Archive 6

Sheesh, EA/OSI really are after our money! Seems like on top of the Item Bless Deed and the Mini-Houses, they finally "somewhat" gave in and we'll get our hooded robes afterall! Not the counselor/GM type robe but still, it's got a hood!

If you pre-order you AoS CD with either EB Games or GameStop, you will receive yet another in game reward: the hooded shroud of shadows that you can see below.

As an extra incentive to get peeps to buy the new expansion, early settlers will be receiving a mini-house collectible and a bless deed. Early settler doesn't mean buying or placing a house. All you have to do is upgrade an existing account to AoS or activate a new one before February 28th, 2003 and each character that will log into the game with an AoS client will receive a random miniature house and a bless deed. Below, you can see the actual in game size of the houses compared to character. There are 20 different models of such houses so collectioners, get ready.

For those of you who may be wondering what they mean by Bless Deed, they indeed mean the old, extremely rare, Item Bless Deed that allows you to bless weapons, and not the common Clothing Bless Deeds. So those of you old veterans that were holding on to your bless deeds, get rid of them asap while they're still worth something. The last Item Bless Deed I saw was selling for 20 million. I wonder what they go for now *sighs*. Yup, another rare gets shafted.

Seems like whining and crying does still work after all. After all the frustration over the tiny puny Malas map they had posted on the AoS website, the Dev Team gave in and provide us with the official map of Malas.

In UO, the naughty and good will be receiving xmas presents early next week, regardless of behavior. In the list of potential gifts, the usual xmas tree, the hopelessly awful statues and nauseating snowglobes, plus a comeback from the wristwatches. No mention of the snowballs *sniffs*. I can't believe we getting more horrid globes and no snowballs! Oh Well. Here's the link.

Jade of Great Lakes wins first prize with her re-creation of the Nativity manger scene. Antique from Izumo gets the 2nd prize with her Japanese Tea Ceremony decor.

Yup, you read that right. Malas will have a PvP arena with grandstands for spectators.

About the puzzles found within the dungeon Doom, unlike the Khaldun chests, these ones cannot be done solo. You will not only need more than one player, some will also require specific skills. In the given example, 4 players would need to activate switches while a thief sneaks in to steal the loot.

On housing, seems like we'll actually be able to place inside guard zone as housing will be placeable within the town walls. Rumor also has it that OSI might release the house design tool before AoS actually launches so we can start getting familiar with it.

For more AoS pictures, hit this other link of IGN.com pics compiled by the German site UOB.

Attention to all BOD buyers and sellers. Fed up with all the guess work when attempting to price your BODs or rewards? Wondering if you're getting ripped off on the BODs you're buying? Tired of running around looking for that one elusive BOD required to complete your LBOD? If you answered yes to one or all of the above questions, then your solution is BODs 'R' Us. My good friend Vita Drakonia (who also happened to help me setup the boards on my site, tkx girl :-D) has setup a comprehensive chart for dynamic pricing of both tailoring and smithing bods, based on the value of the potential reward they will yield.

If you play Atlantic, BODs 'R' Us is also shaping up to be the largest BOD mall on that shard. It is located on Magincia Beach, right besides Goodman's.

The specs for the Paladin are out and, well... once again, evil looks more cool. As a holy warrior, the Paladin will use his powers to heal wounds, cure poison and disease, lift curses, and improve his fighting. To become a paladin, you will need to develop your skills in Chivalry. As usual, the higher your skills, the more powers will be made available to you. The Paladin will profit from 10 new abilities found in the silver book of Chivalry:

Tithing
Each ability will require a certain amount of "tithing points" to use. The Paladin earns these tithing points by donating gold at a shrine or holy place. There however is a limit to the mount of tithing points a Paladin can have at any one time, so showering a shrine with gold becomes pointless beyond that point.

Karma
The higher the Paladin's karma, the more effective his abilities will be. So, a Paladin who is a Glorious Lord will have a greater advantage over one that is merely Admirable.

