EXCELSIOR DAILY

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+Colibri
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Update regarding AFK macros: it is no longer to allowed spin the slot machines at the casino while AFK. You have to actively monitor the game.

- This is also written in the Penalties page on the Codex.
- A guard at the casino announces the rule every 5 minutes.

This is kind of a grey area - in a way, the house always wins - so in the long run, with every spin you sink a few gold pieces. However, we're periodically getting complaints from players who think this should not be allowed, and we agree - the macroers usually go for the loaded machine, and try to empty it - which usually results in profit. Not to mention, it can really anger the person who loaded the machine, went away for a little while, then another person would spin it for hours (while AFK).
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

We moved to a new server!

The server on our old provider has just shut down at 14:30 shard time. It should be up and running in about 15-20 minutes on the new one.

SERVER IS NOW ONLINE

If you are using the regular address to connect, that is "shard.uoex.net" port 60, then you should be able to connect as if nothing special happened.
However, if you have been using the direct IP to connect, you will have to change that.

If you still can't connect after 30 minutes, restart the client. If even that doesn't work, restart the computer & your router. (some stale configuration might still be lodged in there).
If even that doesn't work, please post in the Downtime thread: http://www.uoex.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=789
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

Doom Gauntlet changes:

The gauntlet now runs on a ticketing system very similar to Lady Mel.

We've built an area for you to wait in line if there are other players in the gauntlet. When you enter the gauntlet, if it is not in use and nobody is in line ahead of you, stand on the red tile in front of the blue stone.

When you are ready to obtain a ticket, say 'ready'. You will be able to choose how many tickets you want - if you are running the gauntlet alone you can select 1 ticket, and if you're running it with a group you can select based on the size of that group. Once you obtain tickets, you have just over 20 minutes to complete and loot the gauntlet. Once the time is up, everyone will be moved out and the gauntlet will reset. You can highlight the blue stone to view these instructions should you need them.

We have added a wall in the gauntlet that will prevent players from completing multiple runs within their allotted 20 minutes.

If someone exits or is moved out before completing a round, the gauntlet will be reset when the next person enters- this should prevent anyone getting stuck with a partial run. Please note that if you are with a group, and someone in the group exits - this will force a reset, and you will not be given a new skull.

A reset clock has been added to show you the amount of time left while someone is in the gauntlet. This clock updates every 10 seconds.

Various informational signs have been added to the area to help prevent any "oopsies". Read them carefully.

All of the gauntlet rule books have been updated to reflect the new system.

At +C's instruction, the following changes were also made: You can no longer bracelet or gate your friends into the gauntlet, each player will have to enter manually (consuming 1 skull for entrance, as it always was). Additionally, you will need one golden skull to obtain a ticket. If you are with a group, only the player obtaining the master ticket from the stone will have to turn in a golden skull. Also fixed various small bugs that have been active for some time. These changes were things that +C has been intending to do for quite awhile now but hadn't found the opportunity - they were not just last-minute changes made without any thought.


We will keep an eye on this system to make sure it's running properly, and make adjustments as needed. If you discover any bugs or exploits, report them immediately using the help menu.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

There will be a Grand Auction on Saturday the 21st at 18:00 shard time.

There will be not be a repeat auction of the decorative items on Sunday.

As always, the auction items will be sold in order from most expensive to lease expensive. We will sell the first group of high-demand items, and then move to tokens. After tokens, we will move back to gold and sell all of the deeded deco.

This auction will feature Valentine's & Easter deco as well as lots of other great stuff. Everything is on display in the brand-new Auction Display Room, which can be accessed via the usual green gate in the auction room.

Hope to see everyone there!
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Regarding recent server instability, it has just been fixed with the last restart (actually, was a crash :mrgreen:).

Yesterday, we lost a whole 47 minutes (because the save was at 0:00 and shard crashed at 0:47). Since then, I've increased the save frequency to 15 minutes, but when we crashed today we still lost around 13 minutes. Also today as I was searching for the cause, we had some major lag spikes.

This was the kind of bug that's harder to track, but fortunately I found the bug by reviewing the code, and several minutes later a diagnostic tool picked it up too (though, unfortunately this was already at the time of the second crash). But as I made a quick fix, and should now be in the clear.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Happy gaming!
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

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Temporary bound items - manual undoing of accidents now no longer possible:

Since the temporary binding of items was "fixed" (so that the item actually binds on transfer, instead of just if you actually equip it), we had a few reports of players binding an item by accident, usually by lifting an item from someone else's house, or dropping an item at someone else's house. These items were manually unbound (one time per account only, basically only for those who could say they didn't know). But we expect this to be a continuous issue in the future, so now you will get a warning:
fe8b2377c5e24160b68cb40599df2a3e.png
fe8b2377c5e24160b68cb40599df2a3e.png (67.5 KiB) Viewed 16090 times
This warning only comes up when lifting or dropping an item to/from another player's house (which would then count as a transfer, and make the item temporary bound).
There are numerous obscure ways that an item can become transferred to another account, but those do not give a warning.

