EXCELSIOR DAILY

[+Colibri]

This weekend's events: Mini auction, opening of a new map, and daylight savings time switch.

1. Mini auction this Sunday, 9PM shard time, 3PM EST. Mostly featuring player submitted items, plus a few staff submissions. A powerscroll bag among other things. We hope to have the items sold on display shortly before the auction starts.

2. After the auction, there will be a short pause, followed by the opening of the new map. It is a copy of Malas, intended mainly for housing, but we may add a thing or two eventually. Keep in mind that at the moment it's mainly just an empty land. For example, there's no pouches where you could mark your runes for the hidden places, no monsters, and so on. But if you are in search of a bigger space for your house, you will have the option to move your house to the new land. Either yourself, or with staff assistance. Also keep in mind that the service of staff assisted moving of your house to the new land will be 500k gold instead of 200k gold, for a limited time of probably 2 weeks.
Should there be more details, they will probably be announced in this thread.

3. This weekend the server will be changing it's clock to the summer daylight savings time. This will occur on the night from Saturday to Sunday. To be more precise, when the time is 2AM shard time Sunday, it will jump forward to 3PM. There should be no technical issues (like the autumn DST switch where the whole world would freeze for an hour and would require a restart). But just a heads up so you know that, since for the past few weeks the offset between shard time and EST has been 5 hours, it will now be the standard 6 hours again.

[+Colibri]

Guidelines for opening of the new Malas.

1. The map will open at exactly 23:00 shard time. To see the current shard time, type [time. There will be 3 gates connecting Malas and new Malas, they will be placed very near the world teleporters in: Luna, Mook town, and Umbra.

2. Houses will be built on the order of, First come, First served.

3. If you wish to have a staff member move your house to the new land, you need to first run to the location you would like to move to, and send a page from that location. Your request will not count if you page from a different location. Should there be two people wanting to move to the same location, the person who first sent the page will have the right to have it moved.

4. Staff assisted moving to the new land costs 500k per house (if you have double house, this means it will cost you 1 million). This price will be all until April 15th, 23:59 shard time. After that, it will be the standard 200k.

[+Colibri]

About lost things in the game.

I've made a similar post a while back but I need to re-post because there's been a high number of such help requests lately.

The server does not eat items or pets.
If you have lost something, you have either misplaced it, forgot to lock it down, or someone else took it (with access to the secured container in your house, or to your account), or it had been damaged in fight so severely that it has dissolved... If your pet is missing, you either didn't feed it enough, or logged off while it was not mounted or shrunken or stabled, and had therefor gone wild.

I have now made numerous investigations into different kinds of claims about how millions of gold, maxed pets, great gear... has gone missing. Till now, I have not yet found a case where the item simply vanished without a trace. Well there was a bug or two over the years, that resulted in strange behavior, but the items were for example just invisible to the player, so there was no recovering from backups necessary. And the bug was immediately fixed.
Each investigation takes hours to piece together what exactly happened... to load each backup near the time it was lost, to search the different kinds of logs and put it all into meaning. With the numerous other things needing my attention lately, and with probably one claim of missing items every day, there's simply no way I could investigate all of it. And even if i did, so far all claims turned out to be something with a really simple explanation.

So please, if you have lost something, please please do not PM me saying it's a bug, because it's not.

[+Colibri]

Grand auction, house wipe and the donation bonus.

This weekend we're having a grand auction,
it's the kind of auction where the GM submitted items are sold in identical copies at two auctions, which are at different times, to make it possible for as many people as possible to be able to bid on the items they want. Once all the staff submissions are sold, if there is time we may also proceed with selling of the player submissions.

First auction will be on Sunday at 3AM shard time (that's Saturday 9PM EST, 6PM PST).
Second auction will be on Sunday at 9PM shard time (3PM EST, noon PST).


Following the second grand auction, there will be a wipe of inactive accounts.
Of course, with a short pause after the auction, so we the staff have time to stretch our legs.
This will cause some houses to fall, leaving items to be picked up, and freeing up space for new houses to be built.
Since the auction is likely to last around 2 hours, the house wipe is expected to be at around 11PM shard time on Sunday. Could be a half hour earlier, could be a bit later.


There's also a donation bonus all till June 2nd.
You can visit the donation page for all the info on what the bonus rewards are.


Have a nice weekend!

[+Colibri]

Staff applications are now open!

We are looking for new candidates to join the most elite guild on the shard. If you consider applying, know that an applicant must meet the following criteria:
- At least 25 years of age,
- A spotless record on the shard,
- Active player for at least 3 months,
- A ton of spare time,
- Honest and unbiased.

Please note that high profile players, such as guild leaders, have a very slim chance of being accepted, though you may still apply, since you probably don't know whether you are considered a high profile player or not.

As for time, there is no required number of hours per day or week that you need to be online, though please note that we want a small and efficient team, so if you can only be here for example an hour a day, or a few hours a week, you are not likely to be considered when we decide on who will be accepted.

-----
To apply, send a private message on the shard to +Hina. In the message, write the following info: your age, timezone, at what times of the day you're usually online, how many hours per day are you usually online, whether you have msn and/or skype, and whether you have used voice chat so far. She may also ask you a few follow up questions.
----

Please note that this is now only an application to get on the list of candidates. Then as time goes by, we will pick candidates from this list. Though if you are not accepted in the first place, we will let you know. If however you are on the list, and continue to meet the criteria listed above, we may eventually pick you to join the team.

