EXCELSIOR DAILY

[+Colibri]

We, the Staff of Excelsior, wish you all a Merry Christmas and great holidays. May the bread that you eat always be warm and your soft drink always be cold


Would also like to inform you of some reduced staffing these days - many of us wen't to see our families or are staying at friends, so there are very few of us who are online on a regular schedule. So expect delayed response times if asking for help from staff. If it's something that can wait, you can give it a week or two till we're back to our regular schedule.

[+Osiris]

Just a side note, all though we are short staffed here over the christmas holidays, There is no excuse for slacking with any rules ok.

Keep things good and tidy, So far so good, well done all.

On another note, If you keep paging when is colibri going to be on, the answer is when he gets on, Only colibri knows the answer too that one, So please sit tight as we are very short staffed

Happy Christmas too you all.

+Osiris

[+Colibri]

1. Milestone rewards have finally been given out.

2. I've finally ported the UOAM&ventrilo pages from the /guides to the /codex section.
http://www.uoex.net/codex/technical/uoam
http://www.uoex.net/codex/technical/ventrilo

3. Just a bit over a week till the December donation bonus ends.

[+Neptune]

For all the new players (and the old ones who may have forgotten), Blessed items will return to your backpack if you are killed. BUT, remember, that they are required to be in the outermost layer of your backpack. If say you have a bunch of runebooks, and you put them in a bag or box to keep them organized, then if you die and your corpse decays, you will lose them all.

But there is a solution, on the tokenstone (which has been moved from it's original spot and a gate has been placed there for your convenience) there is a "Blessed Item Bag" that will only hold items that are blessed. This way you can organize your backpacks and not have to worry about the chance of dieing and not being able to get your corpse back (you never know when your doing a champ or something and you lose internet connection while you are trying to get rezzed or retrieve your corpse).

This is just a public service announcement from your staff here at Excelsior!!

We know you have a choice of free shards to play on and we appreciate you choosing to play with us. We hope to give you the best place to play with the highest level of enjoyment available. In the event of a crash over water your token book can be used as a flotation device.

Neptune- Ruler of the Deep

[+Colibri]

The staff of UO Excelsior shard wish all of you the best new year, we wish that 2009 will be peaceful, harmonious, lots of fun and new friends, also successful in reaching all of the goals you pursue

We will continue to bring yet another year of great fun, relaxation and good company. Well, not just one year, we will try to keep it going for ever

2008 has been a great year for our shard, and we hope that 2009 will bring even greater achievements, but most importantly, that the community will stay as friendly and as close connected as it was so far, and that the shard remains stable in the technical sense.


At the time of this writing, it's just a few more days till the december donation bonus runs out, so if you want to catch it, you have all till January 5th midnight shard time.


A note about joining houses: Although for now i have joined houses even if they were owned by different players, this will not be possible in the future, so if you want any house joined that are not from the same player, do it by sunday evening midnight shard time, or if you cant get in touch with a staffmember to do it, send us an email (listed on the front page) by that time.

[+Colibri]

A few updates:

1. New subforum: Guilds - for posting guild news and for guild related discussion
2. I see we're running out of space to place housegates, so i've added two extra spaces there.
3. Some prices have changed on the player services pages.

[+Colibri]

A note about "Messages in the bottle" aka SOS scrolls. We have an upgraded system that generates SOS locations even in tokuno. But the message still says "trammel or felucca". That is on my todo list now but no ETA on fixing. Temporary solution:

If the SOS message won't work in Tram or Fel, or if that location is on a land area, try tokuno at the same coordinates. If even that doesn't work, there's a slight chance it's for Malas. If everything fails, i guess you can store it, or you can trash it if you don't want to complicate things.

[+Colibri]

IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT GUILD TYPE (Order/Chaos).

It is currently possible to kill another player and loot their corpse if both of the players are members of a Chaos or Order guild. To prevent this, we are temporarily making all guilds of a "Normal type". We've already had two incidents with this, and this just creates a lot of work for us staff, so until i change this in the scripts (and test it well), we are taking this temporary solution.

If your guild is either Order or Chaos:
1. If you are a guild master, change to your guild type to Normal
2. If you are a member of such guild, alert your guildmaster. Should the guildmaster not fix this in 24 hours, contact the staff.
3. If you cannot change the guild type on your own (takes 7 days between changing types), contact the staff.

If after some time you still see players that are either of order or chaos guild, please alert the staff. This took a few hours of our time today to return all the items and to take appropriate actions, and we have a lot better things to use our time on.

To the staff: if you get a request to change a guild type, type [guildprops and target the guildstone

[+Colibri]

More: IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT GUILD TYPE

And may i remind everyone to read the rules on the Codex page and abide by them. This is the second killing at the TC now (there was one about a month ago). First time we were very forgiving. This time a little less. If this happen again we'll start bigger sanctions.

