EXCELSIOR DAILY

[+Colibri]

Excelsior ANNIVERSARY is coming up!

To be precise: On February 1st, at exactly 12:39 PM (noon), the shard was first started. To celebrate this magnificent day, we are going to have a lot of events We hope that they are spread out so that as many of you as possible will be able to attend.

(Times are in shard time zone, CET, GMT+1. To get EST, subtract 6 hours. To get PST, subtract 9 hours.)

1. (Not confirmed yet) Saturday around 6PM, either taming race, invisible maze, or a quiz in chat
2. (Not confirmed yet) Saturday around 9PM, UO Excelsior's tournament of champions

3. GRAND AUCTION : Sunday 3AM shard time (that's 9PM Saturday evening PST, 6PM Saturday evening PST)
4. GRAND AUCTION : Sunday 10PM shard time (4PM PST, 1PM PST)
5. Wipe of inactive accounts (Time may change) Sunday around midnight: wipe of inactive accounts (scheduled after the auction, and a 30 minute break).


We will try to confirm the times as soon as possible, so check back (should be final by Friday, if not earlier)


AUCTION RULES: Same as we had on the Christmas auction. First part will be the player submitted items, second part will be the staff submitted items (some really nice ones ), both auctions will have identical staff submitted items. If you buy a staff submitted item at the first auction, you may not buy the same item at the second auction.


The times of the auctions have been combined based on how many people are usually online, and also to make them available to as many of you as possible. I know that some of you will still not be able to participate, unfortunately with so many people there probably doesn't exist a time when everyone could come. But if you can't, you can still get a friend to bid for you. (note that if a friend bids for you, the friend is considered the actual buyer, need to keep things simple. Sort of like, if you want to buy something for a young player, you need to buy the item, then give it to the other player).

See you all there and I hope you will enjoy all the nice things we have prepared for you

[+Colibri]

All times are CET (Shard time). To see the current shard time, type [time when in game. Or check the frontpage, where it's displayed in the recent chat.

1. Saturday at 6PM shard time, a taming race or a quiz in chat
2. Saturday at 9PM shard time, UO Excelsior's tournament of champions (or, if that fails, a Capture the flag event)

3. GRAND AUCTION : Sunday 3AM shard time (that's 9PM Saturday evening PST, 6PM Saturday evening PST)
4. GRAND AUCTION : Sunday 10PM shard time (4PM PST, 1PM PST)
5. Wipe of inactive accounts: Sunday around midnight (after the auction we will take a 30 minute break, after that, the houses will fall. It will be announced in chat when exactly they will fall, also a couple of minutes before the wipe).

[+Colibri]

Well, we reached our 3rd birthday and are now happily sailing onward to our 4th.

On this occasion, there is a small extra bonus when donating. Every donation will receive double the amount of universal dye tubs. The base number gets determined by the amount of ED you receive - for example if you receive 149 ED that would mean 1 unitub, and if you receive 150 ED that would mean 2 unitubs. Another example, at 349 you would get 3, and at 350 you would get 4. This number then gets doubled.
Also, anyone who donates 30 USD or more, will get a pair excelsior footwear (one item). This used to be a referral reward but since the referral rewards are no longer active, these are no longer available. The stats on the footwear are:
Blessed, 100 luck, -10 stones weight (they make you weigh less!), 15 total resists that are distributed the way you want, and the footwear can have the form of any footwear that exists in the game and is accessible to players (shoes, sandals, thigh boots, etc)
NOTE: Any person may only have one pair of excelsior footwear.

This donation bonus will be available for the next 2 weeks, all until February 15th, 2009, till 23:59:59 shard time.


Thank you all for playing and enjoying this great shard

[+Colibri]

A few updates.

