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.

Maybe this:
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=97580
In short, Ascaron filed for bankruptcy protection. :-(

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 :)