The applications will be open for only a short time (i will post a reply to this topic when applications are closed), so don't delay

[+Colibri]

Bump on the staff application

[+Colibri]

Just letting you all know that it's been extremely busy for me lately, therefor there's many issues and misc requests I haven't yet gotten to. Fear not, I'm still alive and i am on the shard every day, though along with a lot of stress and exhaustion from work, I'm getting to things with a very reduced capability. The good news is that the project I've been working on is pretty much complete now.

I would like to remind you all again, if you require staff assistance, that you use our help system by clicking Help on your paperdoll. That way whichever staffer is online can come to you, and the work is distributed among all of us.

You can use a Private Message to a staffer ONLY if you know that only that staffer can assist you, and nobody else.
If possible, use the public chat, Wiki or forums to get answers.

It's a bit frustrating when i take a whole afternoon off to finally reply to all the messages in my inbox, and then go away for a couple of hours and there's 50 messages in there again.

Make sure to insure your items and bond your pets! We only return items if it was due to a bug (for example like there was a case that due to a bug, all items from bank and pack disappeared). If your connection goes down, or the shard's connection goes down, it doesn't count as a bug. Keep in mind that you need to have enough gold in your bank, plus your automatic renewal of insurance must be enabled, in order for an item to remain insured when you die.
Also, eat plenty of vegetables and exercise every day

[+Colibri]

A quick update - some of you may have already noticed that there's no option to send me a PM if you check the staff list, and typing [pm colibri says that no such person exists. Not to worry, I'm still alive and well. I however needed to turn off the messages for a while so that I can get to the pile of stuff that has accumulated over the past month or so. I'm now about 50% through, but once I'm done I won't immediately turn it on again, since I would like to get some reorganizing and scripting done so that the whole shard will run smoother. I will probably make it possible to send a PM to me again, though not sure when exactly will be, or for how long. If you receive a message from me you can however still reply to it, and with the MoreText feature that has been added, it shouldn't be a problem to explain all the details in one message.

We have a pretty cool support system, if you need a staff member just click Help and whoever is online will come to your assistance. If they are unable to help you, they will leave your help request in a special queue where someone who is able to do so, will be able to see it and come to your assistance. In case you send a page but nobody responds for a while, you can also click Help on the paperdoll again, and select the middle option of "i wish to be contacted when someone is available". This will leave your help request in this special queue, and whoever will see it first that can help you with it, will come around.

And a note about emails. I am afraid that I would start getting more emails now, and since I can't simply turn emails off, I have decided that emails will only be responded to if you don't have access to the shard (for example if you forgot your password). So emails are to be used only if there is no other way to contact staff.

[+Colibri]

Just to let you all know, I am on a week long vacation, and although I was expecting to be online every day for an hour or two, there's too much going on here every day, and when we get back to our place, it's best to just go to bed to be rested for the next day

I will be back home this weekend, and then I will also tend to the numerous things that are waiting. So please be patient.

[+Chaos]

This Saturday, July the 24th, there will be an auction starting at 9:00 pm shard time.
3:00 pm eastern
12:00 pm Pacific

This will be a player item auction with a few special staff made items and deco.
I hope to see you all there. Be Well +Chaos

[+Colibri]

Important update about account decay.

Up till now, account wipes were done once every few months (usually after a grand auction), and all the inactive accounts were deleted together, which also made all the houses owned by those accounts to fall at the same time.

From now on, account wipe will be automatic and will happen on that exact time when an account becomes inactive. So this is sort of a last general warning that from now on there will no longer be announcements about when a wipe will occur.

Keep in mind that once an account has been deleted due to inactivity, none of the skills or belongings may be recovered.

The automatic system will come into effect on August 10th, 2010.


The rules for an account to become inactive will remain as they were up till now, that is:
- If you have less than 1 hour game time on your account, it will decay after 1 month since you last logged on.
- Between 1 and 10 hours gametime, it's 2 months.
- Between 10 and 100 hours gametime, it's 3 months.
- If you have 100 hours or more gametime, the account would decay 6 months since your last login.


There is a chance these rules may change sometimes in the future (months, even years, perhaps never), something along the lines that your account would decay after that many months, as there are digits in the hour number of your gametime (1-9 hours is 1 month, 10-99 hours is 2 months, 100-999 hours 3 months, and so forth). Should this change occur it will be gradual, and it will be well announced before it comes into effect. For now, the old rules stay.

[+Colibri]

Just to remind you all: inactive accounts will start getting automatically wiped on August 10th. Reminding one last time that if your account gets wiped, it is not possible to recover any of the items, pets, or skills. See previous post for more info.

[+Colibri]

Grand auction this weekend!

There will be two auctions, both with the same items.
First auction will be on Sunday 3AM shard time (that's Saturday 9PM eastern, 6PM pacific).
Second auction will be on Sunday 9PM shard time (that's Sunday 3PM eastern, noon pacific).
To see what the current server time is, write [time when logged into the shard.

Keep in mind that if you win something on the first auction, you cannot bid on that same item on the second auction. There is a minimum bid increment rule, the minimum increment can be calculated as such: take the first number in the current bid, move it one space to the right and that's the minimum increment.
For example:
If the current bid is 190k, the first number is 1, so that's 10k increment.
If the current bid is 200k, the first number is 2, so that's 20k increment.
If the current bid is 3.5m, the first number is 3, so that's 300k (0.3m) increment.

[+Colibri]

Bump Grand auction this weekend, see the post above for more info.

[+Colibri]

Mini auction this Sunday at 9PM shard time, that's 3PM eastern and Noon pacific.

We will start with a few staff submissions, at 9PM sharp. So don't be late if you don't want to miss "the good stuff". There will be just a few staff submissions, 3-5. After those are sold, we will sell the player submissions.