Steel DarKnight

Tonight I was asked to post a brief summary of the role of the Shadow riders (archery) and the Arcane cohort(mages) in the HONOR wall. Specifically I was asked how to prevent attacking or hindering ones own units as well. Magi priorities 1) Heal and cure front wall 2) Heal and cure front wall 3) Heal and cure front wall Simply enough if the front wall falls, the magi become ineffective and unable to work as a unit. Once the enemy crawls through the line they (Magi) must use evasive action to keep from being brought down. This retreat often leads to confusion and more losses. 4) Resurrect and restore to action any fallen combatants. (Again in keeping the line solid in front of you) 5) Lay down a line of area affect spells and magical combatants (EV, elementals etc, etc....) in front of your line to weaken the enemy. This can be devastating to the enemy and can turn the tide of any battle. 6) Engage with direct attack spells (But always leave enough mana available for a heal or cure for..)Yes you guessed the front line.) Shadow Riders The Shadow Rider role is one of an indirect combatant. The following guidelines will assist a Shadowrider in being as effective as possible. 1) Do not engage an enemy first..Let the melee wall bring the enemy (or at least have it attracted to it)to it...then engage. 2) Stay one space behind the front wall, no farther. The reason for this is because you can use your healing ability to bandage the front wall. These extra heals can save the day. 3) Shadow riders are in certain circumstances can be excellent magnets (If the line is large enough to block the advance of the enemy fully) They can weaken a following enemy and can also pull through the HONOR wall...were the enemy cannot follow. Finally, as to how to not attack your comrades, as a rule, pull your enemies life bar and double click it, not the enemy itself. With some practice this can be done quickly and will prevent you attacking your allies. In the confusion of battle, and the buildup of bodies, it is very easy to target the wrong person. Strength and Honor

*bump*

Tatiana, We met briefly during our romp (Maven) Monday and was a pleasure having you along. Hope to see you at many more events.

To all that were able to hunt tonight in the Lost Lands, was great fun, and barring a few slips the wall held together decently. Now that we've had a bit of time to train I expect that things will go better on our next romp. Thank you to all for your company and cooperation! Special thanks to Doddz for playing the role of "Bait". Strength and Honor!

In order to work through this time of change, I have put together a timeline of what will happen and when. Please review and attend were you can. >Saturday at 7:00pm EST Voting for the office of Emperor will be ended, votes tallied, and our new sire determined barring any controversey >Saturday at 7:20PM EST Leadership to meet at Olympus to discuss the results of the vote and handle any issues that arise in conjuction to the aformentioned vote. > Saturday at 8:15PM Mission (hunt) meeting at Olympus for all members (Hunt story posted) > Saturday at 8:30PM Departure for mission from Olympus. > Sunday 7:00PM Coronation of the new Emperor to be held in Trinsic (Location to be announced) Strength and Honor

