My friend and I, who have been playing Sacred MP on his server for a couple of weeks now, can't seem to connect to the Lobby server. Any news on that? Is it just a temporary problem? No mention on the official Sacred forums, although I'll post there too.

Found this on the Sacred site
[url=]http://forum.sacredeng.ascaron-net.com/showthread.php?t=62625&highlight=10026[/url]
Post #20 seems to say it's more than temporarily down. which bites.

I wonder what he means by "the current situation at Ascaron"... that statement (in fact the whole post) seems rather ominous.

They did that months ago, my concern is that this is something new or something worse. Besides, if the bankruptcy protection filing were to somehow affect the game servers, I would have expected it to happen long ago; like, when they filed; not now, months into the bankruptcy proceeding.

Yeah, in fact I saw that last night but the European date format had me confused. Thought the post was from March :( It does sound ominous.
Here's a direct link to the post from Ascaron:
http://bit.ly/HWTgt

It wasn't March, but they did file for bankruptcy protection back in April:
http://www.ascaron.com/gb/gb_news/index.html

I suppose what she meant is that with the recession+developing 1.5 games, Ascaron has to spare money wherever it can.

Works now. The company that managed the lobby software went bankrupt. They have gotten a new contractor and now it wworks again. Now I just need to wait for my key to come in the post and I'm ready to play :)