EXCELSIOR DAILY

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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

Updates to Umbris Camp + Sgail:

Both areas now have AOE spells (including those on weapons) disabled, and their healing has been set back to default. We are hoping to see players venture into these areas more now, while still preventing the exploiting that was prominent previously.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

The Spring Grand Auction will take place tomorrow - Saturday, March 22nd at 3PM EST, 19:00 shard time.

The items will be displayed later this evening, I'll make an announcement when they're set up.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

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Due to an unexpected shard issue, the auction has been rescheduled to Sunday the 23rd at 17:00 shard time (1pm EST).
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

At +V's request, Sgail is now for players 90 days or older, and the Gleam Aura Leggings may be worn only by accounts older than the same 90 days. There are numerous systems in place to prevent access to these areas for players under the required account age, so if you are under 90 days and somehow find a way in, you should report it. Otherwise, you are exploiting and it will be handled accordingly.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

With today's restart, apart from minor fixes and optimizations, there are two new things:

Mondain's legacy weapon abilities:
There are 6 new weapon abilities, the most anticipated was bladeweave. Also I wen't through all the weapons and made sure that they all have correct and working specials (though with so many, I could get something wrong so please let me know if anything is off or not working).
But please keep in mind that these new specials are sort of in beta testing, they might still be tweaked a bit. I also have to go through bladeweave in particular, there is some conflicting information: Stratics says it basically triggers one of the moves at random, but I haven't found any RunUO topics that would support that (actually, just as i went to search again, I found it... so this will most probably be changed to the "correct" functionality).

Relayered items binding
We have found that it is necessary to restrict the lending/borrowing of relayered items, since beginner players are able to borrow them from veterans and play the content that was intended for veterans (or groups) and that disrupts the intended gradual slope of difficulty and reward. It takes a lot of planning, grinding and leveling to get to a point where you can solo balrons, and it should. This is a particular problem for the upcoming facets, where a portion of the quests as well as rewards are made specifically for the veterans - if you have those rewards, it should mean that you have really earned them, and it can't mean that you just have a friend from whom you borrowed gear.
But we don't want to simply bind relayers. We have discussed several options at length, even asked a group of veterans for their opinion and the idea was well accepted. I understand that now when this was finally made, many of you will come up with alternate ideas to approach this issue, but basically it is a closed subject now, enough time has been spent thinking and rethinking of the possibilities and sleeping it over.

The final version of it is that all current relayers, existing and new, will become account bound. When creating, buying or borrowing a relayer, it will bind to your account for 30 days. After 30 days, it will enter a 100-day period when it is possible to unbind, but for a fee starting at 100ED on the first day, decreasing by 1ED every day, until after 100 days (130 days since the initial binding) it becomes completely free to transfer again.

There were also ideas for the item to remember how many times it was transfered in a longer time frame, and then the binding cooldown as well as the early-unbind fee would vary based on that, but I think this solves the problem without becoming too complex.

We know that many of you have relayers lent/borrowed, so we are making this a gradual process. All currently borrowed relayers will be set as if the 130 days have already gone by. So all who have any relayered item right now, can return it (or sell it) without any wait. For about 2 weeks (until the next restart), relayers will temporary bind for 24 hours upon transfer. After the restart, they will bind regularly with the 30 day no-transfer-at-all, but the fee for unbinding (between 30 and 130 days) will be 1ED - it will stay like this for a month or two. There is also currently a bug where the item will think it has been transfered, if you put it on a biopet - this will also be fixed in the next restart - we wanted to make the 30-day/1ED thing right away, but not until this bug is fixed.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

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There will be a Grand Auction on Saturday July 5th at 1:00pm EST / 17:00 shard time.

Items are on display at the auction display area. All items in this auction will have a designated starting bid that will function as the 'reserve price'. These starting bids are based on the average sale price from previous auctions, except for items which are brand new and those are based on the value we determined for them. The starting price will be announced as each item is placed on the auction block.

Hope to see y'all there!
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

We have successfully moved to a new server. Hopefully more stable than the previous one (that has been acting up in the last few days), but if not, at least it's faster :)

You should already be able to connect from this moment on.
If you cannot connect, here's a few things to try:

1. Restart your client. It may have stored the previous shard address.
2. Open command line prompt (WinKey+R) and type the following (without the quotes): "ipconfig /flushdns" (in case your computer insists on not forgetting the old server address).
3. The above should work, but then restarting your computer or network router might also help.
4. But mostly, you might just give it a little time... but if you can't get online even after let's say 6 hours, please post on the forums.

