Hi everyone!
First off I'd like to apologise for my extended absence from the shard. I know that the classic excuse is "busy life", but for me this is an understatement. I've been managing a team, doing a management qualification, working on my band, and now I've been offered another job, so life is manic right now.
However, with that out of the way, I'd like to bring your attention to the forums. In light of the recent development focus from GM Bob and Broadband himself, and of course the extended support from GM Echo and the rest of the Obsidian Staff team, I felt it only about time that we gave a bit of focus to the forums.
I've always believed very strongly that the forums are an integral part of the game and form the core of the Obsidian community. I also feel that we can do more to link the game to the forums and vice versa, which I will be speaking to Broadband/Bob about in a development context when I see them.
So, what can you do?
I would very much like to get some suggestions from you all about how you would like YOUR forums to look. Examples would be
- Is there a section that you feel needs improvement?
- What about a forum section that you have seen elsewhere that you would like to see here?
- Is there a section that doesnt work and should be changed or removed?
- Do you think that the forums could use a visual facelift like the main website?
- What other ideas do you have?
Please leave your comments here. I will be collating these so PLEASE make them relevant, and constructive.
Thanks, and <3 to you all.
GM Thassius
(2) Comments
As I said in my previous posts, it's my intent to ensure that people at least know what's going on and why. In return i ask that you all be understanding, and know that while we have done our utmost to avoid stuff like this and downtimes, sometimes circumstances are out of our control.
We have approximately 23 hours, give or take a couple, until time stops again. It is unlikely in that time that the patch will be implemented.
Broadband has had some unexpected circumstances arise with work, and has been literally out of contact of pretty much everyone for the past week, so much work couldn't get done.
However on that same note, I would like state that I myself have had issues pop up, some of which i shouldn't have let interfere, and so I have not been able to work as much on the patch migration as I had hoped.
Also i will point out, as many know, a good portion of our staff are either employed in jobs that vary with seasons, or are academic, and so the spring/summer transition is when people have no hours. Applause to echo and the two lower staff who have put in hours in the past weeks helping out when their schedules have been full to the brim.
I'm sorry the patch is going to be late. I am sorry it is as late as it has been, it should have went up months ago, but with the way the shard is set up currently, you have a few staff working, and bottlenecks happen when we have to wait on one particular staff, sometimes me, sometimes broadband, sometimes echo or thassius, to do something. And the relatively stressed schedules of all of us have just resulted in a lot of time where work can't get done.
However the good news. I get to reveal some of the interesting things about the patch, hopefully you'll see why it's taken this long and why we've put so much time into it. Please note this is nowhere near the full patch changes, just a few things i think you'll enjoy.
Changes for staff:
A new system for keeping track of players. This means no more people stuck in jail for weeks because staff don't put notes up correctly.
Patches will be more streamlined, meaning no more delayed bottlenecks just because one staff gets delayed in life, the others will still be able to worked.
Upgraded site systems, such as a new account creation page as well as a few others.
Changes for players:
Upgraded Client
Healing has been rebalanced. I won't give specifics as of now, but I trust that it will piss some people off, make some people happy, but in the end I think everyone will enjoy the new system, especially with how it deals with poison and hunger. Fail rate has also been completely redone.
Most of the crafting skills got upgrades and new items, as well as a few small balance changes/use changes.
three new commands have been added for players,
.bandageself and .bandagelast. They do as they say, bandage yourself, or bandage the last person you bandaged.
.sortpack has also been added, to help organizing packs with lots of items.
Potions now have a new reworked timer system, with different types of potions having different timers.
Keep in mind this is only a small portion of stuff the patch will implement. The full changelog will be posted when the patch goes live.
I will be able to post within a week what the new schedule for the patch is, and hopefully we will limit the downtime when time stops to a single day, however that depends on broadband's availability. Please be patient with us.
(25) Comments
Good evening, I just thought i'd get this post up before bed.
The shard is due to go down again in about.... 6.6 days. give or take a few hours. This also means that the patch is about to come as well.
However due to the way things have been going, we have a bit of a problem. The patch has been ready for around a month and a half. Unfortunately, due to broadband having real life issues, we've been unable to accurately test the patch with the shard data as a whole until just recently. I.E. bob, echo, and the rest of staff have been working their asses off in the past week to try to make up for lost time.
So we have a poll for you guys. We can either bump the patch back another month, OR we can install the patch now, and have a live beta. This means that there could be rollbacks if big bugs are found, and things could be not working as usual, since it is a pretty big patch that affects almost every part of the shard in one way or another.
Poll is attached to this post.
In other news, the "wouldn't it be neat" contest is almost at a close, with the patch comming up, so be sure to enter that if you have any ideas.
(24) Comments
The shard has been rather peculiar as of late, being as some people can login and some can't. The staff are aware of it, and we have been trying to isolate it since it first started a few days ago. I apologize for the relatively late news post, but I feel there is no point posting until i can tell you what's wrong, why it's wrong, and what if anything we can do to fix it, so i've been spending the time figuring that out.
As it stands, the server is up, and a few players can connect partially to it, with a few being able to login fully. The problem lies in the switching point right before the router, and unfortunately there is not much we can do about it for a consistent time, we can route around it for a few hours at a time, but it should be fixed within a few days. Broadband is out of town at this point, as he has been for most of the last month or two and will continue to be for another month due to business trips at this time of year, but he is updating the routing whenever he can to at least get you guys a few hours of uptime till they fix this crap.
Summary: Shard is up, connection is random, the ISP has issues, and we're jury-rigging solutions for a few hours at a time until it's fixed, should be fixed soon.
Also, if you all would rather we give updates about outages and such like this sooner, but with a lot less information, please post below. In the past people would much rather know why things are wrong rather than just that staff know it's wrong. I'm fully capable of going with either option or doing both, I just prefer the second one that way there's no speculation on the problem or concern over what may/may not happen.
(15) Comments
We haven't abandoned you guys, sorry for the lack of news posts.
The patch is, for all intensive purposes, done. We're waiting on a few more tiny things. Expect to see it within a month. Mainly just because we only have a month left till doomsday again, for those who are smart and were keeping track. Why so long? Because we're still missing a few tiny things, and we want to get some testing done on it before we put it on the live server, to minimize people going bananas over small bugs here and there. Assuming there are any.
That being said, that also means you have less than a month to finish your entries for the contest mentioned in the previous news post.
(10) Comments