Mojang Specifications the owner of Wurm Online announced that Wurm Online will restart its life from May 5th.

The latest off-site backup was too old.
We will reset Wurm Online totally. It will once again be that huge forest infested with creatures, awaiting your colonisation.

The game will open again on the 5th of May at 1600 hrs Central Europe/Stockholm (0900 in US/Central), with a promise to make automatic off-site backups and other safety measures we can think of.
Up until then we will carefully generate new maps, look over the database structure so that it will put less stress on the disks and write reimbursement code.

Old players will be able to retrieve all gold they ever purchased, and of course retain their premium time plus two weeks bonus. The reimbursement will be based on the email you create the account with.
Hopefully we can recover the Ageless title from the backup, and with it the Bok.

In order to try to compensate for the lost efforts, some kind of new trinket will be created. You will receive a number of those trinkets depending on how many months premium time you have paid for, so if you have paid for 9 months premium time you will receive 9 of those. There will be a trinket contest in the forums.

Some of you wonder why you can?t keep your skills or money if it is in the backup. The money can?t be kept since we reimburse all gold. The skills can?t be kept partly because it would involve extremely difficult database operations, partly because it would be very bug prone and require new strange logic that would possibly delay the reset.

I am very sorry for this. I am also very embarrassed. I really, really should have known better.

I calculated that more than 500 000 hours worth of playing time has been wiped away. That hurt.

Many of you think that we will receive a lot of new players. I hope that the old players will recognize this opportunity and see the value of their expertise.

My sincere guess is that when you have played three hours on the new map, most of you old players already will have the old map as a good memory, but be very much into the new map and the opportunities it brings.