EXCELSIOR DAILY

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+Colibri
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Happy Anniversary, Excelsior!

It was on February 1st, when the server was first started. Very experimental at the time, with periods of long downtimes and accessible only to a select few. Our world and community is 12 years old today. And here's to many more!

A big thank you to everyone who has ever participated in making Excelsior what it is today!

Come get your commemorative goodie bag, there's a gift stone at the Town Center, and will remain up throughout the weekend.
anniversary group photo cropped.png
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Codex rule update. The codex now prohibits sending of ads or announcements through private messages.

2.f. We don't like spam - announcements in public chat must be 60 minutes and 12 lines of other player's text apart, there can be at maximum 12 single-line announcements in a day. Do not send unsolicited private messages to other players. Details »
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Requiem »

Some radio changes are on the horizon.

I thought you should know, that soon our DJs will be getting rewarded in game for their dedication to helping enhance the fun of everyone on Excelsior Radio. +Colibri and I have discussed it, and DJs will receive an ED reward for recording your ads, as well as doing live shows!

We will be having a new incentive for player radio ads in the form of a custom raffle specific to the radio. Each month, anyone who submits an approved radio ad will receive a ticket to use on this raffle. One ticket per person. These tickets will be temporary, so that you can't save them up. Use it or lose it! Also, the current unique item we have for the raffle will be a deed that extends your time on the world teleporter shops.

If you have other suggestions for things we could raffle off, please let me know. Keep it unique to the radio, and no, it won't be anything super. The value should be less than 1 million gold, give or take.

Not sure when these changes will go live, but it should be soon.™

Thanks everyone for making Excelsior the shard it is today, and will become tomorrow!
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Bugs galore!

If you have reported an issue and we haven't resolved it yet, please be patient. We haven't been keeping the bugs squashed on a regular basis recently, so they piled up. If you have a ticket in the help system, if it's open, it will definitely not be forgotten. Many of the issues take some time to first determine what exactly is wrong, and then to fix it in a way that doesn't break more things.

What you can do to help: if you have a ticket in, make sure that you have written all the relevant information to the issue. What you were trying to do, what you clicked, when did it happen (assuming just moments before you sent the ticket, but could be days before you decided to report it), etc..

The issue of negative veteran spending points has just been resolved, more info here:
http://www.uoex.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=70241#p70241
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

There is currently an issue with the Help System and the Vote Reward System. I have just attempted a fix but it didnt work so it'll take a bit longer and has to wait until tomorrow.

Until then, if you need staff assistance, you can ask in public char, or wait a day until the system is up again.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

The helpsystem and vote rewards issue has been resolved, and looks like it's working fine.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Staff applications now open!

Recently, I've seen a few raised hands, players who want to help out the shard. We are also going to activate the Wiki scribes group, and might even revive the youth center, but that still needs some debate.

For staff applications, we will no longer have the occasional announcement and then have the whole hiring procedure, but I've decided that it's better if the applications are always there, and when we need someone to help out, we'll look over the active applicants to see who would be able to fill those shoes best.

There is now a staff application stone inside the Britain bank. All the requirements for staffing are written on gump that shows up, any updates will be written on the gump itself. But overall, we're looking for active staff who can be here on a daily basis, helping out with help requests, misc things that come up, and organize events. Only players with a good standing record will be considered.


Besides "regular" staff (for monitoring chat and answering help requests) we're currently looking for someone with experience in maintaining social media accounts.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

A farewell to +Mocha

For those who haven't had a chance to meet her or get to know her, she's become staff back in June 2010, and was very active at the time. She recreated the Felucca Wrong dungeon, greeted many new players, and offered her insights at our meetings. After some time, she couldn't find time for Excelsior anymore, so took a leave of absense, and returned in 2015. Though, for a while now, she's been overwhelmed with life, and can't be an active staffer right now. But she's welcome to return again.

We wish that your situations work out of the best. Thank you for being with us!
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Minitrees & Halloween achievements

We had some technical difficulties with the minitrees and halloween-related achievements, about 70% of minitrees vanished about 2-3 weeks ago, and similar happened with the halloween achievements.

