[4YA] Training Servers

4YA Shutdown

Hi everyone.

With a heavy heart, I share the difficult decision to close 4YA’s 30 Servers after seven years of service. The closure will take place on November 1st at noon. I’m sure there will be a lot of questions but we have shared the most important information below. Further announcements and plans are to follow.

At noon, November 1st this year, Aerobatics Online and Project Overlord will continue outside of 4YA, details of which we will announce closer to the shutdown date. We will also make our PVE missions available for you to continue to enjoy outside of the 4YA servers.

Any excess server funds already donated to the servers that are left after the shutdown on November 1st will be refunded by GTX. We will work closely with them to ensure any donations made get refunded to the paypal accounts of the latest donators.

Below are the personal messages from Lurcher and me that led up to this decision.

  1. Lurcher’s personal resignation
  2. My (Rhino’s) closure of the current 4YA Training Servers
  3. Continuation of Aerobatics Online and Project Overlord
  4. The future of our 4YA PVE missions

1. Lurcher’s resignation

Hey all.

For those of you who don’t know me as well, I’m the main author of the 4YA PVE and PVPVE mission scripts. I also developed and maintain the very custom infrastructure that keeps our 30 servers running: server management tools, moderation, monitoring, and automations. I joined 4YA in 2019 and have been supporting our community as a developer and admin since 2021, helping to build 4YA into what it is today, together with Rhino and the 4YA Staff.

4YA has been a huge part of my life for the past 6 years, in a very positive way. I’ve met some close friends here. Flying together with you all on PVE and in PVP events has brought so much joy to my life. Next to that, the development, system administration and mission building sides, and collaborating on these things, has given me purpose and belonging.

Without going into unnecessary detail, my personal situation has changed. I’ve had less time and energy to give 4YA the attention that it needs to continue running and improving, and there currently happens to be a hard deadline imposed by Discord, halfway through November, that will cause our chat-based server administration system to cease working unless much of it is redesigned - which is something I currently am not able to do.

At the same time, to me equally important, we have had severe internal admin/staff struggles lately that, even though they only indirectly involve me, have brought a large amount of negativity and stress into this hobby. It has reached the point where for me, it’s no longer outweighed by the positives. Working on 4YA used to give me energy, but it’s now draining my sanity in my free time next to an already demanding real job.

For these reasons I have personally decided to resign from 4YA.

I want you to know that I’m extremely grateful for having had the chance to build these things and to get to see so many people enjoy them. I’ve felt a strong responsibility to give back to the 4YA PVE community, and later PO and AO, all the support that they need, and I have done so for as long as I could.

I want to sincerely thank everyone who made this part of my life so fun and interesting:

I wish you all the best. Kind regards,

Lurcher

2. Rhino’s closure of the 4YA Training Servers

I just wanted to take a moment to express my deepest gratitude to each and every one of you. Over the past seven years, 4YA has been more than just a community; it’s been a family, a place where we shared our passion for DCS. Seeing all of you enjoy the missions that Lurcher and I have put together has truly been one of the greatest joys of my life. Your enthusiasm, support, and camaraderie have made this journey incredibly special, and I am so thankful to have been part of this community. Throughout the years, I’ve watched many of you pilots sharing tips and helping each other on our discord. This has been a highlight for me, and I hope they’ve been just as meaningful for you all.

I want to share that I’ve made the difficult decision to close 4YA for a few different reasons. Lurchers resignation makes the running of 4YA too much of a task to continue alone as we have spent 6 years fine tuning our separate roles to keep 4YA going. Also this last year due to personal reasons related to my family and my health, i have found less time to be able to give 4YA my entire focus which running such a large community demands. This isn’t an easy goodbye, but I believe it’s the right step for me at this point in my life. I am hoping that freeing up my time will also allow me time to fly with friends on DCS more which running 30+ servers for so long has restricted.

While 4YA is coming to an end, I want to thank each of you for your understanding, your encouragement, and for those that already knew this was coming—thank you for your messages of support and understanding. Looking ahead, I hope that the community spirit we’ve built here continues on, whether in new endeavours or within other groups and doesn’t have to end with this chapter.

Finally, I want to say a sincere thank you to all the staff in 4YA for giving up their time and assisting making this community run smoothly. It’s been my honour to fly alongside you all.

Take care, stay safe, and I hope to see you in the skies.

Rhino

3. Continuation of Aerobatics Online and Project Overlord

We want to emphasize that, since Aerobatics Online and Project Overlord both originate from communities that we have welcomed and adopted into 4YA, we feel a very strong responsibility to help in what way we can for them to continue without our involvement.

Currently, work is underway by existing 4YA Staff to set up the infrastructure for running AO and PO outside of 4YA. In November, these communities will be continuing without interruption.

4. The future of our 4YA PVE missions

We very much would like for all of you to continue to enjoy the missions that we’ve built for as long as you like. For that reason, after the servers are shutdown, we will make the missions and scripts available for download.

TL;DR