Excelsior

+Colibri wrote:Outlook for the summer of 2009
Just some ideas I wanted to share with all of you, two things that are planned to go in and will be a lot of fun to code.

Not sure if this will go in first, there's the portal upgrade, and the specifics on this one are pretty simple to figure out: guild chat capability, possible to reply to messages or even initiate a message to someone. Excelsior Exchange (Exex) will support non-stackable items. It will also be upgraded so that a couple of the frequently traded commodities (iron, wood, tokens, ed, organics, ointments) will be traded directly with a bid/ask system, kinda like the stock market.


I'll be working on automating as many player services as possible, both to give us staffers more time to do fun stuff, also to get rid of the sometimes long wait times.


There's one very promising idea of having two shards in one server. I have been giving it a lot of thought about how this would be technically done, and i've settled for one solution. It could allow even more than two shards eventually, though for now having two is pretty much a good goal.
The second shard would have all objects placed exactly the same, with one big difference, there would/will be no staff members to monitor chat, and many other rules. The only thing we'd monitor there is things that would have direct effect on the primary shard, that is dualclienting and AFK gathering/leveling. Language would be unmonitored, though there's still a few things to be decided about here. This shard would mainly be for those who don't like the carebear nature of our shard, for those who like the functionality but would like a more adult atmosphere. This primary shard would however still be kept under strict rules, and anyone who would be porting the adult atmosphere over, would be facing the same penalties as anyone else.
Number of houses would cumulate from both shards, meaning that you can have 2 houses on your account, no matter where they're placed. Can be one in each shard, or two on just one shard. Transition from one shard to the other would be done by a special gate. The transition would probably restricted in some way, such as perhaps that you could only pass it once every 24 hours, there may as well be some fee. Idea is that we want transition to be possible, but that the shards would still be kept separate in a way. As you may have already concluded, the public chat would be separate on both shards, though PMs could probably travel from one to the other.
This is just an idea for now, but i think i know enough about RunUO to attempt this upgrade. If/when it is done, not all facets will be open/spawned at once, but probably it will be made so that as we reach a high enough number of people on both shards, new facets will be spawned.



Oh, and here's a fun fact. We'll be hiring soon (keep an eye on this thread over the next couple of days).

Gumbi wrote:I think this would be a cool idea. I know pvp has been mentioned a lot but and idea that could go along with the new adult atmosphere shard would to have pvp on one facet (fel). If someone doesnt want to have that risk go to the sissy server