VHS Closed Beta Still Down

The developers of VHS have announced today on their social medias and Discord server that there is “no ETA on when VHS will be back.” For those who don’t know, VHS suffered a serious of attacks on their servers during the week of February 14th. A dev with the username Sam Gee posted the following on February 17th:

“On Monday, our servers suffered a string of attacks that continued until yesterday, when we pulled VHS offline. These attacks caused the login issues, the invisible lobbies, and games that wouldn’t start. To be clear – these attacks did not access any of our internal systems, and no user or game data was compromised. We made the decision to put the game into maintenance mode while we work on a patch to protect us from future attacks. To set expectations, VHS will be down until we address the holes in security that had been taken advantage of, along with developing improved tools and strategies to further protect against attacks in the future.”

It is unclear what exactly allowed these attacks to occur, who decided to attack the servers, or what the aim of the attacks was. There are a number of possibilities, but I am speculating that it could be either something to do with the additional wave of Closed Beta keys that were sent on February 8th or one of the patches that happened around the time that the attacks began. While the February 8th wave seems unlikely to be the reason due to other waves coming weeks prior, there is always the chance of a rogue player getting in.

I would more suspect it had something to do between the patches of version 0.62885 that was implemented on February 11th and version 0.62983 that was sent out on February 14th, the first day of the attacks. I would like to reiterate that these are just my opinions and that nothing of this nature has been divulged to the VHS community.

The same developer that goes by the handle Sam Gee made a new announcement today where the dev stated:

“Hey all! Many questions are coming in about when the game will be back up! As of yet, we don’t have an ETA on when VHS will be back, but we can assure you that we’re working hard on the required fixes to protect us from future attacks! Gentle reminder that the mods are here on a voluntary basis, and know just as much information as the rest of the community. All updates will be posted here, as well as on Twitter! Thank you all for your patience and understanding. I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: this community is everything, and we deeply appreciate your support”

Despite the fact that the game has been in maintenance mode for six days as this is being written, the transparency of the developers has garnished a huge amount of praise from both the VHS community and the Gaming community at large. In an era where games are being left to run on sub-optimal standards as the developers rush patches and some developers straight up just ignore glaring problems, the team working on VHS at Hellbent Games is a breath of fresh air. If the developers maintain this transparency and goodwill towards their player base, then it would be no surprise for them to soon be the front runner of the Asymmetrical Horror Game genre.