This should solve the issue, and from now on if you accidentally bind an item, we will not undo the binding.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

All Grand Auction sales data I've compiled from the auctions I've hosted since 2013 is now available on the wiki.

http://uoex.net/wiki/Grand_Auctions
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Voting system update:

The vote reward stone now gives rewards based on whether you voted fairly (on all the 5 big bold links) or just on the one site that used to be known to give the reward.

I will include more detailed info on the stone itself, but a quick summary:
- When calculating the reward, it checks your last 7 votes (or less, if you haven't made that many votes in the last 30 days).
- Of those 7 votes, it counts the ones that got an additional voting confirmation.
- If the percentage of fair votes (those with additional confirmation) is high, you increase the level of the reward. If it's very low, the level is decreased.
- It doesn't require 100% fair votes, because the system isn't 100% reliable (depends on 3rd party sites). But you shouldn't rely on that to occasionally skip voting on the other sites, because skipping the votes combined with this unreliability will result in not gaining levels or the reward even decreasing.

- Once you reach level 23, the reward is 1ed. the Level goes up to 25, but the reward is still 1ed. Being at level 25 however gives you a little buffer (so you can hover between levels 23-25 and keep getting 1 ED per day).




Also upgraded with today's server restart: crop overhaul.
http://www.uoex.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=65185#p65185
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

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Item experience gump upgrade:
With today's restart, the improved weapon leveling gump was added. It no longer directly applies the points to your weapon, but you first set which points you want to add, and then click "Apply".
This should prevent accidental point applying in the future, for which we had two player services: undo up to 2 points on a weapon for 200k tokens, or rollback the weapon to a previous state (up to 2 weeks in the past, from a backup) for 100ed. These services are from now longer available (should no longer be needed).

This update officially adds the voting stone upgrade (which was added a few days back). The vote stone now has built-in instructions and info how to vote & collect rewards. It also has an improved "Open browser" button, which doesn't give you the option to vote until the cooldown expires (24 hours, so you don't accidentally vote too soon and end up with an "unfair" vote session).

It's also now possible to trade the Scribe's pen over Exex.

This restart also adds some minor technical fixes, improvements and optimizations.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

World revert

Unfortunately we had corrupted saves, and the most recent valid save was from Saturday (Yes, April 1st, the server made a nasty prank on us).
During the downtime, I was considering leaving the server offline for a few hours, while I would try to reconstruct data from the broken saves. I decided not to go with that option, since there would still be hundreds of affected items, and more importantly, any stackable item would be "undetermined" - you may have had some gold in one location before, and moved it elsewhere, and that's something I wouldn't be able to accurately fix. So we'd probably be left with weeks of missing items reports, and just a single such issue is not easy to fix, not to mention all the items all players interacted over the weekend.

That's why it's by far the best option to accept this 52-hour revert, and at least we can be sure that we still have a 100% consistent world.

We're doing what we can:
- Skills & stats will be recovered in (in an hour or to after this announcement),
- The Spring quest will run 3 days longer,
- Donation & voting rewards will work too (in an hour or two, since these are unaffected "decoupled" systems).

I have also upgraded the core code to handle this particular error, in which case only one (or items of that kind) would be affected, not the whole server.

So much for setting a record. Otherwise, in over 11 years, the longest revert we've had was about 12 hours if I remember correctly. And overall, this is a very rare occurrence on our shard ... I suppose, "Exceptio probat regulam" - Exception proves the rule.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Bioengineering technical change.

Bioengineering is no longer a separate craft system, but is now part of the upgraded Alchemy system. Biotools are no longer "useful" as tools, but biopet crafting now requires an organic enzyme to craft all items. Basically, 1 biotool use = 1 enyzme. Things that used to drop biotools (bods & Doctor Apocalypse) now drop enzymes. If you have a big stash of biotools, you can simply doubleclick each tool and after you confirm the conversion, it will convert into a stack of enzymes. Or you can also keep a biotool in it's "tool form", for nostalgia purposes.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Wax refiner machines are now available!

To render raw beeswax, you can now use these machines. The current wax pots are still available, but will be removed as soon as we make sure the machine is working 100% ok - a few players were testing them, but i'm sure another bug or two will come up now that everyone can have one.

Beekeepers sell the machines, as well as machine coal which is required for the machines to run. Eventually the coal will be sold on provisioners, tinkers, and obtainable by mining. There are a few more machines planned.

