I've been waiting a day now to be infected with 'Caterkiller' from 2017. Is this a normal wait time? Sincerely, an anxious newbie on their first survival

This is not normal, no. Things are not usually this comprehensively broken all over.

If this were a normal situation, you'd have picked Caterkiller from the VIP page and then, if you'd just sat there and waited, an amount of time would pass before you'd get that "You've been matched, sit back and enjoy the ride" notification that indicates the strain is actively progressing.

But for some of the older viruses (like the 2009 ones) that 'stage 0' wait can take up to three days, I think. Caterkiller would probably have been anywhere from 4-10 hours since it's newish (I'm guesstimating). So users can ask other users with that strain to "bite" them. Getting bitten speeds up the process, especially if more than one user is biting. It means you can start your infection stage progressions faster (the progressions themselves don't actually go any faster).

But biting is really, really broken right now, and at this point I don't think anyone's sure if the regular progression time is even working. The only thing I think we know is that the new viruses are progressing their stages as they should. Everything else seems stalled.

So hang tight if you want Caterkiller! If you want to opt for another virus, like one of the new ones, the "I don't want this Virus" option is currently free (it normally costs 1 mil).

Yeah I'm really confused, I just saw on a kissing board that I'm classified as 'infected' but I never got my notification and Gunner insists I'm still waiting, and my HA is broken too, I can't change it. It's a real mess so maybe I just have to wait with my tickets and hope everything fixes itself? As exciting as the new strains are, I wanna be a giant moth!

Yeah, the site's super broken right now. For instance I have a meatball on my head (stage 1 red) but the button under my name says "no biting" which suggests I'm not infected.

Yeah, we're all in the same boat! I know others have had issues with not being able to see/resave avatars. You could check the bug threads and see if there's any resolution there, and I know they're currently tweaking the buttons on the site right now (probably to bring biting back) but it's all a big mess at the moment.

If it's any consolation, the event runs for 2 weeks and so there's plenty of time to manage more than one strain. :)

Well, at least kisses work rn! Thank you.

For what it's worth, I've been waiting about 24 hours now to get infected with Pinkie Patch and I filed a ticket a couple hours ago and was told I'm still in the queue to be infected. So if you haven't been bitten to get infected faster, that seems to be a normal wait :/

Yup, I was told something similar when I filed a ticket to make sure kisses didn't break it. I'm gonna go get bit and see if it helps at all.

As far as I know it can take ~3 days to get infected when you're not bitten. And since the bite button has been gone since last night (only recently showed up now) there has been a delay with infecting.

Yeah, as mentioned above, biting is broken right now so nobody can bite yet, and hasn't been able to for a day. They're working on it and hopefully it will be fixed soon but at this moment, it's still broken.

Edit: Looks like it's getting fixed now, but there are 24 hours of people worth of biting to get through, lol!