EXCELSIOR DAILY

[+Colibri]

The shard will be offline between 3AM and 6AM shard time, July 15th, due to the power grid maintenance. I've learned of this today, and it was on the towncriers since about 3am shard time this afternoon.
So we have an approx 3-hour scheduled downtime, let's hope it's less, or at least not more.

This post is just to notify those who missed the towncrier and chat announcements, and don't know why they can't log on.

[+Colibri]

Already announced on the towncriers and here is a more detailed schedule.
The auction will be at standard times with standard rules.

First auction on Sunday 3AM shard time, which is actually *Saturday* 9PM Eastern US and 6PM Pacific US.
Second auction on Sunday 9PM shard time, that's 3PM Eastern US and Noon Pacific US (Sunday).

Special attention to players from Australia (or any other country with a change in daylight savings this weekend). The times are meant on the clock as it is before it will be changed; keep in mind that for the rest of the world the clock doesn't change.

The two auctions will have identical items, if you buy something on the first auction you may not bid on it on the second one. This is to allow more people get a chance to win the items.

There is a minimum bid increment rule for auctions. To calculate the minimum increment, you take first number from the current bid, move it one space to the right, and that is the minimum increment.
For example:
- If the current bid is 190k gold, the first number is 1, meaning the minimum increment is 10k.
- If the current bid is 620k gold, the first number is 6, and the minimum increment is 60k.
- At 3.8 million, the minimum increment is 0.3 mil, meaning that the next valid bid is 4.1 mil.

See you there!

[+Colibri]

Ever wanted to rent a destination on the world teleporter, for your vendor shop? Well now you can!

Just step on the world teleporter, or doubleclick your personal one, and at the bottom of the menu you will see "Shops". And from there, you can click the "Click to rent a world teleporter destination".

At the moment there is a 100k gold per week fee, plus every week you extend it's an extra 10k. So, after 10 weeks, the price is 200k per week, and if you were to keep it for a year, it would be as much as 620k gold per week. This is to ensure some rotation, so that the same shop won't be at the top forever, or if so, the price to keep that top spot is ever greater.

Keep in mind that these prices may change without notice... could become cheaper, or more expensive. The goal is to optimally fill all the available 18 spots that can be rented out. If the price would be too low, it wouldn't be possible for someone to get get it. And if it's too high, it might be empty. So, the prices will change in order to maintain the best use of the 18 slots.

[+Colibri]

Today's server restart, October 6th 2011.

When pouring potions into hives, you get a view of the actual hive and then have to click the damaged parts of the hive, that is where you want to pour it. It adds an extra bit of difficulty (levels the field between those who know how to write a macro and those who can't).
Also, you will get about 30% less gold for beeswax and honey.

I know it doesn't seem like a positive one for most of you but after much consideration of the issues and possible solutions I've went for this one. I know it's fun to get 6 mil gold a month by doing bees, and i know it has a certain degree of difficulty, but when so many people are doing it it just causes inflation. The gold income is simply way too high on the scale of the whole shard.

There is a new type of leash, the enchanted leash. It requires 125 wax to craft, over 117 taming skill and 126 animal lore skill. The wonder of this leash is that it will shrink all pets within 6 tiles of you. Also comes with 100 charges. It consumes one charge for every pet that it shrinks (so if you have 5 pets out, and use it, it will consume 5 charges).
Also, the regular leash now requires 10 wax to craft.

* So, on one hand there's the reduced gold income from selling wax and honey,
* and on the other hand there is now an actual use for wax (not just converting to gold).
Perhaps in the future, some new things might include the use of wax or honey... (e.g. maybe to start a quest).

View of the honeycomb in a beehive.
You have to click the red dots (which indicate the need of the potion) and with that you will pour the potion.
There are from 2 to 6 dots that appear which you need to click.

beehive honeycomb pour.png (31.71 KiB) Viewed 21593 times

[+Colibri]

Mini auction today (Sunday, 23rd of October) at 22:00 shard time. A lot of player submissions, and we might as well add a thing or two from the staff. The staff submissions will be sold at the beginning.

[+Colibri]

Beehive hibernation aka pine needles.

You can get the pine needles at 10k tokens for a stack of 10, that's basically 1k tokens per hive per day.
Once you have them, double click the needles and target a hive. It will make the hive go to sleep for 24 hours, and if it's already in hibernation, it will extend it by 24 hours.

This is also useful for synchronizing your hives. Using the needles on each hive just once, and all at the same time, will make them all go on the same cycle, where the next growth/production cycle will be 24 hours from when you apply the needles.

This is sort of a work in progress, I plan to make it a little more involved (with crafting) but since the holiday season is here and some of you need to go away for a few days, and don't want them to die during this time, I've put in this quick solution. So, since this will be reworked a little, I'd advise you *not* to stock up on needles since they might be something you will get from pine logs or from pine trees directly, and it'll be a different component that you'll buy from a vendor or vendor stone.

