News

It’s been a hot minute since we’ve had much to say about the ways you can spend your money and help keep the lights on at CoN, but since the turn of the year we’ve been hard at work patching things up and getting some new things on offer for you.

First, we can point you back at AmaCoN, our affiliate partnership with Amazon in the US and elsewhere; for quite a while, our links out and search functionality were having lots of trouble, so today we’ve streamlined them quite a bit. You can still get links to search for your favorite CoN games from each game’s landing page, and we’ve also set up some convenient links for common searches on the AmaCoN page, as well as fixed up our search. You can still make your own links from there as well, to use yourself or share with others. Don’t forget to stop at CoN before making your Amazon purchases, to help support keeping us online!

The other new feature we have for you today is the return of our bespoke merch store! In partnership with Teepublic, we have just rolled out our first two CoN designs for shirts, mugs, stickers, magnets, and more. And if you aren’t looking for something that has the CoN logo on it, don’t fear; we also currently have six Final Fantasy-related designs there as well that you can’t get anywhere else (because we created the things). That’s just the start, as there are lots of designs that are ready and haven’t been published yet, and even more on the drawing board. I'll share a couple of the products later in this newspost for those of you who are simply too lazy to click things more than once.

Please take a look around and think of CoN next time you have something you need or want, and feel free to make suggestions on what you might like to see next!

Okay, it's not for The Ivalice Chronicles, but it's not like I got a preview copy...

Anyway, it’s very nearly a legal adult here in the States, but finally the War of the Lions version of Final Fantasy Tactics has a home at Caves of Narshe. This is a project that I’d wanted to do for many years, and at times made some progress towards that goal, but life being what it is, we never quite got it over the line until now.

This is almost a complete redo of what we’ve had to offer for over twenty years in terms of Final Fantasy Tactics coverage, with expansions and reorganization of our game guides and data throughout. It’s the perfect way to reacclimatize yourself to the game, no matter where you last played it, with just ten days left before the new release drops.

Our team of help in preparing this coverage is smaller than usual, but their dedication made up for the numbers in a big way and as always I’m beyond thankful for the assistance. Here’s hoping that this is the start of more new things to help our friends and visitors enjoy their Final Fantasy experience; I’ve already done a couple behind-the-scenes tweaks since I released the new section early this morning to help make future work a bit easier. As always, please let us know if you find anything that isn’t working or you’d like to see changed!

Hi, friends - this is just a quick note to say that the heavy lifting on the server maintenance that has been going on since the summer is now largely complete. There are certainly a few things that have broken along the way that are on my list to clean up, but if you're reading this message it means we've fully transitioned to our new hardware and the site is not likely to fall over dead for at least another couple years. Probably.

If you see anything that looks bad, runs slow, doesn't work, et cetera, please let me know as soon as you can. If it's something potentially time-sensitive, like site slowness or rampant spambots, your best bet is to find me in Discord. Thanks as always.

Longtime friends of CoN, TheSpeedGamers, have announced a charity marathon stream of Final Fantasy games for next month, starting July 9 at 7pm ET and running through July 14. For this marathon, donations will be in support of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, one of my personal favorite charities. As of this post, the schedule is still to be determined, but expect a large slate, as previous Final Fantasy marathons from TSG have covered virtually every mainline single-player game and then some.

CoN is supporting TSG this summer as well! We will rebroadcast the stream live on our homepage throughout the marathon, and I'm certain it will be a topic of discussion on our Discord too. We've also just packaged up some donations to be given away for raffles and donation goals during the stream in partnership with ThePhoenixCave, with more to come! If you'd like to be a part of CoN's contributions, start by grabbing some of our holographic stickers before they're gone, or come talk to me in Discord.

Keep an eye out here for more information, and don't forget to tune in on July 9.

Source: TheSpeedGamers (TSG.tv), ThePhoenixCave

We here at CoN were notified over this past weekend about a potential past intrusion into the CoN database, which may have affected user information, including email addresses and passwords.

Please note that our passwords have never been stored in plaintext, and while there's evidence suggesting that we may have been susceptible to brute force attempts to unmask user passwords, we want to assure you that we are going to do everything we can to safeguard your accounts.

Let us first give our apologies for this happening; it's our belief that any information that was stolen was out of date, though we know that doesn't make this news much better. Nevertheless, we're taking additional steps to further enhance our security measures; yesterday, we rolled out changes in how we securely store passwords, effective immediately for all new users and set to update for older users upon their next login. The new storage method tracks to current best methods and reduces the chances of any passwords being reversible to nearly zero.

If you're already logged in, or once you log in next, we kindly ask you to update your password. For those who haven't logged in within the last two months, we've already reset your password, and you can regain access to your account through our 'forgot password' process. By doing this, you'll be utilizing our new, more robust security and also separating your CoN login information from anywhere else you might have used it online.

If you encounter any issues, have concerns, or questions, please reach out to R51 on Discord, via the forums, or via email for assistance. As we always say, there are web professionals behind the running of this site, and we'll always answer questions about how things work here and even what you can do to keep your accounts secure elsewhere.

It's nearly 2024 and we probably don't need to tell you this, but now's the time to make sure you're not reusing passwords. If your password was unique to CoN, then we still suggest you change it but you don't have much else to worry about. If you have used your CoN password elsewhere, this is still a good time to make a change for the better. We will continue to look out for your account as best we can, and if you meet us halfway, we'll all be in good shape for the future.