After some suggestions and discussion we've decided to make a small change in the TE ranks system. From now on level 50 alts of Battle Heralds will also be promoted to Battle Herald, even if they are not yet RR3 themselves.

The reason for this change is that the whole RR3 system was intended to make sure people have some idea of what they're talking about before being allowed to use (abuse?) our alliance chat :) The kind of RvR experience needed for sensible AS usage gained playing one character is also valid for other characters, which is why this change was made.

While on the subject, I would like to remind people of the Alliance Rules. Compared to many other guilds in our alliance I think our conformation to the rules is excellent, but I'd like to keep it that way.
This means: no asking for trade chatgroups, no asking for artifact groups that require 1FG or less and no telling other people off on alliance chat for not following the rules (if you can't resist, use /send). If there is a mass protocol violation only officers are allowed to call for order on Alliance Chat directly.
I would also like to point out that the "Any ML <insert here> raids planned today?" messages were judged against the rules by the alliance leaders. At the moment people seem to be lenient in this matter, but try to keep it in mind and try to use other means of finding a battlegroup: use the new and improved LFG window, check out the usual gathering points, etc.

I'll start with some (belated) congratulations: Dreggel and Idlefire have both reached level 50, last Thursday and last Tuesday respectively :)
We also have some new members: Juj, Feolab and Groq. Welcome all, I hope to get to know you a bit better soon :)

Game development is going steadily, Mythic is up to version 1.69g on Pendragon. The next live patch on European servers will the 1.68 and should be here by the end of April, fixing several Trials of Atlantis bugs and balance issues.
On other European server news, GOA have announced some upcoming improvements to their customer support. No details yet, but improvement can't be bad :)

Tomorrow (Thursday) starting 8:15 GMT Excalibur will be down for a hardware upgrade. Ever since the release of Trials of Atlantis there have been intermittent problems with server side lag in the new zones.
While the servers used by GOA are actually already faster than prescribed in the system specifications by Mythic, European servers also tend to have higher population per server, therefore the server will be upgraded further in order to solve the lag problem. The server is scheduled to be back up early afternoon, see also the official news article on the DAoC Europe website.

Update: as of 10:58 GMT, Excalibur is back up.

Tuesday 10:15 all the English gameservers will be brought down for some bugfix patching. You can find the original Camelot Europe message here.

On other news, Zonewall has been promoted to Emissary today, congratulations :)

Lastly, 1.69d patchnotes for those interested, as well as 1.69c if you missed them. Mostly bugfixes, but also some minor artifact changes and added trophies for TOA mobs :)

Update: The database server upgrade was completed, and the website should be back to normal.

The tiwaz.org database server will be upgraded and moved early monday morning. Because of this, posting on the forum has temporarely been disabled, as any posts made while the server is moved would be lost.
Character data editing should also be disabled (haven't had time to test this), but it boils down to this: any changes made during the transition period might be lost, so it would be easier to postpone any changes you need to make until further notice (ETA monday afternoon). After the move the website should respond faster than the last few weeks. My apologies for the inconvenience.

There have also been some problems with the Excalibur server on sunday. GOA personel responded quickly, but the problem seemed less than trivial, so people were unable to log in for about 3 hours. Hopefully there will be a followup news item from GOA about this soon.