The minitrees were restored with a mass recovery on monday (2 days ago). If you had a mini tree that was missing, now that exact same tree (color & type) is placed at the exact location where it used to be, 902 trees were restored this way. There were also 3 trees which could not be placed there, since a house no longer exists, belonging to two different players, those trees were placed in a bag in their bankbox.

Three of the achievements were restored, althouth it's not a perfect 100% solution, it did work for almost all accounts. Basically, each achievement has it's own ID, and we added the new achievements to existing IDs, which made the trick-or-treat achievements collide with some existing ones. We made the fix on October 29th, and after this time, achievement progression for these few achievements remained in a different data slot, no longer counting towards that achievement's progression.
The achievement count was transfered from the erroneous achievement data into their proper data slots.(achievement count = how many times you were tricked, or treated, or how many times you did the trick-or-treat on vendors).
For most players it will seem as if nothing happened.
A few players will notice that their achievement completion time is today, November 7th, this is because prior to the fix on October 29th you already had some progression, and after the fix you did some more progression, and both of those summed up were enough for the achievement to be completed, but the exact time when you achieved that 20th trick/treat, or 200th trick-or-treat, cannot be determined from the data, so I had set it to today's date as a workaround.

There is still the issue of the fourth achievement, the halloween-bosses one, which I don't know if I'll be able to fix since it's a different kind of data, and the data doesn't collide with any other previous achievements. Since it took 3 hours to write a script to fix this, I don't know i'll be able to find the time to fix that achievement.

We're sorry for the inconveniance. Game & data consistency is important, so I'm happy to have restored these things.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Anniversary weekend events!

It's been 13 years since that faithful day, on February 1st, when I first doubleclicked the RunUO.exe file and we started fiddling with our own world. It was sometime around noon, if I remember right.

We've prepared a few exciting things that will happen over the weekend:

- Grand auction, that's one on saturday and one on sunday. Items are not yet displayed, should be someday tomorrow.
- Saturday at 23:00 shard time (that's 6PM EST)
- Sunday at 20:00 shard time (that's 3PM EST)

- A bundle of new achievements, coming on Saturday. Info will be posted tomorrow after the restart. Since some of the achievements are easily obtainable, be sure to log on right after ther server restart, for a chance of being the first to achieve them!
- Server restart scheduled for Saturday, 21:00 shard time (that's 4PM EST)

- Donation bonus, starts on Saturday at 18:00 shard time. More info will be posted.


EDIT: EST times were written incorrectly.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Constabulary Report

There was a whole ruckus about AFK players a while back, which was an interesting phenomenon since we actually increased the rate of AFK checks prior to that, they're also more consistent now. Still, it's our policy that we don't disclose what happened to the reported player (whether it's an AFK thing or otherwise), if it was just a warning, or given a penalty, it seems as if a lot of them get away with it... that's however not always the case.

Here we've compiled the january score:
(all penalties, not just AFK)
- total of 2134 jail tasks were assigned
- 1 permanent weapon impound
- 7 days total weapon impounds
- 2 warnings
- 4 strongly worded letters

Karylin, the Exceslior guard partrolling the streets of Britain, had this to comment on the matter:
"The passers by art gentle, and infrequently useth foul words. At which hour I patrol the dungeons, I oft encounter knights, who standeth there in combat, but their eyes art lifeless and their tongue remains still when asked a question. I liketh not throwing those folk in the cage, but such are the rules that I have to enforce. "
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Recent and upcoming additions

Past few months were quite productive!

- We have created a quest system from scratch - we currently have 2 quest systems (the classic RunUO quests and the Xml quest books), each have their own benefits and drawbacks, the new system combines all of the benefits with a few additional improvements. All classic quests are already upgraded, and +Arden is working on upgrading the remaining book-based quests. The new system will make it much easier to create or edit a quest, so that making a simple "go there and fetch that" doesn't include rocket science.
- A month ago, we formed the Mentor Society - a group of players who help newbies in their first weeks of playing here, with advice as well as covering them as they go into dangerous places. The group right now has 7 members, and we will be accepting new members in a few weeks.
- We have an overhauled logging system, that goes well beyond logging into text files. Not only are they searchable much easier, I can now also give access to those staff who would need it, to for example research a bug or view log entries related to a certain feature of the shard.
- Automated staff services: recovering a lost corpse is now availble right on the corpse stone - no need to wait for me to do a recovery anymore. If you forget a password, you can now reset it at http://www.uoex.net/resetpassword - without waiting for me to reply to your email.
- Just a week ago, we got a new topsite voting reward system. The old one has it's roots back in january 2014, and it's been patched a few times to compensate for unreliable confirmations coming from the topsites, as well as to compensate for those who figured out how to do the least clicks or votes to still get the reward. It's now recoded from scracth and will be much easier to maintain, so we no longer get tickets every few days about the reward level going down despite voting on all the sites.

