hope for the best. I did design a new take on our logo, as I have for every big anniversary since the tenth. As I usually do, I will probably document the design process over at my own blog and will crosspost it here when I do. If you like the golden watercolor, I did manage to make it also into an image that will class up your computer, tablet or phone, so go check that out. If you would be interested in having a printed copy of your own, well, I didn't make any to give away this year but post here or come to our Discord server and make your interest known and I will see what I can do in the near future. Or, you know, just post at the site or join Discord and talk with us. We are still game, if you'll pardon the pun.

Oh, dear, I've gone long-winded again. Sorry.

It's been quite a long time since I've had anything good to talk about with CoN progress. I'm still trying! I promise! So, with that in mind, I do have a little bit to talk about today that probably isn't the most exciting for most of you reading this but hopefully will still help you enjoy your CoN experience just a bit more.

Starting this past weekend, I've shifted a big chunk of the CoN website into an Amazon Cloudfront CDN. This should mean pretty much nothing to you readers out there - if I did my job correctly - but it does have some potential benefits. For one, the site should load faster now, particularly in the case of the images we use in our guides and website (and forums!). Additionally, it did give me the opportunity to fix another couple minor bugs that I found while doing the conversion; and, down the road further, this is the first step to making the rest of the site faster and more useful for you people out there using it to complete your games or generally enjoy Final Fantasy.

Of course, this also means that if you see something that's looking weird, I'd appreciate you letting me know. I went hard into the move-fast-and-break-things approach for this, and while I'm pretty sure I didn't do the "break things" part, well, you never know. And, if for some reason you have some curiosity about how exactly I did this and why now, you can always visit my personal blog where I go into a deeper dive.

Thanks for sticking around CoN - we're happy to have you visiting, using our resources, and in fact reading this!