EXCELSIOR DAILY

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+Colibri
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

There will be a taming event today at 22:00 shard time (that's 4PM eastern US, 1PM pacific US).
The event is suitable mostly for newbies, but everyone is welcome to attend :)

The event starts at the Town Center - in the event room.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Server downtime today.

At 10AM shard time, the server simply restarted, the technician couldn't pinpoint the exact cause - either a faulty chip, faulty power supply, or it could be something else.
So I decided to switch to a different server (newer). Also as an attempt that this will fix those weird save times ranging up to 30-50 seconds every now and then. Last few saves were pretty normal, but it'll take a few days to find out whether the long ones still occur.

When the server came back online, all pets on the loose were shrunken and returned to owner's backpacks, i also checked whether there are any corpses laying around, but there were none (that would contain player's items, which would be lost).

Seems to me that the server is good to go, and safe to play.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Grand auction this Sunday, July 7th, 2013.

The auction starts at 21:00 shard time, that's 3PM eastern US, or Noon pacific US.
(Type [time to see current shard time).

There will only be one auction (this weekend), though there will probably be another at the end of the month with many similar items.

You can preview the items by going through the green gate at the auction room, at the town center.
The auction is mostly summer-themed, there's a water house, a pier, dolphin and kraken personal spawner, a hammock, tent, and campsite, etc.

See you there! 8)
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

Server restart and patch availability


The server was briefly restarted today to implement some more patch compatibility changes.

Further changes are as follows:

- Carving of a player's body is now only allowed in the pvp dungeon. cutting it elsewhere gives a message "you can only cut player corpses in pvp dungeon".
- Anti-afk measures have been added on spinning cotton/flax, as well as when looming a thread.
- Various debugging fixes including uni-tub use on house to house teleporters (it will now dye both tiles).

The Excelsior patch beta is now available for download and can be found at: http://www.uoex.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7222
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Grand auction this Sunday, July 28th, 2013.

The auction starts at 21:00 shard time, that's 3PM eastern US, or Noon pacific US.
(Type [time to see current shard time).

The items will be up for preview tomorrow, a few hours before the auction starts, in the display area through the green gate at the auction room.

This is the second summer-themed auction, so you can expect most of the decorative items to be the same or very similar.
(No promises, but there might be a third, similar one in mid august, though that one will probably be partially harvest-themed).
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

Updates to the Harrower system

We have modified the process for summoning and fighting the Harrower to ensure there is no ability for uninvited players to participate.

To summon the Harrower:
- Go to Fel Destard and approach the far North wall (very near where the Harrower previously spawned).
- Approach the altar at the base of the stairs and say "Harrower"
- Collect the skulls into the quest book. This book lasts forever, but you cannot obtain another until you do the Harrower.

If, at this point, you are not ready to fight the Harrower, you may leave and return when you are ready and your participants have gathered at the base of the stairs.

When you are ready to begin the process to fight the Harrower:
- Go up the stairs, stand on the red teleporter tile and say "ready". You will then be teleported into a ticket booth.
- Once inside the ticket booth, you will pick up tickets from the table and hand them to those you wish to allow to attend your Harrower.
- Once all tickets have been given out, step onto the teleporter tile to move to the next section.
If you are attending and have received a ticket, approach the red teleporter and say "ready" to be moved to the next section.
- Approach the blue teleporter tile and say "proceed". A portal will open for you and your attendees to the new Harrower area.

Attendees will approach a red teleporter tile to be assigned a ticket and moved into the Harrower preparation room. From this point, each person has 45 minutes total in the Harrower area.

When everyone is ready, they will go through the yellow gate. The Harrower will spawn when the host with the master ticket approaches the center of the spawn room.

When one's ticket expires, they are moved out of the Harrower area, to prevent anyone from lingering and interfering with someone else's spawn in the future. There is no hiding, stealthing, etc in the entry rooms where tickets are given out. There is also no bracelet of binding into the Harrower room.

We hope that this system will eliminate most, if not all, of the problems previously surrounding the Harrower and allow everyone to fight him at their leisure without fear of interference or trolling.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

New staff service: Banners!

