In a lengthy post on the official Heroes of Newerth forum, Marc DeForest from developer S2 Games has both apologized for the game's recent issues and revealed a number of items offered to players as compensation. Yesterday, Shacknews reported that a "catastrophic hardware failure" caused the game to shut down service.

DeForest says that the last five weeks of service have been "unacceptable" and announced that every player will receive "2,000 silver coins," every item in the Goblin Store will be "unlocked until Wednesday, June 29" (12PM ET), and "Leaves" on all player accounts from Tuesday, May 17 through Thursday, June 9 will be removed.

The S2 Games founder went on to outline the reasons behind the game's recent issues, noting that following distributed denial of service attacks in May, the company "retained a world renowned internet security firm to secure [its] network." Required updates and server transitions to protect against attacks began on June 9, until revealing the team would need to upggrade its database boxes for "additional capacity and consistency of service."

When the replacement CPUs started on June 21, DeForest says, the engineers noticed "anomalies in the raid setup, causing a total loss of data on the master and slave boxes." As of today, Heroes of Newerth is back online and running on a temporary setup while the developer constructs its new environment at another hosting firm; however, "not all services may be operating at 100%"

Heroes of Newerth is playable and will continue to be, DeForest promises; however, the team will notify the playerbase of required maintenance.

To their credit, S2 Games says it holds themselves "completely accountable" for the events that have transpired.

"Through two years of closed beta, open beta, and retail play, we provided nearly 100% uptime. We are intent on restoring this level of service you have all come to expect," DeForest wrote. "We will be making the necessary adjustments in our systems, processes, and management to achieve a better and more reliable quality of service."