[+Colibri]

Grand anniversary auction this weekend!
The auction will be at standard times with standard rules.

First auction on Sunday 3AM shard time, which is actually *Saturday* 9PM Eastern US and 6PM Pacific US.
Second auction on Sunday 9PM shard time, that's 3PM Eastern US and Noon Pacific US (Sunday).

The two auctions will have identical items, if you buy something on the first auction you may not bid on it on the second one.

There is a minimum bid increment rule for auctions. To calculate the minimum increment, you take first number from the current bid, move it one space to the right, and that is the minimum increment.
For example:
- If the current bid is 190k gold, the first number is 1, meaning the minimum increment is 10k.
- If the current bid is 620k gold, the first number is 6, and the minimum increment is 60k.
- At 3.8 million, the minimum increment is 0.3 mil, meaning that the next valid bid is 4.1 mil.

[+Colibri]

A few updates:

1. AFK Checking rules. This has been a hot topic lately and we (the staff) have discussed it and came up with a reasonable change. First, please keep in mind that there have been numerous issues with this, either the rules being too soft, or too strong.

- Weapon/resource impound times are now defined.
- If you are jailed and you send a help request (paging staff by the Help button on the paperdoll) within 5 minutes of when you were put in jail, then the penalty is reduced by half.
- Violation decay is no longer 1 month, but 3 months. Statistically looking, we found that many players no longer watch their AFK after a month has gone by from when they were last caught, resulting in frequent warnings, but that's about all. It was basically possible to go AFK every month, with the penalty of only getting a warning.


2. Advertising of selling items/pets for real money. This has been written on the forum some time back, but it is now on the codex. It is not allowed to advertise that you are selling or buying something for real money, on the forums or public chat, or anywhere with lots of players.


3. The [tourthankyou rewards are increased (since the last restart). Before it was possible to get between 1 and 4 ED, this is now between 2 and 7 ED per tour. The reward depends on what rating the new player gave you, as well as how long they played after the tour was over. I don't want to give out the exact settings, but the 7 ED is if you tour a newbie, they give you the best score for the tour, and then in the next week they actively play. The time played was already considered before (it's what made the difference between 3 and 4 ED), but it now makes the difference between 4 and 7 ED. It is also why you have to wait a week before turning in the ticket.

I see a lot of new players that soon log out, hopefully this will encourage you all to meet and greet the newbies and to show them around a little

[+Colibri]

Daylight savings time warning

The clock will go forward one hour on the 25th of March at 2:00 shard time. The time 1:59 will be followed by 3:00.
This change will not have significant adverse effects on the server (in the autumn, it's best if the server is restarted), however time will "speed up" during those few seconds, meaning that timed spells will expire sooner than expected, and beehive times will also shift by an hour.

It is recommended that you stay in a safe spot during that moment when the clock changes, to avoid accidental death (such as your spells running out and you receiving more damage than you can handle).

[+Colibri]

Shard revert

It seems that yesterday's crash was a result of a deeper issue than I thought, as it reoccurred today. The bad news is that I cannot load any save from the last 24 hours, so we will have to revert to yesterday at 20:00, that's 25 hours from when the shard crashed today at 21:06.

In a way, it's good that it crashed today again, if it did after a week it would mean there would be a much longer revert to live through. This is the longest revert in the history of the shard that I know of (before the record was I think 6 hours).

As a compensation, each player who was logged in during these past 25 hours will get 2ED for every hour of being logged in. I'll whip up a script that goes through the logs and sums up the time. There will be a stone at the Town Center to pick up this compensation.

Also I'll keep track of the saves, loading the current one every few hours on the test server to see if it all works OK.

[+Colibri]

Regarding recent rumors of staff cheating:

There has been a rumor going around that bad things are going down without me seeing any of it and I am making this post to put an end to these assumptions. I'm not sure if it's just something out of the grapevine as these things usually start or if it was started by a disgruntled player after being jailed "unfairly" or perhaps, as hinted by a few emails I've received, by players that want to put Excelsior to a bad reputation in order for people to join their shard.

I have logs of everything that every staff member does on the shard, this includes movement, modifying items/spawners/mobs, deleting, moving, looking at properties of items (e.g. when something will spawn) and I occasionally check them. Keep in mind that only I have access to these logs, and it is impossible for someone to modify them (i.e. cover their tracks).

I would like to say that I have made a bit of a more through inspection recently, to verify these claims of staff cheating, and I have found nothing that would justify these accusations. And I didn't any indirect suspicious activity (example of a direct cheating would be to make yourself a lot of gold or modify your own items, example of indirect cheating would be checking when something will spawn). These findings relate to all currently active staff members.

There is also a belief that if we don't like you (or someone you are friends with) we will simply ban you. This is also not true, as the jail/ban records do not show any irregular "high frequency" and also any penalty that was given was appropriate to the rule breaking.

In short: The rumors - that some staff
members are mean cheaters - are false.