Players may now purchase custom-named banners from the staff for 2million gold per banner. If you buy 5, the 6th is free. Available banner graphics are pictured below. Note that the itemid values go up by 2, that is because the inbetween number is the other direction. So, if you wanted the other orientation of 5550, you'd ask for 5551. All pictured banners are not hued - if you wish to specify a hue, it will ONLY color the very plain gray portions of the banner. It will not hue anything colored, white, or the portion that attaches to the wall.

http://www.uoex.net/codex/services/items
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

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Modification to Sgail's Gleam Aura Leggings quest:

This quest is no longer repeatable.

We regularly monitor various quests and mobs that provide items above a certain level of stats, to prevent any exploiting or game-unbalancing usage. Over time, we have noticed that players were running this quest multiple times to relayer these leggings. This was not the original intent, so the staff discussed it and decided that the quest would be made non-repeatable and the leggings made non-relayerable. Those of you who have multiple pairs currently will most likely be able to keep them, though if you have relayered them it is likely you will receive a refund and the leggings reset to their original state.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

New doom rare system!

I have just put in a basic configuration of the new doom rare system, to be used for testing for a few days and then it will be put to full use.
I havent yet decided whether all current stealables will be put into this new system, or simply set at a twice-as-long interval and with the same interval on the new system too, thus making them equally rare but available through two ways.

During the testing phase, these 3 items are available:
- Voucher for 1 ED, about 2 per hour. You can cash in the voucher at the entrance to the doom dungeon, white chest.
- Mock titan's hammer, with inscription "Hammer of the doom rare chest beta tester", about 4 per day.
- Four jars - about 2 per day - this is the only actual stealable on there right now, requires 80 stealing.

More info:
Just go around doom and discover :)
But be warned: you will definitely die until you figure out the catch.
Hint: there are three locations in doom, with metal chests that weren't there before.


In Other news:
House-to-house gate and personal animal vendors are no longer available on the trinsic gold stone.
They are now on a vendor stone in the Deco room.
On that same vendor stone there is also a house-to-house *password* gate deed. You can now have a password-protected gate.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

Elysium Access Information

In order to prevent swarming of the quest NPC upon release, I have decided to control the flow of players running the quest that will be done to gain entry to Elysium. Each player wishing to get into Elysium will need to run a quest to earn the token that will grant access. This token will be a permanent item and the player will need to have it in their pack each time they wish to enter Elysium. Those who complete this quest first, will have first access to the new facet and all the goodies it will contain.

Access to the entry quest will be given in groups. Each group will have 10 players. Each player in a group will be given a ticket displaying their group number. These tickets will be account bound. Upon beginning the quest, the ticket will be removed and the player will have a specific amount of time to complete the quest before the quest items decay. If this happens, the player will no longer be eligible for their original group number, they will essentially go to the back into the pool of un-ticketed players.

Tickets will be distributed as follows:

Group 1 - Hand selected. Tickets will be given to players who are particularly awesome in some way. A few of the tickets for group 1 will be sold at auction.
Group 2 - A few hand selected, the rest will be raffled on the 7-day raffle table.
Group 3 - Restricted raffle. Players will be able to purchase 1 ticket per account, winners will be drawn via a randomizer.
Group 4 - Restricted raffle, same as above.

After group 4 I will assess how it's going, if it seems like it's time to open the quest up as a free-for-all, I will. If it seems that it would benefit from another group or two before being made public, I will hold further restricted raffles.


I am nowhere near ready to release this quest yet, and much much further away from being ready to open Elysium. However, I do plan to begin to slowly distribute the tickets for these groups, so I am making the announcement now. This way it's not a confusing surprise if anyone receives a ticket :)
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

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Public Service Announcement:

Please be reminded that if you are aware of another player's cheating/exploiting, it is your responsibility to report it to the staff immediately, along with any evidence you may have. If we find that you have been complicit in any form of exploiting, you will be punished as well as the other player.

Examples:
- Another player mentions to you that they have made a new account to circumvent their jail time/ban.
- Another player has found a way to make money/items/etc that is something they don't want others to know about.
- Another player mentions to you that they are using their child's/spouse's/friend's account.

