EXCELSIOR DAILY

[+Colibri]

1. I've just made so that there will be 1 ED sold on Exex (auction) every 5 hours till the end of december.
Happy bidding

2. The vendors at the market are now available for purchase without staff assistance!
Simply click a vacant chair spot at the market and read the instructions.
And just an interesting fact: There are currently 67 places for vendors at the Town Center marketplace

[+Colibri]

Auction Sunday October 12th, at 22:00 Shard time. That's 4PM EST, 1PM PST.

It will be a bit larger mini auction since we didnt have one last week. So expect a few more deeds this time.

[+Colibri]

Urgent announcement: The auction was postponed to 22:30 PM shard time. That means, 30 minute later than first announced.

[+Colibri]

Two new rules added to the codex:

6. Spawn sharing
a. If there is more than one player at a spawn, the players must take turns. Once a player kills/tames a monster or takes/steals an item, he or she must go in the back of the line and wait for others to get their turn.
b. If you come to a champion spawn that already has 8 or more red candles, you must ask the players that were already there for permission. You may join and start killing the spawn only if they approve.

Effective immediately.

[+Colibri]

About messaging staff - please note that lately there's been a whole lot of people online and the best thing to do is to use the page system in your paperdoll. Please page, and the staff member who is currently online will help you. (we hope to get a few more soon).

But we know that there's some things that you just need done personally, so if it's something that you need to contact a staffmember directly, via a private message, please follow these guidelines:
- If it's a general UO question, please check stratics or the forums. If you can't find it, ask other players in chat or on the forum.
- PLEASE DON'T ask things such as "are you here?" or "can i ask you a question?". Ask directly.
- If you need us to look at an item or change anything, don't ask "hi there do you have time?", followed by "i have something interesting for you", followed by "come here please". Please tell directly what it is you want and where that item is stored. It can take just 1 minute to check it, but if there's many irrelevant questions meanwhile, it can actually take days before we finally get to the point.

If possible get a GM to help you... +Rayne and I already got a whole lot on our hands. It's kinda inconvenient if I have spend a good portion of my time to reply to messages such as "where can i tame a mule" and "my mule is bugged i cant put an unlimited weight there"

[+Colibri]

P.S.: We still love to help But due to the recent volumes, it's more optimal if a player gets help from the nearest source, instead of going directly to the admins for a little thing. Often i go through about 15 private messages when i wake up after 6-8 hours being offline :p

[+Colibri]

New feature: if you need a secondary account for someone from your household (same IP), you may now get it without contacting staff.

Simply type [account, and look at the bottom of that gump. There's a button labeled "create another account". Once you read through all the important text, and if the account is not for yourself, you can enter the username & password, and create it.
This was is a kind of a mid-way between having to request for all secondary accounts, and having open access to create as many accounts as you like from the same IP. Since the unlimited accounts didn't prove to be a good idea, and there are many second account requests, i hope this will do the trick.

I need to emphasize that our rules allow only one account per person. All of these account creations are logged and may be reviewed by staff at any time. In the past few weeks we've noticed a few violations, and I will not be so patient with future findings.

The one-account-per-person rule applies even if you actually have for example your spouse playing at your house. Even if that person is at home, you may not use that account. For example for BOD gathering, running around dungeons, gathering resources.... etc. There's a very fine line between "she asked me to do her bods" and "i'm using both accounts to gather bods".

[+Colibri]

Auction Sunday 22:30 Shard time (4:30PM EST, 1:30PM PST).

[+Colibri]

On October 21st 2008, at exactly 0:00, the shard went offline due to an ISP major fault. The connectivity was restored at 2:25 AM. As written on the ISP's website, this was due to a major error on their network. The whole country was out, everything from VoIP, TV-over-ethernet, and Internet access. So every user on their network, which is currently about 20-30% of all internet clients in Slovenia, were offline.

Luckily they got it fixed so "quick", i was afraid it will be an 8-10 hour downtime. Seems like they the techs out of their beds and world peace was restored

[+Colibri]

Ventrilo: 3 new public channels have been added. So in case it gets too crowded, you can go into any of the 3 sub public rooms.

And a promise/incentive: once we reach the 100 milestone, I'll also make a playerservice for being able to own a private channel.

[+Colibri]

1. I will be chilling out on a little vacation from Tuesday evening till Friday evening (possibly Saturday afternoon). Since I'm the only one who handles donations, please note that if you donate in this period, you will have to wait till Friday or Saturday to receive your reward.


2. Yesterday we avoided a big lag time due to the DST change. Here in europe we change clock back from 3AM to 2AM on the last Sunday in October. We move it forward again from 2AM to 3AM last Sunday in March.
- The autumn switch causes the server to just pause for 1 hour. I would like to fix this but there's many systems that need to be updated so i just hope I'll be able to catch it every year and simply restart the server at 2:59 so that it comes back online at 2:01 (2 minutes later).
- The spring switch causes the server to think that nothing has been going on for the past hour, and it disconnects all clients. There's something i can do it fix this, although it's not a priority. So basically, if you all get booted in the end of March, you'll know why

[+Colibri]

1. We have a new staff member, +Alucard
Welcome to the team!

2. There was a little server crash today which resulted in a bit over one hour revert. I'm sorry, it was an accident. In an attempt to make things better everyone who has logged in within 15 minutes of the crash (it was offline for about 10 minutes) will receive 3ed into their bankbox. The ED are right now being given out and should be all there by the end of today.

3. I'm back from my little vacation, the place was great and I had lots of fun swimming and relaxing in natural thermal water from about 1400 meters under ground (it smelled a whole lot like diesel fuel hehe). I hope you all had a nice Halloween!

[+Colibri]

IMPORTANT NEWS FOR BLOG OWNERS & WEBMASTERS:
I would like to boost our site a little bit so I will reward blog articles or website pages that describe our shard or link to it in a way with Excelsior Dollars. If you make an entry on your blog or on your website, or on some other gaming related website, and if it sticks there for over a week, you will receive a reward. To contact me just type in the game: [pm colibri


I've just freshened the website a little bit... makes it easier for a new visitor to know where to click to start playing, and for a veteran who already has all the stuff patched to know where to connect. Also reconfigured the chat display a little, i've noticed that lately it has been quite frequent that an error was there instead of the chat, well the chat showed up after a page refresh, but still let's hope that a diff config will make these errors much less frequent.

[+Colibri]

The server has been restarted after 100 days of uptime. That should fix those little disconnects we've been having.

I wanted to put in another network adapter but it doesn't support the 64bit OS, also wanted to put in a RamDisk for faster saves but there was a problem with that too so for now we only have the restart hehe.

[+Colibri]

I just want to remind everyone to INSURE your items and BOND your pets.

I got a rather rude message today about how I'm to blame that a player lost their belongings. Consider that not only the shard's connection can go down, but also your's alone... you would be in the same position. Your computer can crash, or perhaps you need to rush off somewhere. That's why there's insurance and bonding.

If you go to a dungeon or a dangerous place, take a look at your backpack and think about all that you can loose. If you see anything valuable, leave it at your house or in your bank. Insured and bonded items will stay with your ghost if you die. Bonded pets will remain lurking aroud there for at least a few hours.

It would be nice if we were to replace lost items, and it is technically possible, but takes a very long time. So consider if the ISP was having a rough week, with a 30 minute disconnect every other day... both me and Rayne would basically have 16 hour of work a day for the entire week, while all that can be prevented with a few clicks of insurance.