- Free killing only in the PvP dungeon
- If you are able to harm another player (guildmember) and you are not in the PvP dungeon, then first make sure he agrees on the duel, then make sure you're in a secluded spot (not somewhere other people could see you as some understand PvP as frightening, they might think you will attack that player too)

If/when these rules change, it will be properly announced, but until then it's just like this.

[+Colibri]

In preparation for the beekeeping changes...

The reason all the beekeepers went on vacation is because they were buying hive deeds at a higher price than they were selling. Meaning if you kept selling and buying you could grow super rich. I hope nobody has found this error so far and nobody could exploit it.

Along with this minor fix there is also going to be a change in the way bee epidemics work - what i spent the last 6 hours on, thinking and coding and reconsidering.
It will no longer take hives in range, but it will take the number of hives that are owned by your account. This still doesn't address the issue about some people lending houses to others for keeping bees. But if i see this becomes a wide spread exploit, i shall upgrade it some more to prevent that too.

Now, i've been trying to use my calculus knowledge and make a sort of advanced statistics distribution, but when it all failed, i just went straight to some linear and quadratic functions. I don't want to tell you exactly how it works, but I would still like to provide a hint for those beekeepers with lots and lots of bees:
Having over 20 hives isn't very efficient anymore, and having over 30 hives just hurts the overall production.


I know this is misfortunate for those with a lot of hives already, but beekeeping was never men't to be a money making machine. Just placing 100 hives and harvesting them with a macro. If that was a good choice, i could just script a command like [creategold 1000 and you could all macro that


I hope this solves the beekeeping gold inflow for good now. It's almost been countless times that I've gotten fresh calculations about how much money can be made per day or per week. And this new epidemic function i hope makes sure that bee keeping is kept primarily as a hobby, but can still yield a certain gold income, which however can't be compared with other methods that involve more player involvement.

[+Osiris]

Shard Auction this coming Sunday the 11th!

22:30pm Shard time, 16:30pm EST, 13:30pm PST.

Type [time in-game to track the time!

Be there or be square!

+Osiris

[+Colibri]

1. Vendors, 2. Contacting staff

1. There seems to be a space shortage at the TC market, basically no new spaces open, and the oldest vendor has been restocked 2 weeks ago, meaning we can't move them out anymore (should be at least 3-4 weeks before they get moved, if space is running out), so we opened a new market, this one is in Tokuno. Just step on the World Teleporter, and go to Tokuno -> Makoto Zento.
Should we run out of space again, we'll either expand the makoto zento or make even another extra vendor market somewhere.


2. Contacting staff
I seem to have problems getting this across, but the problem I am facing (and I suppose any high level staffer as well), is that I am constantly overrun by private messages, either in the game or on the forum. At the end of the day i look back and realize that all i have been doing was replying to messages and doing small tasks. We would really like to be available for direct contact, however if this continues like this, I would start considering turning off my PM possibility.
1. If it's a general question about UO: google it, ask other players
2. If it's a question about our shard: look on our website, codex, wiki, forums, or ask other players
3. If nobody knows, or you are in need of staff assistance, USE THE PAGE SYSTEM
4. Only PM me if you need me specifically and there is nobody else that can help you

5. Try to resolve as many issues as possible using google, asking your friends, etc.

- Do not, never ever, I'm serious, PM a text that goes like "coli do you have a minute" or "coli can i ask you something" or "coli can you come here for a little?". I might be offline, and it's really time consuming to reply to all these messages with "yes, what do you want". I can handle a few a day but after a year it gets really boring State what you need clearly, provide any info you think is necessary. If i need to access any items, put them in the top level of your bank so that when i come, even if you're offline, i can quickly access and fix/apply/edit whatever needs to be done.

- Don't ask about becoming a staff member, also there's no need of telling me your previous experience. Should we have a staff position open, a blue book will appear at the Town center, with all the details and instructions inside. You will have a chance to tell all about yourself in an email that you send us, when we have a spot open.

[+Colibri]

Just in case anyone hasn't yet noticed, there is a staff application book open at the Town center. So if you wanted to apply previously, and havent noticed that in the last 2 days, now is your chance. The book will stay open for another couple of days. After that, emails will be sent out with all the further information.

[+Colibri]

Correction about milestones : next milestone is 140. Then we'll stop incrementing for 10 and start 20.

[+Colibri]

If you have applied to become a staff member, please note that I have sent all applicants their application forms. Please reply with the filled form by the time that is written in the email.

If you haven't received the email, PM me in the game and I'll try to get it to you again.