In all of these cases, failure to report these exploits to the staff makes you guilty of helping them 'get away with it', and will likely land you in jail. Cheating cannot be tolerated on this shard, and players do not receive jail or get bans without very good reason. Just because someone tries to explain it away does not make it true, and it is always in your own best interests to not let them drag you into it. Someone who is willing to put you in a position to have to protect the knowledge of their cheating is not really concerned about you, or the shard. It is not worth potentially losing all your hard work and fun on Excelsior for the sake of someone who has no regard for the rules.
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

Grand Auction this Saturday the 28th at 22:00 shard time. Items are on display now. :)
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

In today's edition: 1. Doom rares, 2. Personal spawner upgrade, 3. Codex addition.

1. Doom rares
The doom rares system has been running in beta-test mode for the past few weeks (should have been a week, but it got extended a bit). Those of you who were able to obtain the beta-testing titan's hammer, you're lucky, as they will not be available anymore :). The 1ED was a beta-testing reward as well, though the jars will be added again in the future.
Changes are the following:
- Gauntlet rares remain unchanged.
- Non-gauntlet spawns still spawn at their original locations, but with a 4-times-as-much delay. They are however available in those doom rare chests, with a 1.33-times-as-much delay as original. So, the overall spawn rate is the same.
- Titan's hammer is not available at it's original location, since that is what caused the most issues with camping. So, the titan's hammer is now exclusively found in the chests.
- Due to technical limitations, i were not able to port some of the rares to the new system, but that will be done soon. The jars currently do not spawn, but will be added.
- Those who were using this during the testing period, and were not able to cash in their ED - the voucher submission chest works now.

2. Personal spawner upgrades
Last weekend I have upgraded all of the personal spawns (animals, special animals, vendors, trainers). Well, there are still about 20 in existance with some exceptions that need a bit more attention, but for most it should all work ok.
- There has been a problem reported with dressing your vendors, and moving your spawns. It has been fixed and will work at the next server restart (planned in tuesday-wednesday).
- Since these personal spawns were intended to reduce our workload, please do not page to have them moved or traded. You can move them yourself. As for trading, they are made as house addons - if you sell the house, the house carries over with all of it's spawners inside.

3. Codex addition - the Acts page.
http://www.uoex.net/codex/acts
As written on the page, it's purpose is to inform players of the misc minor rules that are in effect, as well as to not forget these things (for example, we don't often get a request to move/merge a water house, so in the 2 years since the last request, it's easy to forget what conditions were said at the time).
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Colibri »

Halloween costumes

Halloween costumes are now available! Just go through the gate at the Town Center and chose what you want to be. You can only pick one, so be careful what you chose. Past year costumes were also enabled, so if you picked one last year, and the year before, and still have them, you can wear them as well.

There are 12 new costumes on the stone this year:
- For everyone: Panda bear*, Bipedal cow*
- For 1 year veterans: Lady of the snow, Ophidian warrior, Terathan matriarch, Sphinx, Tritan*
- For 2 year veterans: Juggernaut, Arcane demon, Ignus*, Shadow priestess*, Grim reaper*
* means the costume uses new patch graphics.

The costumes will be deactivated a few days after Halloween. And just to repeat a rule that was decided last year (or possibly 2 years back), regarding costume use after they are deactivated: once a costume is deactivated, it can no longer be equipped. However, if you are wearing it when they are deactivated, you can continue to wear them, until you take it off (either take it off manually, or when you die and it falls off, etc). If you accidentally take it off, or die, the staff cannot help you re-equip it (even if you've already worn it for months after they have been disabled). There is no defined limit until when you can wear the costume after it's disabled - technically you can wear it for a whole year (but if issues arise from this, they would be manually unequipped).
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Re: EXCELSIOR DAILY

Post by +Nyx »

There will be a Grand Auction on Saturday the 30th at 6:30pm Eastern U.S. time. There will also be a 2nd auction featuring some of the items from Saturday on Sunday December 1st at 3pm Eastern U.S. time. The shard is due to reboot and undergo a time change between now and then, so please calculate your time zone's relation to Eastern U.S. for this event.

This auction will be trying out some new rules:

- All winning bid amounts and winners' names will be made public on the forums after the auction.
- Maximum of 4 items per account.
- You may not bid on an alt. Attend and bid on your main character.


Hope to see everyone there!
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