They shut down yesterday as all the main devs left. Here is the full article in whole quoted by Atracer himself. Sorry to those Private Servers that were all leeching off of AU.. Guess you'll have to shut down too..?
"Hi all.
As the team leader and AU initiator I take responsibility for resolving current unfavorable situation with the project.
We all observed lack of good updates and noticeable growth of overall instability/number of bugs during past months. Since I left development in June, Sarynth in July, Mr.Poke and lord.rex yesterday - situation even worsened. The project now has no active leader nor active senior core developers.
Since I decided to stop development I was looking for some kind of replacement and hoped that project will proceed further (that’s why there were no any public announcement). But as experiment shown, without the organizer project starting splitting from inside.
There are still very talented and promising people in current AU dev group that can continue to work on project – Jego, tomate, Destin, rhys2002 etc. not even counting active contributors from our forum (you all know them – Divinity, rolandas etc.). But the actual point is that their actions need to be coordinated for success and new people should come enter the team (especially core side).
One thing you all should bear in mind is that aion emulator is far from completion. There are multiple areas where things need to be redesigned/refactored. Examples are AI, related NPC skills, fortresses, support for GEO and many more. These things can’t be just fixed but need dedicated people that could improve them significantly and iteratively. Also some areas need global attention – like performance, general server design etc. and this couldn’t be handled by regular forum contributions. Those who are already in “Software development” – already know all about these processes and will understand how much it is important.
Motivation/interest is also one of most important factors that drives development. Fortunately, I don’t have any private server and it resulted in my pure “educational” interest and sole dedication to the open project. As the side effect – this interest can’t last for a long time and new leader should find additional sources of motivation – open donations, delayed server build releases with open sharing between contributors etc.
Regarding SVN - I could leave project workspace for community but doing in this way - I will be still in some kind of managerial involvement. My point is that further emulator development need “hard reset”. This will imply creating new workspace with new owner who will be fully in charge of the development. Also I advise not splitting into multiple projects but create one solid community fork.
As for the forum – it’s not closed and open for further cooperation and discussion (but I’m not actual owner of it).
I couldn’t finish this post without saying thanks to all people who were involved in this project since the day I started in (September 19, 2009). I’m sure all of you got nice experience in emu development and don’t regret about the time spent. Thanks to guys who started with me - alexa026, avol, orfeo087, orz, srx47, StasON. Thanks to guys who did major contributions for our project in core section - Mr.Poke, Sarynth, lord.rex, kosyachok, Xavier, Simple and DP section - Kamui, Atomix, Nemiroff, sweetkr, Destin. Our team also got nice contributions and help from alikasfreak, tomate, Jego, lordicon, rhys2002, sphinx, stpavel, Hilgertby, Youli, zdead, rolandas, Divinity, wylovech, Master, Hellboy, RotO etc. Anyway thanks to all who has at least one or more contributions in Core or DP section.
With deep regret I announce that project discontinued. Temporal lack of core developers is not actual reason for that. And it’s not the end – treat it as necessary restructuring. I already discussed it with team members - probably there will be announced a new AU fork with old & new people and new rules. Stay tuned for further updates and don’t give up!
Best regards,
ATracer"
It will only be a matter of time before 90-98% of all the Private Servers shut down and or just never update again!