As I mentioned during this last meeting. I will be working with the "leadership" to restart our weekly hunting events. These are all RP based as they once were and should be. The last "events" often led to more ideas from the group as to possible future events and I hope that this mission will start us once more down this road. ********************************************** Great change was coming for the Empire. This Steel knew would be a time of turmoil, and he had sworn to work to pull the order together and to rally around the next Emperor. By the grace of the membership of the empire, Steel had been given the task of handling the administrative duties required of the emperor until the coronation this weekend (posted elsewhere). Fortunately most of his most difficult task in setting up the method for the citizens to determine their next leader had been completed. The remaining tasks that lie before him was to handle to arrangements for the Coronation ceremony that was to be held in Trinsic next Sunday. Steel chuckled to himself lightly as attendants brought before him stacks and stacks of ribbons, food, decorum, and other items that would be needed for a proper ceremony. Definitely his years as a warrior had not prepared him for such and the decisions were almost as complex as dueling an angry Balron. Steel almost had his mind made as to the color of the decoration when the doors to emperor’s office slammed open. A bit taken back by the suddenness of the event, Steel eyes slowly focused on the person entering. “Senator Elathiel, you have just arrived in time to………” “Sorry Steel…..sir…… to interrupt so abruptly but time is of the essence…. I have dire news!” “My agents have just returned from a recent mission and the information they have provided leads me to believe immediate action is required.” On that note Elathiel reached into his tunic and reached for a parchment, which he handed to Steel. Quickly, the pro-temp opened the seal and read. Steel paused. “So, they seek to strike us now, during this time of transition?” Steel whispered. Elathiel spoke “Yes, sir that is what I believe, and the reports appear to confirm this.” “Gods” Steel slammed his hand down upon the table. “They yet carry a vengeance against us and I feared this would come, but alas, the time could not be worse. Steel wiped his eyes with his hand and paused a bit to regain his composure. “ They think they will find us wanting, weak and confused… disorganized.” Steel paused once more.... “Elathiel, I trust you have sent word to the SOW Logan and Decurion Ballyn?” “Yes Steel, I have contacted both and they are on their way to the castle now.” spoke Elathiel. “Excellent Senator…Excellent.” “By the gods the Guardians will stand together once more…the enemy will find it has stuck its hand into the wasps nest… We will make sure they are appropriately stung! ********************************************** Saturday 8:15PM EST Mission briefing Saturday 8:30PM EST departure to parts unknown *chuckle* If you plan to attend please be prompt. Were will you be when the empire stands together, united in battle, once more?

Unfortunately, as many whom attended the meeting are aware, we are faced with some dire issues. For those whom were not able to attend it has come to our attention that Borg has decided to step down as emperor. This grieves me most greatly and I for one wish to thank him for his work, much of which goes unseen and unappreciated. An age for the empire is at an end. At the request of the membership of PGoH I have been asked to post a poll to determine the next successor for the office. During our meeting three individuals were nominated to this post. I would like to note that no party asked for this position but were the consensus for the attendees. Steel DarKnight, Ballyn, and Logan. Logan, Ballyn and I have agreed that neither party will campaign for the post. I believe that I speak for them when I say that is was a honor for us all to be asked to step forward and that we both feel the others would be more than suitable to the task. Vote with your hearts Guardians! In agreeing to fill this role we all accept the duties, time, and commitment it would involve. For all of us UO is our home. We have both put allot of our time, effort, and dreams into the Honor Empire and would continue to do so to serve its members. For whoever is granted the post I ask that all members understand the great responsibilities that individual is taking. The task that lies before them is great and the road long. But, we will continue, we always have and we always will. The future lies in you Guardians, not only in this vote, but also in the actions and days to come. The Empire is more than a name; it is a charter and a way of life for us in this realm. It is YOU and what YOU make it. Strength and Honor.

*This poll is now null and void due to a matter brought to my attention that I was unaware of. Simply, I wish this to be fair for all parties. Please note a new Poll has been placed.

*deletion due to events*

Fertbert posted offcial word about the issue where "use best weapon skill" was not working on archery type weapons in this stratics thread: Right now Use Best Weapon Skill will let a person with swordsmanship, fencing, or macing use any sword, mace, or fencing weapon. It has no effect on ranged weapons...which means that having use Best Weapon Skill on a bow or crossbow is meaningless right now. This is by design. As it was explained to me, we didn't want melee folks to gain a ranged attack with no skill point cost, nor did we want ranged weapon folks gaining a melee attack with no skill point cost. Cheers, Fertbert ********************************************** Hmmm...this was previously posted as a bug. Secondly, why have "use best weapon skill" archery weapons spawn? I believe someone's fibbing here.

Thiork who? *chuckles*

As luck would have it Winter, shortly after seeing your post I uncovered one. Spell Channeling \ Mage Weapon / Damage increase 25% Hit stamina leech 2% -28 mage level Its all yours for the competitive price of say "saving my butt" somewere down the line. Just drop me a pigeon.

Did someone say Wolf's battle tactics manual? The Honor Empire Tactics manual.