For once, this is one justification for postponing phase III yet again that I cannot argue with. As you know, Phase III is when IDOCs will resume on all inactive accounts regardless of friends refreshing them (or rather trying to). This should have been implemented a few months ago but various bugs delayed its activation. While they are apparently ready now to go ahead with it, they have decided for postpone it once more until the begin of the new year:

We know that many of you are waiting anxiously for phase 3 to start, and it is because this is such an important matter that I believe it would be a poor choice on our part to launch it over the holiday.

If we were to release it today, the changes would hit in the middle to the end of next week, just as the holiday for our customer support staff is beginning. In addition, it’s probably unfair to make these changes when people are not in their normal play schedule because of the break.

SunSword
Producer
Ultima Online

If you quit UO and feel like coming back, OSI will give you a free newbie account (including the free 30 days) to encourage you to do so. If you no longer have the CD, you can even download LBR for free from their site! A few select players were even given a free small tower on Lake Austin. I do not know if any of the said small towers are left but they were all prime location. Note that those small towers are not transferable.

As you may have noticed, a new link has been added on the top menu to our discussion boards. The Board has been divided in 5 forums: General Discussions, Rants & Spiels, Skills Training, Macroing & Ongoing Content.

On the General Discussion forum you may discuss everything and anything you wish, whether UO related or not, as well as anything related to this site.

The Rants & Spiels forum, as indicated by its name, allows you to get off your chest whatever has been gnawing at you (UO Related only please). The Rants & Spiel page under the Q&A section has also moved to that forum.

The Skills Training forum is so you may ask any question that has not been answered on the Skills essays in the training section, if you need extra explanation or simply seem to have hit a wall. You are welcomed and encouraged to share tricks and tips with other players.

The Macro forum, will replace the macro page I was going to make. The macros posted on that forum are UO Assist macros ONLY as this is the only program authorized by OSI. You may once again share your macros, post questions about using UOA, etc. A special thread will be locked at the top of that forum with all the best macros.

And finally, the Ongoing Content forum allows you to discuss any event currently taking place in game, scenario and upcoming expansions, in this case, AoS.

UOHoC Chat - Skeletal mounts, Tithing points: More insight on the upcoming AoS

Finally, we know where the skeletal mounts will come from. Here is an extract from the UOHoC Chat:

OaksOSI - Animating a dead horse will create a skeletal mount that may be ridden by the Necromancer.
OaksOSI - All animated creatures cannot be stabled, and they die slowly over time, so they are more of a temporary (and evil) ride for the Necromancer.
MrTact - You mean decay, right?
Lord-Xanthor - *Thomas* What are the advantadges of a skeletal mount as opposed to a normal horse?
OaksOSI - Not only do they look cool, but they require no taming for a Necromancer to acquire one. Simply kill a horse, and animate the corpse. It's easier than baking a pie.
OaksOSI - They are also tougher than a normal horse, but they are somewhat temporary because their bodies decay.
OaksOSI - And buffer horses make buffer skeletal mounts.

Do you think they could be any bigger teases? We've all been dying to see the map of Malas. They post one, and it's a tiny puny little thing. We've all tried to stretch it, but anyway you look at it, it's horrible. Oh well, it's still better than nothing I guess. Below, you can see the map provided on AoS official site. Click the picture to get a blown up version made by Paetzo of Tur on which I placed various locations based on what little information we have. Please note that these are speculations and not the official Malas map.

It is now official, Malas will be a facet of its own. Frankly, it reminds me of the movie Dark City. Malas is a land that floats somewhere in space, in some strange void (hence the wanderer of the void creature) that they describe as a dark sea of stars. I wonder if the star room had anything to do with it. Anyways, that landmass is made of 3 large main land areas connected by bridges and surrounded by the void. One of the landmass will crumble into smaller islands (are those the ones they are considering selling to players for rl cash?)