If you however believe that someone is cheating, I'm don't mind checking. You can email me (address is on the frontpage) and I will look into it. But there is no point in emailing me with "Staffer A is such a cheater, they really shouldn't be on staff". If you want me to take it seriously, you need to give enough info (date, time, location, what exactly happened) so that I can verify that claim.


And just to explain a possible misconception:
- If a staff member wants to play besides their staffing activities, they can. If they wait for something to spawn and get that item (either a rare thing, or a champion, or even get a skull), if they didn't actually check when it will spawn (or even make it spawn right away) then there is no possibility of cheating here. Note that there are several possible ways to check when something will spawn, all of which are logged, and I would see that.
- If you are jailed because you broke the rules (most frequently this is bad language and AFK gathering/leveling), and you've even been given a second chance, well it's really hard to say that it's unfair. Possible ways to avoid such an "unfair jailing" is that you not cuss at other members of the community, including staff. And to avoid that AFK issue, if you know how to make a macro to recall around, then surely you can stop that macro and even make a shortcut key (CTRL+ALT+Something) that will recall you to your home. Takes 3 seconds to click, and I'm sure that whoever is at the door can wait a few seconds longer, and the same goes for the call of nature.

[+Colibri]

About recovery of lost items/pets from a backup:

I would just like to post a few guidelines to make these easier for me, as well as quicker for anyone that wants a recovery done. It's written on the codex that "This is only possible if you know the exact precise time of when you last saw the item." but I'd like to write a few words about this. I often get a request such as "I died last night, I hope you can help me". Problem here is that I then i have to email you back (or find you on the shard when you are there) and a few days can go by, along with a lot of energy.

When you want your item(s) recovered, you need to send a help request (an email is fine too, but I'd prefer that you use the Help button on your paperdoll).
In that help request, write:

1) The exact date and time when this happened (this should be the Shard Time - Central European timezone. If not, at least type what time zone you live in). Type [time in the game to see the current shard time.
2) What items you would like to recover (is it just a sword and your chest armor piece, or is it the whole equipment and backpack contents you had with you at the time, etc...)

Have the necessary amount of tokens ready in your ledger. It costs 3 mil tokens to find the correct backup, then it's 100k tokens for each item (but if it's more than 10 items, the maximum is 4 million tokens total).

Please note that I can only recover items if I find them in a backup. An example of when an item/pet cannot be recovered, is if you had just looted it from a monster, then lost it just a few minutes later (before any world save took place). And if you had an item for just an hour or two, please add that to that request.

Examples of proper recovery requests:

1) I have died on the 12th of August at 19:42 shard time, I would like to have all my items from backpack and paperdoll recovered, the tokens are in my ledger.

2) I fell asleep at the keyboard and something killed me, I woke up at around 11:00 shard time and I was asleep for about 7 hours. Please recover my lvl 89 bone crusher.

3) I lost my items on my mule when it died, this was on the 9th at about 7PM my time. I don't know the shard time, but I am from the pacific timezone. Please recover my wood and metal resource keys, I don't care about the rest.

[+Colibri]

Please note that due to a security issue on the forum, I have removed all moderators of the private forums.

If this were properly reported when it was discovered, with some scripting it would be possible to fix, but for now I've just made a quick fix by disabling moderators.

[+Colibri]

Redesigned Labrynth vendor stone

I've received requests/ideas to improve on the portal map a little bit: The portal map will no longer be usable from the ground, but by double-click if you have it in your backpack. If you buy an item, the portal map will be used - you can only buy one item in one trip there.

One cool addition is that you can now buy an ethereal reptalon there, it costs 20,000 elven notes. I've actually been thinking about a higher price, but seeing how elven notes are distributed among players, i think 20k is high enough.

I've also redesigned the area a little bit, so you know where to walk

(btw the code has been in since last restart 10 days back, just needed to reconfigure it in-game)

[+Colibri]

About the price of the reptalon, I will go with the initial plan of it being priced at 30k elven notes, but I will reconsider reducing it to 20k in beginning of next year. Depending on how many are obtained by then, but I will also take into account the posession of elven notes at that time (let's say if a lot of players saved up 20k and are just waiting for the price to drop).

I see many of you have posted ideas/reminders of what should be coded next, I found that it's best if i just go one by one (because if I start one project and then another one is requested with great urgency, and then another, I can't keep a good thought pipeline of reconsideration-planning-coding-testing-adding). The few things that are in the priority are:

- Champ spawns to have no 8-candle rule, but the rewards (gold amount, powerscroll chance) are based on how many levels you participated in.
- Oaks rework to disallow participating in multiple champ spawns at once.
- Harrower to be on invite-only basis, to avoid any drama of "who was not invited".
- Personal spawners (regular animal ones and vendor spawners) to be put on the vendor stone.
- Automatic AFK checks added to killing monsters, harvesting/spinning/looming flax, and possibly even shop buying.
- Tidying up and posting at least the recent changelog.

(these are partially already coded so i think it's best to finish it up first).