Strangly enough, this last patch was unusual as I did not dowwnload *visibly* anything but did benefit by the effects. The only fix that I have seen work reliable Ballyn is reinstalling. I myself remeber seeing a few other things but the info is hazy. (Getting forgetful in my old age).

Ahhh no problem. Back when I first started a group of ppl aided me and showed me the ropes. Doddz, Christoph and a few others can testify to our initial days in Shame "Dont go to level 2!!!!!!, and fear the scorps" *smirk* Just keep the tradition going Lukkan, when you are more expirenced and you come upon someone new to the realm.

Pride, I know were your coming from. You see I went from cable to dial up...connecting at 33.3. I moved as you are to a rural local. Now when AoS hit I had a horrid conn. But, I can say that things have improved as of this Friday with the latest patch. Altough Im probably not "Champion spawn" able, I can do most of my normal romps.

Not to make light of a bad situation, but, I did find this somewhat humorous and sadly true to form. US: Ok, putting together RvR group for Iraq raid... who's in? Turkey: Only if someone makes me new armor. Last Iraq raid I lost money on much you need. Turkey: 6 Plat. US: WTF?! You're not building the armor out of platinum, ya tard…no frikking way. Turkey: Yeah, but I wanna get it SC... US: 3 plat, and that's all I'm offering. Turkey: Sweet. Ok, I'm in. But only if I can get a majority share of loot Spain: I frikking hate Iraq. They were camped at our keep for frikking EVER, man--long time ago, but still pissed off about it. Meet you at Turkish keep. US: Cool, thx. Italy: Me 2 Chile: I'm in. US: Ok, so far, got US, Turks, Spain, Italy, Chile. Bulgaria: Umm, got room for some lowbies? Thought maybe we could leech some RP's. US: Yeah, sure. Why not. Just don't attack anything. Set up a /assist US macro, ok? France: Hey all, what's up? US: Putting together an RvR raid, hitting Iraq. France: No frikking way, dood. Look, I'm part of Alliance leadership, and I say no way do we go in there. I'm using Alliance veto. US: WTF? Alliance Veto? France: Yeah, it's in Alliance charter. Me, Germany, US, Russia, and China can all cancel any Alliance raid event. Bulgaria: Hey, me and the other Eastern Europeans wanna go... France: STFU, n00b. Your guild got no say in this. Bulgaria: ,,!,, Germany: I don't really want to go either. US: ... France: Yeah, we veto. No guildies go to Iraq. US: What about you, Russia. Russia: Well, if everyone else goes, it's ok, but if France and Germany say no, then that's cool. US: Jeezus. Dood, show some balls. You used to love going on raids. Russia: Yeah, but that Afghanistan raid a while back was a disaster. Total group wipe-out. US: Yeah, but you were in different alliance, man. This is different. Besides, we pwn3d last time we went on Iraq raid. France: Doesn't matter. I say no. Spain: .tell US doesn't matter if they don't go anyway, France just gives up anytime he sees any combat anyway. He's a bu77munch. Lives next door to me. Spain: Oops. MT. France: Oh yeah? Well you skipped that WWII raid completely. Spain: Only cuz I'd just come back from dueling, was too tired to RvR. Besides, you died in first wave, spent the rest of the raid licking dirt and whining. France: ..!.. US: Guys, c'mon. I'm trying to put this thing together, here... look, I don't care what France says. I'm going, and anyone who wants to come with me can. China, you in? China: *shrug* Don't feel like it. US: Ok... North Korea has challenged you to a duel! Type /duel accept to accept or /duel decline to decline the challenge. /duel decline North Korea tells you: "Dood u r teh suq. I will r0xxorz u" You tell North Korea: No thanks, guy. Trying to get an RvR raid going. North Korea tells you: "Ur just scaerd of teh pwnage" You tell North Korea: Riiiigh. STFU, okay? I'm busy North Korea taunts you. /ignore North Korea. US: How come you're not coming, Germany? Germany: I'm just not into the violence anymore. You tell Germany: Bulls***, you're just waiting for us to go into Iraq so you can gank France again. Germany tells you: Ooops. *blush* busted!! You tell Germany: Dude, why bother? He's gray to you. Germany tells you: It's just satisfying, I guess. It shuts him up for a while, anyway. France: I'm telling you, if anyone goes, then it'll break the Alliance. Spain tells you: Whoop-de-s***, this Alliance sucks anyway. Let's go anyways. US: France, WTF is ur problem? France:I want to send scouts in, first. Let them see if there's any reason to go in. US: Ok, how long it gonna take them? France: Couple weeks, maybe. Months, possibly. US: MONTHS? WTF???! Dude, I don't want to wait that long. I'll give your scouts a week, at most. We'll reschedule then. France: I may veto anyway. US: Yeah, whatever. /tell Spain yeah, may have to. He's a dips***. United Kingdom tells you: Dude, I'm in... where u want me? I got stealths watching the Iraq Mile Gates. Bulgaria tells you: If you go, let me know. Me and my lowbie buddies are in. You tell Bulgaria: Cool, thx. Are you someone's ALT? Bulgaria tells you: Some of us were Russia's buffbots, but we're soloing, now. US: Ok, meet again next week. We'll take things from there.