There will be 2 new towns: Luna, the city of Paladins and Umbra, the city of Necromancers. Luna's design will somewhat resemble that of Trinsic. The Paladins will officiate there as guards. Green lands outside the town gates will allow for house placement. Umbra doesn't seem to provide any form of guard protection nor house placement. The design will be more somber, sounds almost like blood dungeon. Both cities will have NPC vendors. It is safe to assume that NPC mages in Umbra will be selling the necro regs, and some NPC in Luna will sell the book of Chivalry.

The Grimswind ruins could very well give birth to 3rd city, maybe through a scenario.

The Crystal Fens can be found in various areas in Malas. I have a strong feeling Miners will be able to extract the Nox Crystals (necro reg) from those mineral formations. I would personally like to see them making it so an alchemist would be required to purify the crystals before they could be used for magic. But we'll find out soon enough.

Hanse's Hostel is an inn between the 2 cities since the journey between them is fairly long. I certainly this doesn't mean there will be no recall.

The Forgotten Pyramids. Was about time, darnit! After all, we were supposed to get the Doppleganger (egyptian looking creature) with LBR. I sure hope they will not only spawn in Malas or it will be highly unfair for those who paid for LBR and still cannot access those creatures since AoS will be required to access Malas.

Dungeon Doom: what has me drooling about it is the mention of new puzzles and quests. Woot! Some wandering spirits will give you quests to perform. When successful, you will get one of the new rares being introduced in the game. I just hope it's not the same quest over and over again. That would get old quick. I'm also very curious about the puzzle. The Khaldun puzzled chest, the Exodus Towers and the PBL puzzles all rocked. I can't wait for another permanent puzzle to be introduced in the game. I just wish they had somehow found a way to keep the Exodus Towers in game. You will also be able to get rezzed within the dungeon by an undisclosed creature. I wonder how high the price for it will be though.

There have been a lot of complaints, mainly from champ hunters about getting d-robed in town after dying at a champ spawn, then looted clean by other players (even though their corpse was blue) without the guards lifting a finger on the looters. As you well know, looting a blue corpse in Felucca is a criminal act and as such, should make you flag grey and get you insta guard-whacked in town. But a fix for the faction system introduced this bug which has been heavily exploited since Publish 16.

A fix for this bug is going live this morning on Great Lakes. If all goes well, it will go live on all other shards after tomorrow's morning. For the whole story, read the FYI.

A lot of people are wondering how housing placement will work after AoS since there will no longer be house deeds nor land surveying tools. The changes are very cool and will make our lives A LOT easier.

The House Placement Tool (HPT) will serve both functions. The HPT will work just like the land survey tool by allowing you to test house placement and place the house. The choices include the 20 static house designs currently available as well as dozens of customizable dirt plots to build your own house over. Once you find a valid location, you can choose to place the house or dirt plot immediately by confirming it on the menu of your HPT. The kicker is, the HPT displays your current bank balance, including gold and checks. If you do not have sufficient funds in gold pieces, the tool will deduct the necessary funds from checks you may have in your bankbox. The price of a dirt plot is quite cheaper than a already designed house. Just know that you will pay for each part you add to the house, so down the road, it may become A LOT more expensive to design your own.

If you chose to place a dirt plot rather than a predesigned house, you will access the house design interface by double-clicking the house sign. When designing your house, you will have a much better control over the level of security you wish to assign to house doors, secure containers and teleporters. With the a context menu option, you will be able to set them to be accessible by Anybody, Friends or higher, Co-Owners and Owners or Owners only. Roofs will only be flat. Customized houses can only have 3 floors and 1 roof.

This means, you could build a house with no stairs whatsoever, but only teleporters leading to the upper floors. Access to such floors being limited by the level of friendship to your house. 1st floor, all access. 2nd floor, friends only, 3rd floor owners only. You could have a floor reserved to co-owners and owners but with one room only accessible by owners. Same thing for containers. Just note that you will not be able to trap anyone inside your house by placing one way teleporters. Any player will be able to eject themselves from any house by clicking on themselves once and using the context menu.