1. The lag issue. Now currently i see two bottlenecks in the system that could cause this chronic lag. One is due to the router, which although is pretty new and with DD-WRT firmware, it's not managing the many connections that we have running. I'm actively working on placing in the new, way more powerful hardware that should handle it all very nicely
The other bottleneck might be because the server is running under a virtual OS. I will port the server to the host OS, which however is 64bit and not compatible with the current scripts we got, so this will require some work. But since i see the router working at 100% CPU, and with all the RAM used, i think that's the biggest problem right now.

2. To all owners of BIO PETS:
There's a bug with biohumans and equipping armor. The thing is, that as soon as any individual resistance gets to 70, it gets lowered by 70. So if you have a biohuman with let's say 65 phys resist, and 60 fire resist, that means that you can put a total max of +4 phys armor and a total max of +9 fire on him, to avoid it being reset. Until this is fixed in the scripts, i suggest you avoid putting that much armor on your biohuman, that would get them to the limit.

3. General about PvP on the shard:
Read the rules, make sure you do PvP just as a sport and not to prove your superiority. Or well, if you do want to pwnzor the place, show good sportsmanship and display your uberness only in the PvP dungeon (and on any PvP events that we may have in the future), not in the chat or by private messages. This goes for all players. If this PvP thing becomes a serious problem we may just disable it all.

4. A note about afk gathering resources...
Although fishing is allowed for AFK gathering, that would not go for deep sea fishing. The general idea about limiting AFK gathering and leveling, is that if something gains you a fair amount of wealth, or points, you need to be there while doing it (on a macro). There's no point in simply running a macro while you are asleep or at work, or even on vacation, to come back home and gain a lot. It's of course allowed for skills, since we know those are a pain to raise, especially if you have already raised them 20 times before over the last 10 years.

[+Colibri]

Some information:

There was a very abusive player in the chat today, it has been taken care of. I would like to remind you all that this is a family shard, there are children playing. We aren't a carebear shard, yet still we want to maintain a certain level of civility.
(Well i know that a big majority of the players here are great, there's just a bad apple from time to time )

We do our best to keep the shard manned as much as possible, but unless if we are a 5000 players online, there will always be times when there's no staff online, I hope you can accept this apology

Also a reminder: If you are dealing with a staffmember, or if you are reporting an abusive player, write down the exact time and the name of the people involved. To find out the current shard time, type [time in the game. (also written on the uoex.net frontpage). Only with this information we can successfully and quickly resolve issues.

[+Colibri]

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

The PvP dungeon seems to be causing a lot of arguments lately. Since us staff aren't here to babysit and determine who's fault it was to insult another person, and since it seems that so much of all this originates from the PvP dungeon, this is a final warning:

One more incident, and the PvP dungeon will be closed.

Whoever goes there, should use it in good sporting spirit. Showing that you're pwnzor and that someone else is a n00wb is not why this was intended.

We could start giving warnings, start jailing, or even banning - but do you really think we'd like to spend a few hours every few days just to determine who's fault it is? Usually these childish things are so bundled up and it's really hard to know.

If you go there, and see another player, tell him that and don't start a duel with him/her until they have seen this post and understand the idea. I will not go into much effort to advertise what is already written in that book at the entrance.

[+Osiris]

Auction Sunday 15th February,

10pm Shard Time, 4PM EST and 1PM PST.

Type [time in game for the shards time.

[+Colibri]

URGENT NOTE: MEDALLION OF THE UNDEAD is incompatible with Bio Humans. I will fix in the script so that you wont even be able to equip one to the biopet, but until that check is in the script, simply don't put a medallion on there.

This is the only warning. If you loose one, I'm not going to replace it. (I believe that those who have biopets are mostly experienced active players, who are up to date with this thread)

[+Colibri]

Wedding of Overmage and Fable Rose on Monday, 11 PM shard time (5PM EST).

Everybody is welcome to come and see this blessed couple to be joined together in the holy game matrimony

[+Colibri]

Just a little info on what has been going on lately, hehe.

Yesterday at 10AM shard time, both the backup utility and a world save were activated at about the same time, which caused the save system on the server to lock up. I've created an extra script to manually save the world in a geeky way, and it's all good now.