Thiork, I understand your situation since I myself have fallen victim to that same ailment. Perhaps to a lesser degree than yourself. Last night I was unable to attend the meeting due to otherwordly responcibilities, but, I will be more than happy to carry some communication crystals to the next so that you may participate. If for some reason I cannot, I am certain another will step forward. We can make arrangments prior to next weekends event.

*sticks out his thumb and looks skyward for the nearest Vogon cruiser* "oh hell were are my peanuts and towell!"

I will be more than happy to start a vendor.

Doddz, May the good Lord watch over you in this time of crisis. As you can plainly tell the prayers and hopes of many follow you onward. Included in those are mine. You strive for what may be the most noble cause, the liberation of a people you have never met. Godspeed Doddz. Godspeed.

First of all, we're aware that some of you are experiencing lag since the publish of Age of Shadows. For that I'd like to apologize and explain what we're doing to improve things. While reading this explanation understand that bandwidth usage and lag are related... more bandwidth usage tends to create more lag for low bandwidth users. Here are the Age of Shadows features that do and will continue to use more bandwidth than Event 5 did: - Customized houses are about 500 to 2000 bytes each and are cached client side in a persistent cache - Item properties are about 20 to 100 bytes each and are cached client side in a temporary cache - Floating damage numbers are small number of bytes (< 20) Some details about what we're doing or have done to reduce the impact of these: - Customized houses are about as optimized as they're likely to get right now. Each house is broken into slices and encoded using one of several algorithms, then each slice is compressed. The only further optimizations that can be made with regard to housing is for us to gradually ship each slice to the client instead of sending all the slices at once, and to turn off the standard packet compression/encoding for housing packets. Since I have yet to read one single complaint about customized houses causing undue lag, I have no immediate plans to implement those further optimizations. Further more the majority of the house-related lag appears to be due to the lockdowns and vendors… - Items properties are the current target of our optimization efforts... these appear to be the major cause of the increased lag, and are what have been causing people to be blackholed. The size of the average item properties packet caught us by surprise, we had not originally intended to send so many properties, so our initial impact analysis was way off. We have a fix in QA right now to address this problem. We're now throttling the rate at which these packets are sent to the client so that when people enter vendor malls or recall to a popular place their available bandwidth is not overwhelmed. - Floating damage numbers do not appear to have a significant impact upon lag, are are already as optimized as they're likely to be. Those same features that can cause lag, can also cause the client to be completely overwhelmed with data resulting in a character becoming blackholed. We have a patch in QA to address this problem. I have refactored the server side buffering code to behave better in these situations. Once this patch goes live, naturally occurring blackholes at champion spawns, banks, and vendor malls should be rare. Also in this patch is a fix for the packet corruption problem that plagued many users (especially modem users.) This corruption is likely the cause of the majority of the recent random disconnects, seeing the character select screen in the middle of gameplay, and other miscellaneous weirdness. The reason why this bug appears to be more prevelant now is that it is only triggered when one of the server side buffers in near capacity… as we’ve been seeing lately with the increased bandwith usage of Age of Shadows. In development is a fix that should address the famous multiple door problem (as it applies to regular buildings in UO) as well as a related cause of blackholes around places with too many candelabra, communication crystals, the Delucia bank, etc. Right now I am focusing on more item properties optimizations, and weeding through out data stream to remove duplicate information. I anticipate having another batch of fixes in Publish 18. Thank you for your patience in this matter, Fertbert * original post on Stratics UO Tech board... cross posting to uo.com boards... please watch for future messages on Stratics