The first 8 houses can be found in the download section of the Official AoS Site. The other 4 are models created by Wynterhart on Ianstorm.com

The subject has been discussed in more details on the following thread. (You need to be registered with the uo.com boards to have access).

A lot of people have been going on a frenzy selling their pagan (necro) regs in fear they will get nerfed when AoS comes out. It would indeed bite to have paid over 1 mil for a serpent's scale just to find it spawning at 3-5 gp per on NPC mages. Well, you may want to hold on to them for a while longer. There will be 5 necromancy reagents, we know 4 of them, 3 of which do not currently exist in game. Only one is left to speculate on.

You will notice on the above picture the reagents required for 2 of the necro spells: Nox Crystal, Daemon Blood, Batwing and Grave Dust. If you have visited the official AoS Website, you may have seen the crystal elemental. I suspect nox crystals will spawn on them. Daemon blood off daemons, grave dust (dug up from graves? we can dig up quest bones from graves since the Hag quest, so why not dust too?), as far as the batwing goes, will bats spawn or will we be getting the wings off mongbats and imps? Those of you who currently own the batwing pagan reg may want to unload it asap. For the last one, your guess is as good as mine.

In some ways, I hope necro regs will not spawn on NPCs but will be resources that need to be gathered, like ore and powder of translocation. Otherwise, get ready for some fierce NPC camping. Those of you who do not have 3D better get it up and running or you'll never get a chance to buy anything.

You got imagination? A keen eye for aesthetics? Love decorating houses and create new and innovative house add-ons with the most unexpected resources? This one is for you.

To enter, all you have to do is submit your 3 best house decoration tips along with a picture of a house you have decorated (be it your own or someone else's). 10 finalists will be retained out of all the submissions. On Wednesday, December 11, each finalist will be transferred temporary ownership of a house on a special test shard where they will have 7 days to decorate it in a xmas theme using any and all resources available on the shard.

With AoS, the combat system gets totally revamped. You will be able to execute deadly attack moves, such as mortally wound your adversary so that they cannot heal themselves for several moments, archers will be able to shoot arrows while on the move. Crafters will be able to make magical weapons of ice or fire that will deal double the damage to those lacking the resistance to those elements.

Damage Types
A fifth damage class will be added to the 4 existing one: Physical (melee), Poison, Fire, Energy, and Cold (new), all of which you can gain resistance in. Non-human creatures will have intrinsic resistances. For example, a Giant Ice Serpent may be practically immune to cold damage, but be very vulnerable to fire-based attacks. Humans (NPCs & players) will have some natural resistances, increased by their armor based on its type, the materials it is made of and its magical properties. The classic AR value is transformed into Physical Resistance, and provides benefit against Physical attacks.

New for Craftsmen
By making weapons from different materials, craftsmen will gain the ability to create weapons that deliver part of their damage as elemental effects. Armor will become more diverse as well; for example, insulating leather armor will provide superior protection versus energy and cold damage, but a heavy metal suit of platemail will still be the best defense against physical damage.

Special Moves (SM)
Warriors will gain the ability to use their Mana to perform special atacks with their weapons that can have a variety of unusual side-effects. (More details to come on new items that can increase a warrior's mana). Each weapon will have a unique combination of a primary and a secondary special move. At Expert level a warrior can perform the weapon's primary SM. At Master level, the fighter can execute the secondary SM, making them twice as deadly!

A new icon on the paperdoll will open a book that details each special move available to the warrior, based on his skill level and equipped weapon. You can drag the SM icon into the game window just like you do for spells. They can also be configured in macros. When activated, the SM icon highlights red, indicating the character is ready to perform the move. At the next opportunity, the SM is performed, and the icon returns to its un-highlighted state.