The machine system and the new crafting is in a technical sense part of Elysium additions, there will be more machines available there (and with the wax crafting, we're basically testing it's working, so when we come to that part, we wont get stopped by minor issues that could be resolved sooner).
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Today's update brought us an improvement to the Treasure Map content, lockpicking upgrade, wax refining and crafting updates, and an instancing system that will likely be tested next week.

Treasure Map improvements:
Most notably: treasure chests contain collectible figurines, have a bigger chance to spawn a next-level map, artifact drop (e.g. violet courage) no longer drops just on level 6 maps, but on level 6-8 (drop chance correlates with the level).
Lockpicks can now be created with different materials, which makes a difference when used on chests of different difficulty.

For more detailed info and discussion (and bug reports), please visit this thread:
http://www.uoex.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11371



Wax refining and wax crafting updates
Wax crafting upgraded to the new craft system. All the crafts (i.e. "recipes") are the same.

Raw wax can now be refined in the alchemy menu. The basic recipe allows you to refine 1 wax at a time. Beekeper NPCs also sell recipes for batch wax processing, which make the processing go faster, but there's no difference in how much pure wax they yield. Learning the ultimate recipe will cost you about 1.5 million gold, and you will be able to process wax twice as fast as with the basic refining recipe.
We've kept the old wax pots in the game for now, they will likely be made obsolete in a week or two when we can be sure that the wax refining (as a craft or with a machine) works ok.
For wax refiner (machine) discussion, see this thread: http://uoex.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=11346

Dungeon instancing
We've developed a system that will allow you (and your friends) to go fight a boss in your own instance of that boss room. These instances are virtually infinite, so they don't have to be limited by time or how many players want to fight a certain boss at a certain time of day. We'll likely start by converting one or two of the existing bosses (something less popular) and then work our way up to doom & melisande. Since the current mechanics create a bottleneck, and now with unlimited instances, there will likely be an extra fee for those who want to do some boss more than X times per day (likely for tokens).
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

Mistvale Stealables Update:

Over the past 4 years since Mistvale opened, there have been so many people essentially exploiting the stealables that I was spending far too much time trying to prevent it. The dungeons are relatively small, with a relatively high number of stealables, which really limited my ability to thwart exploiters. For example, I wouldn't have been able to put each stealable in a restricted room that wouldn't allow ghosts, and would move people out after an attempt. Even if that was possible, if the dungeons were big enough to do that, it would've been an extreme amount of work and the benefit would have been too small to warrant it.

Due to this, all stealables have been removed from Mistvale.

These items have now been moved to other locations across Felucca and Ilshenar, so any player of any age has a chance to find and steal them. I will not reveal the locations where these items are spawning, but I will give a little information about them:

- The items will have a "Treasure" artifact tag, IE: "A Treasure of Felucca".
- All of the artifacts are either currently spawned, or will spawn within the next 24 hours.
- Their respawn delays are roughly the same as they were in their final iteration in Mistvale (one month, +/-).
- If you attempt to steal one and fail, the skill cooldown is 2 minutes. This means if another player is at the spawn, they may make an attempt while you are on cooldown. It also means if you attempt to steal one of these, you will not be able to attempt to steal any other stealable item for that period.
- All of the items require 113 stealing to attempt.
- Several of the items move locations frequently. A rare will have no more than 4 possible spawn locations, and those locations are largely in the same area. This means if it spawns in a particular dungeon, its other spawn points would be in that same dungeon.

All of the items which were previously stolen from Mistvale have the "Mistvale artifact" tag to differentiate them from the new system.

I expect that it'll take quite awhile for anyone to locate all the possible spawn locations of these rares in order to camp them efficiently, so I haven't added any extra measures to these areas. Sometime down the road when/if it becomes an issue, I will add some extra functionality to help thwart too much camping.

I realize that this will be an unpopular change in the eyes of anyone currently or soon to be Mistvale age, but it is a necessary one that in the long run I believe will be better (and more fair) for the shard. I don't like to take something away without adding something back unless I absolutely have to, so in light of this change I am adding 3 quests to Mistvale that will allow young players to obtain some brand new items which will be highly sought after and valuable. I will post more information about these quests when they're released (hopefully in the next few weeks, I need the next patch to be released before I can make these).
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Today's restart featured a few bugfixes: crafting spellbooks now again produces a spellbook with stats on it, issues with alchemy & kegs (no longer destroys a keg when crafting a full keg of potions), fixed ssues with dropping account-bound items into submission chests. It's now also possible for these submission chests to allow re-submissions (but this needs to be set individually on each chest in-game).

Also, the cooking system is overhauled to the new system. All the actual things that you can cook are the same, there's no changes or additions - so we don't expect there to be any issues. If you find any, you post to this thread:
http://www.uoex.net/forum/viewtopic.php ... 089#p66089
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