Silver DarKnight would be more than happy to offer his assitance in this endeavour.

The Online Community Relations (OCR) team here at Origin feels strongly that communication is crucial when running an online game. When we first opened the MyUO forums in the year 2000, our goal was to provide players with a central place to gather and exchange feedback with each other and with developers. Over the last three years, though, we’ve learned that it takes a lot more time to moderate boards than to simply post on them! In an effort to spend less time as “the police” (locking and deleting threads, sending warnings, finding lost passwords, etc.) and more time on effective communication, we’re going to allow one of our oldest and most dedicated fansites, UO Stratics, to handle message board moderation and administration for the Ultima Online forum community on the currently established forums at uo.stratics.com. So why choose UO Stratics? Well, not only are they part of one of the largest massively multiplayer gaming networks on the web, but they have the most active and established UO community outside of MyUO and a vast set of forums spanning every play style. Some of the benefits of the Stratics forums include: * a more upgraded version of the same software used for the MyUO forums, with all the features MyUO users are accustomed to * the ability to bookmark certain threads and posters * thirty different board color schemes to choose from * a fully functioning “Who’s Online” page * a “Dev Post” page showing all posts made by OSI team members * forums for each profession and each shard * seventeen general forums, including an ideas forum, an off-topic forum, and yes -- even a rants forum! In case you’re wondering if this change means that UO or the UO.com website is being scaled back, the answer is a resounding no! Not only has Ultima Online only now reached its all-time high in subscribers, but we have great plans for the future of the Ultima franchise. We are not short on web bandwidth or hardware; this change is specifically geared to free up the Community Team’s time for things that will improve communication, such as reading and responding to players' posts, researching game issues, and writing important news updates. Our time spent on the boards won’t change much – we’ll just be reading the Stratics forums instead of MyUO, and we won’t be spending any time on moderation or administration tasks. The MyUO Forums will remain open until 2:00 PM Wednesday, March 19th CST to allow players to share their Stratics board names with other posters or make plans to meet friends from MyUO in specific Stratics forums. Anyone who doesn’t already have a Stratics username will need to sign up on the Stratics forums themselves here; we will not be providing players’ UO or MyUO login information to Stratics. I know this is a lot of information to digest; so we invite you to discuss this move here in this thread. We have also started a thread here for the sole purpose of exchanging Stratics usernames. __________________ Cynthe Community Manager ORIGIN Systems ******************************************************** Dont know about you guys but Stratics for me is almost unbearable slow.

No not by the IRS. Mr Tact is checking into the amount of datae being sent to the client: The data stream is being audited, just as I said it would be two weeks ago. This only started late last week because there were other fixes we deemed more important to get into production, among them the actual fix for the blackhole problem. Since the person working on the blackhole fix (Fertbert) is the same person who is working on reducing bandwidth utilization, these were not tasks that could be done in parallel. We know dialup is not fun right now. We are working to improve this situation. There are some fixes in a client patch that will be out this week, and a publish that MAY be out this week, that should make things BETTER, though not GREAT. An aggressive bandwidth optimization pass is in the works and this should make things considerably better for dialup players. As for UOASpeed, Tug has contacted us and we are discussing it. I can't predict right now how it's going to go, but I don't consider it anything to be alarmed about. MrTact ******************************************************** *Does a little connection dance* "Ive just started keeping death robes on as part of my uniform, perhaps this may allow me to return to normal:p"