There are 13 special combat moves in total. Each different type of weapon in the game has a different combination of primary and secondary SM: Special Moves.

Spell Changes
To accommodate the new physical/elemental damage system, some spells will undergo large changes: Spell Changes.

Mages will also notice a change with their magic resistance skill, as it will now play a significant factor in the defense against spells like weaken, clumsy, feeblemind, curse, mana drain, paralyze, paralyze field, mana vampire, and various necromancy spells. However, rather than completely preventing these effects, the magic resistance skill will scale the effects down.

Archery
Bows and crossbows will become repairable by bowyers, just like blacksmiths repair other weapons! The bows will also be able to be given special item properties.

Even without holding a shield, if you have the Parrying skill, you will stand a chance to block the hit (only 50% of your parrying skills will be taken in consideration though to calculate your chances of blocking). When using a shield, if you successfully block a hit, you will sustain 0 damage as is that hit had never landed. At GM parry with a shield, you stand 30% chances of blocking. When blocking a special hit, you will sustain no damage but your foe will have lost mana.

Battle Focus will regenerate both Stamina and Mana, but slower than Meditation. This skill will not be affected by armor.

Item Insurance
You will have the ability to choose to keep certain items safe from being looted or stolen.

Players that die in the FD & LLs will lose any items that are not blessed or protected through Item Insurance.
Players who die in the FD & LLs will no longer be insta-teleported out of the dungeons and no longer have a timer before they can retun inside.
Ghosts will be able to enter these areas.
Thieves may steal any item they are eligible to steal that are not blessed or protected through Item Insurance.

New Status Window
The status window gets revamped to accommodate 3 new factors: Luck, Resistances, and Damage value for your character, taking into account the weapon you currently have equipped.

Over the past few weeks, a strange trance has been taking control of players throughout the land. This affliction has been known since the beginning of time but only seemed to affect a limited number of players. In the past months, this bacteria responsible for the illness seems to have mutated and is now spreading like wildfire.

Currently, GMs are the only ones able to rescue players from this terrible disease in Trammel. But a small group of devoted players have decided to lend a hand in Felucca in a desperate attempt to rescue the weak from the evil clutches of the Trance.

At last, they've reactivated the Xmas trees, so you can finally decorate to your heart's content. From the FYI:

"Holiday Trees are now activated on the Pacific shard only. Players on that shard who own them are once again able to place them in their houses during this December holiday season. We’ll be monitoring the shard and, barring any incidents, will be activating Holiday Trees on all other shards beginning with tomorrow’s maintenance schedules."

Still no words on Xmas gifts thought *sighs*. I just want at least a Xmas tree on LA. *crosses fingers*

I've been procrastinating a lot about that lately. Sorry *bends head down in shame*. But I have updated a few of the skills guides and still reviewing quite a few of them. Alchemy, Magery, Poisoning, Musicianship, Lockpicking and Wrestling have been revised. Two new skills have been added: Spirit Speak & Cooking. Provoke will be added before the end of the week.

Relax, it's not activated yet. But it might be soon. After yet another delay, Mr. Tact posted today that they are hoping the last coding should be completed sometime this week. So Phase III could very well be activated sometimes next week. This means, all inactive accounts will indeed lose their houses and true IDOCs will finally begin. If you haven't taken care of your housing issues, wth are you waiting for?

We are hard at work trying to get a new version of the housing server ready for deployment. As I mentioned in the last HoC chat, we are waiting on our engineering team (which is a separate team from UO development) to complete work on the housing database to make it more responsive and robust.

I am hopeful that the work can be completed this week. I will be making regular posts throughout the week to keep the playerbase apprised of this important rollout.

MrTact
Lead Server Engineer
Ultima Online

If anything, they are cuter than the toys included in the LBR box. Too bad they don't come with some AoS goodies. Get yours while they last... for $20.99

Last month, I brought you a list of some of the pathetic names that some of our fellow players have chosen to adorn their chars with. Further to a special request from Amanda Reckonwith, I put together an encore list of the lame. This time, just so you can view the stats and titles of those unsung heroes, the link to their respective MyUO paperdoll is provided.