We still have a lot of technical things to tidy up, so until then game development and events are on hold. But in the next 2 months, you can expect the following:
- Housing placement system overhaul - the ability to place, move and merge (maybe even resize) houses, without help of any staff. We're bringing back monthly IDOC events, as well as a new housing facet (the facet will be after the house placement system is fully tested and also used for a few weeks, since everything has to work perfectly for the land rush).
- Auctions - with a back-end system so we can track all of the various items, which will make organizing an auction easier, and the goal to host monthly small auctions and quarterly grand auctions.
- Donation bonus in the next few weeks.
- As well as a ton of infrastructural upgrades that will form a foundation for future game development, and upkeep.

Stay tuned!
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

House drops this weekend!
- First half of the houses will fall on Saturday, August 3rd at 23:00 shard time (that's 7pm eastern US time).
- Second half of the houses will fall on Sunday, August 4th at 19:00 shard time. (that's 3pm eastern US time).

Which houses will fall?
If you look around the land, you will see that houses now display their status. The status of the structure indicates how long it has been since the owner has last logged in. Houses are kept between 90 and 540 days after the last time this player was online, the actual number is half of the original gametime, more info here: http://www.uoex.net/codex/accounting. Once the player hasn't been online for this many days, the house reaches 100% wear-out and is safe for demolition.
What the statuese mean:
This structure is like new: less than 20% wear-out
This structure is slightly worn: between 20% and 40% wear-out
This structure is somewhat worn: between 40% and 60% wear out
This structure is farily worn: between 60% and 80% wear-out
This structure is greatly worn: between 80% and 100% wear-out
This structure is in danger of collapse: 100% wear-out, this house will fall.

Note: this status has displayed on houses since the server update about a week ago, but some of the houses didn't display the status, and on those that did, it was incorrect. This is now correct and you can have another look around.

If you have a friend who's house currently shows "in danger of collapse", this is their last chance to login and prevent it from decaying.
I've sent out emails 2 weeks ago, to those who's houses are IDOC. Unfortunately, there are always players who come back after a while and find their house gone. We do what we can to make sure that those who still want to play get to keep their posessions, but there's no perfect solution.

So what is a house drop event like?
When the event starts, houses of inactive players will start to fall, one by one. When about half of that day's houses fall, there will be a 20 minute pause, and then the remaining houses will fall.
When a house falls, most of its contents falls on the ground, and can be picked up by anyone who is there. A few things to note:
- If a house is sunken, it will be unsunken before it falls. This means that there's no need to place a house & sink it at that location, in order to get stuff that was in the basement.
- Items that are listed in any of the vendorstones in Trinsic, ED room, or deco room, will be exempt from the drop. So there's no chance to get a bench deed, house-to-house teleporters, bank stones or personal spawners. These are gold & ED sinks, and it wouldn't be good for the economy if the same house addons would just circulate through these drops.
- The land where the house stood is blocked for placement of a new house for at least 30 minutes. About 1 hour after the drops first started, all of the blocks will be taken down simultaneously.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Important announcement about Sunday's IDOC event.

Half of the houses were supposed to drop on saturday and half on Sunday, and since on saturday we had two batches, i miscalcualted and instead od dropping two quarters, i dropped two halves. So this means, most of the houses that were supposed to drop this weekend, have already fallen.
The sunday IDOC is still on the schedule, but only about 20 houses will drop (most of them are houses that don't have an owner, and were excluded from today's list).

Since some players have scheduled their lives to attend today's event, I assume there may be some who have reorganized their schedules to attend on Sunday, and I'm sorry for the mistake.

Don't forget to fetch your IDOC gift at the Town Center, the stone will be up until August 4th 23:59 shard time.
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