You may have noticed certain things that update on a regular basis, to stop updating. For example, plants, beehives, vendors not restocking, items not decaying... Since this has been reactivated after about 30 hours of inactivity, if you have anything that required daily care, I suggest you tend to them as soon as you log on.

We are also running on the Host OS now (guest OS before), I've finally been able to make the server work properly on the 64bit system. In addition, since Feb 23rd we are running with a special "crash prevention" code that I've put in, which should prevent the thousands of still buried bugs in the code.
The shard now has a very slim chance of crashing (bugs), however this does not affect disconnects. (note that if a shard crashes, that means there is a programming error that is not handled correctly by the system. If you are disconnected from the server, that does not mean it crashed).
Also, since it's no longer in a virtual OS, the shard *should* run much smoother, lag wise. This doesn't include network lag that may occur because you are on the other part of the world.

I wish you all a lot of fun

[+Osiris]

Shard Auction

Sunday 1st March, 10pm Shard time, That's 4pm EST, and 1pm PST!

[+Colibri]

As some of you may have noticed, there have been a few spam posts lately, some of them even contained some very inappropriate material. It seems that no staff was around for about 10 hours to see and delete those posts, so they remained up for quite some time. I would just like to say that we are well aware of the age of some of our players - we hope none were around to read those posts - I wish there was something we could do but it was just bad timing.

I have now added a custom anti-spam question on the user registration page. It should prune out those people, who didn't come here to discuss UO

[+Colibri]

Quick announcement:

Today there was a player who exploited a system to gain massive wealth. The bug has already been discovered, however to fix it, there will need to be a server restart (5 minute downtime, no revert). I know there are regular problems to be addressed as well, but we hope these can wait a day or two, for us to be able to handle the most important things first.

As already stated in public chat, there will be no revert. We are still working on undoing all the damage made by that exploit. We have been able to address a portion of it today. Over the next few days, we will go through all the activity and trade logs, detailed line to line, to find all other possessions that were acquired illegally.

If you have anything that was bought with illegal gold, please open your paperdoll -> click Help -> then submit a help request for a general question. In the question, type "EXPLOIT" followed by what items you wish to return. For example:
EXPLOIT there is a bless deed that i have bought with the gold, it's in the top of my bank

Wait as long as you can, to have a staff member assist and reverse the action. If you can't get a hold of a staff member until you log off, you may cancel your page. Your page will be logged, and even if we won't be there immediately to undo it, we will take note of your honesty.



Tomorrow there will be another announcement, and a restart to fix this bug. Until that time, the vendor stones will be unavailable.

[+Colibri]

I have just deleted all users that have not yet posted anything on the forum (those users with zero posts). This is because there were a ton of registrations just for advertisements. Only about a quarter remained.

If you have just recently registered, and haven't yet posted, just please register again - the procedure is pretty simple

[+Colibri]

Two things to post about today.

1. Rule change about AFK macroing.

4.b. Macroing allowed, even while you are away from keyboard, except for activities listed in rule 4.c. below.
4.c. When performing the following activities, you must not be away from keyboard: killing spawn (regular or champions), leveling weapons, fishing, gathering ore/wood/leather/wool/plants. This may not be a final list - the idea is that you should not perform anything that brings a good amount of wealth while AFK.

To outlaw AFK fishing was decided some time ago now, but it was not properly announced and put on the codex, so today is the day this rule is in effect. Since it's "new", we won't be so strict about it for the next few days, but i hope this news will reach all corners of our land.


2. There was a bug found in the pet leveling system, that makes you able make pets with all 100 resists. This is of course, by logic, not allowed (if we wanted to make invulnerable pets, we'd put them in already). The person who fund the bug, will get his pets set back to default resist caps, and has promised not to tell to anyone until it's fixed, but just in case anything gets out, i'd like to say this: any further pets that get this bug applied will be deleted. I will do a search on all pets after the bug is fixed, and I hope not to find any