I just wanted to congratulate Ralgedi for passing 2 million realm points yesterday (or should I say this morning?). Nice going! :)

Update: Ambush (Jerelyn) is the first Fletcher on Excalibur Midgard to recap her fletching skill after the maximum was raises last patch by the introduction of new crafted items. Congratulations! :)

New playtoy for the more geeky types amongst us, RSS feeds (don't ask) for tiwaz.org news! :p
http://www.tiwaz.org/xml/tiwaz.rss for unfiltered news messages
http://www.tiwaz.org/xml/tiwaz_plain.rss for a plain text version (no HTML tags)
http://www.tiwaz.org/xml/tiwaz_forum.rss for the latest forum posts (subject to change)

A couple after the initial patch, the dust around version 1.65 seems to be settling. There has been some emergency maintenance to fix possible exploits and client side patch to fix some minor issues, but things seem to be mostly working as intended :)

Unfortunately Chronicles/XML data won't be updating for a while, until the generation process has been updated for the new version. No timetable has been given, but it's not likely to take as long as last time.

Some people have made it to level 40 and Herald rank recently, gratz to Grinna, Storka (Keepholder) and Kraig. We've also gained a new member today: Gumi, a refugee from the lands of Hibernia now playing a freshly rolled warrior :)

Patch day tomorrow! At around 8 am GMT the servers will come down. They are expected to be back around noon with version 1.65 online.

See also the original news message, which includes some links to patchnotes.

After some maintenance on the website that took longer than expected, the website is now back up again. If you run into strange error messages, let me know, because I haven't tested everything yet ;)

Midgard had a nice power relic, for a while... the fact that a Midgard group found a relic just lying around in Emain Macha was kind of suspicious, and the next day rumours were confirmed. Someone had used a cheat to remove the relic from the Hibernian shrine. The relic has been returned and the offenders have been banned, hopefully returning things back to normal. See also the official GOA post on their website.

Yesterday also meant the end of an era: BarrysWorld/GAME.net closed all their forums and as such also their English DAoC community forums. For a while now a replacement has been available in the form of FreddysHouse. I expect that community will quickly grow now that BarrysWorld has closed their doors.

Be sure to check the latest GOA Friday news for an update about the soon coming 1.65 patch and Trials of Atlantis (the next paid expansion). It even boasts a player's tip that actually tought me something :)

Lasty, some belated "gratz" for Susanoo (Skeggi) on reaching level 50! If anyone has a genious Critblade template lying around, he might be interested ;)

Some maintenance on the entire game platform is scheduled for tomorrow (wednesday the 21st). As a result, the game servers will be unreachable between approximately 8am GMT until 1pm GMT.

See the official announcement for more information.

Update: Excalibur was back up at 12:54 GMT, nicely on schedule :)

Some news about the recent Excalibur problems:
GOA has identified a subtle hardware error in the network Excalibur has been using since shortly before Christmas, which caused a multiple zonecrash last night and possibly also (some) of the other crashes.

As of 15:20 CET, Excalibur is therefore down for a short hardware maintenance to hopefully fix these kinds of problems.

Original news item

Since the last news post Excalibur has crashed a couple more times. GOA is investigating the situation and trying to up with a solution, but in the meantime action has been taken to avoid long downtimes of the server.

On to guild matters: Poxe (Nannie) has received his promotion to Emissary today. Congratulations and welcome :)
There are several other new members that I have failed to mention in the news so far: Shockwave, Nachael and Dreggel. I haven't met you all yet, but I look forward to getting to know you ;)