The accessories (portal, teamspeak, ... ) will become available within the next hour or two.
Again thank you all for your patience in the last few days with the crashes.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

Due to an increase in the number of folks hiding at peerless in order to 'jump' the line later, I've disabled hiding, stealth, and invisibility at Netopir, Slaarion, and Grizzle. We will keep an eye on things to see how it goes from here.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

There was a poll stone in the Town Center between September 5th - 10th. The question was about the voting rewards, whether they should stay the same, be changed, or removed completely. There were a total of 199 votes. The results of the poll are:
Choice 1: I like it how it currently is (1ED per vote): 156 votes (79,3%)
Choice 2: The reward should be something decorative or random: 40 votes (19,2%)
Choice 3: There should be no reward for voting: 2 votes (0,9 %)
Choice 4: I don't care / I don't vote: 1 vote (that's actually what i clicked hehe, but I do vote).

I was curious to see what the difference between young and veteran player is, so I checked results for the first two choices in two groups: Players under 6 months of age (94 players) had 86% for the first choice, and the "veterans" over 6 months were 79,7%.
I was expecting a different result, also maybe a bigger difference between young and old players.

Considering these results, I will leave the vote reward as is. Sometime in the future I'd like to upgrade the system to properly count votes on other sites as well, since there are some that just get the 1ED by voting on the GTOP100 site, but at the moment they are in such a minority that the whole thing can stand. And while I'm at it, i might give some weight to decorative rewards... perhaps if you really vote on all the sites you get an extra raffle ticket, or after a certain number of votes, somesort of an extra reward.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

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Mistvale updates:

I've made some big changes to how you interact with the Mistvale NPCs. Instead of working on numerous keywords, they are now gump-based. You will approach the NPC and say 'hail' to initiate the very first gump. From there, the rest of the quest is automated and you will not need to speak any further keywords.

Since this is a fairly big change to the way these NPCs are coded, there may be some unforeseen issues. Please report any problems or oddities to me in-game.

Please note that if you discover you are able to do any of the following, you must report it immediately or be held accountable for exploiting unintentional issues in the system:

- Obtain multiple Armaments (Leggings, Cuirass, Pauldrons, Coif, Gauntlets, Boots, Reaper, Sash, Cloak) books, or do these quests more than one time each.
- Receive multiple rewards for any quest (IE: more than 1 bank check per monster contract, more than 1 of each type of keg for the apiculture quest, more than 1 Item Bless Deed for the merchant quest, etc).
- Receive multiple books for any quest.
- Repeat the Apiculture quest more than once per 7 days.
- Repeat the Monster Contracts quest more than once per 7 days.
- Repeat the Merchant quest more than once per 14 days.
- Enter Mistvale before 21 days' account age or after 120 days' account age.

Also, the 6-month maximum account age for wearing any of the armaments is still in place. Some items won't display this information until +C does another reboot.

I hope this helps streamline the Mistvale system as well as eliminate the issues with crashing in the building. I welcome feedback in-game or in the General Discussion section of the forums.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

We are happy to announce that the annoying lag is now cleared up! The lag started sometime in august, and got increasingly worse, and really shown it's full capacity in the last few days (4-second spikes almost every minute, i've even seen some 30 second or up to 120 second freezes).

The shard will remain at a 15 minute save interval, just in case, but it seems we're definitely out of the woods now.

Have fun!
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Staff position available

We are looking for a fresh face or two on our team. I'll probably add more than just one staffer over the course of a month, let's say during November. Currently the primary need is for staff that can be active during the times when most of us aren't. That's from around 6AM shard time till about 6PM shard time. Or people with good knowledge of some specifics, for example coding, graphic design, etc. Or in general, members of our community that are interested in getting more involved, at least in a formal sense (I know some of you are already very involved in keeping this shard a great gaming experience, kudos to all!).

We aim to make it an enjoyable experience. You'll get to see the whole thing from a different angle. And hopefully learn a few skills (or upgrade existing) with all that you'll experience. Keep in mind this is a volunteer position.

