Hello everyone,
(Please rest assured upfront: all of the server incidents described below have already been resolved, and service is currently operating normally.)
Following the release of version 0.7.4 on the morning of April 14 (EDT), several server incidents occurred, and we also received a great deal of feedback from you about the new build. As of today, April 17, all major issues have been addressed via hotfixes. We would like to take this opportunity to explain what happened and apologize for the trouble caused since 0.7.4 went live.
1. The Free Server Outage
In 0.7.4, we upgraded our servers in both China and the U.S. and integrated a global acceleration service. However, during the route switchover to the new servers, the free server in Mainland China mistakenly identified the acceleration node's IP as the user's IP. This caused the system to flag a single IP as generating an abnormally high volume of requests in a short window, treating it as malicious abuse and automatically rate-limiting it.
About 4 hours after the incident began (2:30 AM Beijing time on April 15 / 1:30 PM EDT on April 14), we received the alerts and immediately began emergency repairs. An hour later (3:30 AM Beijing time on April 15 / 2:30 PM EDT on April 14), the China-side issue was preliminarily resolved.
Unfortunately, when we synchronized the update to both regions, the U.S. server—previously operating normally—developed the exact same IP-detection error, causing all incoming traffic to be misidentified as acceleration-node traffic and blocked. As it was already 3:30 AM Beijing time on April 15, the engineer on duty had gone to sleep. The U.S. server anomaly wasn't noticed until around 9:20 AM Beijing time on April 15 (9:20 PM EDT on April 14), and was restored to normal at approximately 9:40 AM Beijing time that same day.
Our original intent in introducing the global acceleration nodes was to improve connection quality for users worldwide, but we ended up making things worse and seriously disrupted your experience. For this, we are deeply sorry.
2. Fullscreen Always-on-Top and Mouse Click-Through Failures
We noticed that, after the update, the application sometimes failed to stay on top correctly. Some users were even unable to dismiss the changelog and got stuck at the entry screen, unable to proceed.
This is because 0.7.4 introduced a significant underlying architectural change with extensive window splitting and performance optimizations. The old N.E.K.O. was a single "mega-window," whereas the new version has been split into multiple independent sub-windows. The software now consists of more than ten independent windows, and the load timing and z-order relationships between them have become extremely complex.
Although the dev team invested a great deal of time in testing before the release and invited selected players to preview the build, certain edge cases still slipped through. After receiving your reports, it took us a full day to thoroughly trace and pinpoint the exact causes. We sincerely apologize for the shortcomings in our technical handling.
3. Changes to Proactive Conversation Behavior
A special note: beyond the two fixes above, we've also changed how proactive conversations work in the new version. You may now need to lower the base interval a bit to make the catgirl chat more actively with you. This value now represents only a minimum interval — if you ignore her for a prolonged period, her enthusiasm for starting conversations will gradually taper off.
On a related note, starting in 0.7.3, we made a quiet adjustment that lowered the trigger probability of "visual-based" conversations relative to other types. We are currently rolling this back in stages, and continuing to collect your feedback.
4. Known Issues Not Yet Fully Resolved
In the interest of full transparency, there are still a few known issues that we were unable to resolve within the limited time available:
(1) After multiple rounds of fixes, the current build still exhibits UI glitches in the Chat window under certain conditions when it's resized smaller. We'll patch this as soon as possible; in the meantime, manually adjusting the window size serves as a workaround.
(2) Once a large number of characters have been created or subscribed to, rapidly switching between catgirls may cause the Chat window to fail to open. We've gone through several rounds of attempted fixes but have not yet pinpointed the root cause. If you encounter the error "Launch failed: WebSocket not connected," please try restarting the application.
(3) In scenarios triggered by proactive conversation, the Chat window occasionally fails to play voice audio. We're still investigating the cause. The issue will resolve itself on the next round of dialogue.
(4) After renaming the currently active character, there is a high probability of triggering a "Character not found" bug. To recover, you'll need to restart the app and switch characters again. This issue was discovered during the final stage before release; we will fix it as soon as possible.
5. A Word from the Dev Team
Finally, a few words about where the team stands. From the very first bug report, we've been racing against the clock, hoping to fix things and get this announcement out as quickly as possible. Regretfully, only moments ago did we finally complete all the repairs.
Every piece of feedback and criticism has been heard. We are doing our best to respond with the utmost speed and sincerity, but our abilities have their limits, and outcomes sometimes fall short of our intentions.
So, a thousand words condensed into just two: we're sorry, and thank you. The team will now return to full focus on 0.8, hoping to deliver that ideal AI companion as soon as we can, and hoping that more people will come to know and love N.E.K.O. in the future.
Thank you once again for your patience and understanding.