Basic criteria - what we look for in a staffer:
- Definitely over 18, preferably over 25.
- Can be online for a big part of the day. We don't have a requirement that is set in stone, but candidates who are here more will have an advantage (if you are only here for let's say an hour a day, you have a rather small chance).
- Excellent understanding of the game, as well as knowing the specifics of our shard.
- At least 6 months account age, and please note that the longer you played here, the more chances you have to be picked.
- No history of rule breaking. Ok, a failed afk check or two doesn't exclude you, but as far as language and attitude goes, there's a very slim chance to be picked if you have a history of drama and foul language.
- Note that if you are a high profile player (e.g. guildmaster of a big/famous guild, player with a lot of influence) that decreases the chance of being picked.
- Although technical knowledge is not required, knowledge coding within the RunUO framework is a big plus, as well as having experience with things like XmlSpawner and other cool things that make a shard work. If you don't have the knowledge, then the wish to learn these things is just as good. (Disclaimer: duplicating a .cs file and changing the name and color of the monster can't be called "programming").

If you'd like to apply:
- Compose a new email message.
- The address is written on the front page.
- Subject of the email must be "Staff Application".
- Follow the template below:
Player: <your shard nickname>
Account: <username, ID>

<A paragraph about who you are, your real name, age, which part of the world you're from, what education you have (even if you're still attending college, even if you dropped out of one), anything interesting you'd like to say about yourself>

<A paragraph about your knowledge and experiences that are relevant to being a staffer on an MMO server>

<A paragraph about your visions and goals, why you want to become staff, what you hope to learn from it, etc>

[[ These paragraphs should be approx 150-400 words *together* (NOT each paragraph). Hard to write anything meaningful with less than 150 words, but I also cannot read whole books, so around 300-500 is kind of the upper limit. ]]
What happens next
I will wait until next week (starting October 27th) and then go through the emails. I plan to chose about 4-6 applicants which I will then look at more closely, invite for an interview, etc. So if you don't make the initial cut, I will do my best to let you know in that first week of November.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

There will be a Grand Auction on Saturday, December 6th at 18:30 shard time - that's 1:30 pm EST. There will be a follow-up auction on Sunday to sell duplicates of the decorative items, at 21:00 shard time.

Items are on display in the auction display area now.

Please note that all items will have starting bids ranging from 1mil on up, depending on the overall value and desirability of the item.

Hope to see everyone there!

- +N
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

There will be a Grand Auction on Saturday, March 14th at 17:00 shard time - that's 1:00 pm EST. There will be a follow-up auction held by +C on Sunday to sell duplicates of the decorative & token items, at 21:00 shard time.

Items are on display in the auction display area now.

Please note that all items will have starting bids ranging from 1mil on up, depending on the overall value and desirability of the item. For example, smaller or older deco items will start around 1mil. Newer, or more desirable deco items will start around 3mil. Extremely rare items that we only sell once or twice a year (things like totem deeds, ancient titan's hammer, etc) will start in the 50-100mil range.

Hope to see everyone there!

- +N
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Voting news! I haven't announced this, but I've been able to collect some data with which I was able to determine how many of you are honest and are voting on all the sites, as was intended - and how many are just clicking the GTop to get the ED.

As it turns out, the data varies a lot... I was expecting to see a rather distinct group of two types of players - those who almost always vote on all the sites, and those who never do. It turns out this is very equally distributed/random/linear... I am aware that captchas can sometimes be wrong or hard, so it's probably not possible for anyone to achieve 100% success (this is true with some, but they all had just 1-2 votes). Btw, the data spans 30 days.

So I've decided to reward the honest voters:
- All who have a 66% or more success rate for voting on all the sites got a double ED reward. The amount of ED is based on how many ED you have already collected for that period (if you have already collected 20, you got anther 20 in your bank box). And a sash "Honest Topsite Voter" (account bound, can't buy this one :) )
- Those who have less, but still at least 25% got double ED, but the amount of ED is based on the number of true votes. For example, you collected 10 ED but only voted on all the sites 3 times, you got 3ED. And a sash "Fair Topsite Voter".
- Those with under 25% won't get anything. Actually, there are a few players in this group that got more than the expected 30 ED reward: the excess of 30ED was taken away.

Planned change for the near future (next week, hopefully):
The rewards will be progressive. Your first vote will be rewarded with 5000 gold, then each successive vote with (probably) 2000 more. Until you reach 50000, at which point you would get 1ED per. All votes made until then will already count in your progression - not to worry, you won't all start with 5k. This will balance out the income, as 1ED per day for a few clicks is quite a lot for a newbie. But after 20 days/votes, you're on top.

(Quick disclaimer: The data isn't 100% reliable, the cross-referencing algorithm does not meet international monetary and banking standards, and the 66% and the 25% thresholds are just arbitrary. I'm sure that among the "fair" voters are those who have indeed voted on all sites all the time, but unfortunately that's the most reliable data that I have at the moment.)

Thank you all for voting!
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