I will no longer post rants on the main page, just a summary of it. You can read the full rant on the page dedicated to Rants and Spiels under Q&A, Rants.

In this week's update, we get a better look at the necromancer profession. Just like the paladin, the necromancer will be able to wield weapons without disrupting his spells. A new spellbook will be added to accommodate the 16 new spells to be introduced. Those spells can be used alone or in conjonction with others:

In order to use these evil spells, you will need to train the Necromancy skill. It works just like the Magery skill. The higher your skill, the more successful you will be at casting spells, each of them requiring a certain level of proficiency. Spirit Speak will grant added benefits to the Necromancer.

On top of allowing you to communicate with the dead, a GM Medium will automatically be heard by and hear the ghosts around him. You will also be able to heal wounds by channeling "spiritual energy" from the corpse an ennemy. If there are no corpses nearby, the energy channeled will be the medium's own energy, hence restoring a smaller amount of HP to his body. You can only feed off the spiritual energy of a corpse once. After its energy has been channeled, the corpse will turn a ghastly color, indicating it's been drained already.

I can't wait to see what the Paladin will have to offer, because right now, it looks like everyone and their brother will be a necromancer. Many of these spells offer countless new ways of griefing *sighs* but also countless ways of giving griefers and PKs a taste of their own medicine. This ought to be interesting. *drools at Vengeful Spirit and Animate Dead* The major upside is that these new spells will clearly spice up PvP and I believe they will also bring a better balance between mages and dexers. I can't wait for this to come out.

While waiting for the game's release, the annoying sound of music instruments played by bards in training will be replaced by the unholy whispers of the wannabe mediums. To all you future necromancers, start thinking what skills will get the shaft and how you intend to remodel your chars. The necromancer only really requires the Necromancy skill, so a 6x GM warrior or mage could just squeeze in Necromancy to make 7. Or you can ditch out another to also add Spirit Speak. IMHO, a combination of healing or magery, GH pots and the curse weapon spell really make spirit speak useless.

How many mana points will each spell require? How many control slots will each familiar count for? How many undeads can you raise with one casting? Does that number vary according to skill? Do they just naturally dispell after a while or do they endure until they eventually die (again)? Will the use of necromantic spells automatically affect your karma alignment (quite probably)? If you have positive karma and cast Wither, will it also damage you? When they say casting Horrific Beast will cost you your mind, does that mean you can no longer cast spells or meditate? While polymorphed in one of the 4 shapes, can we still wield weapons, cast spells and ride mounts? The downsides of morphing into a beast, a wraith or vampiric bat were stated, but what are those of the lich? When they say master of magic, does it mean that as a lich, our spells will be more potent? Or take less time to cast? or... what?

Argh, I hate teasers. They're supposed to give you something to chew on while you're waiting for the main course. But in fact, they just make you realize just how much you are starving.

If you own a 3+ years vet account and play Lake Austin, DO NOT BUY ETHEREALS!!! Apparently, there is a exploit currently being used on LA that allows the dupers to duplicate ethys on that account. Ethereal mounts all possess an ID code that is traceable. OSI is in the process of tracking down any of these dupe items. Be forwarned that whether you duped it yourself or bought a duped item, you account will be banned. But what's even worse, OSI will also ban any other accounts you may own that have the same billing information. So please, do not fall victim to these lamers.

Crazy Joe is currently running a thread on this subject on Stratics' forums. You may want to read further about it here.

We're still waiting for the official word from OSI. Until then, keep your accounts safe. Some people have already lost their accounts with castles and keeps. Don't be the next.

At last!!! WOOOHOOO!!! I'd do a couple of backflips but my old bones couldn't take it. Yes my friends, AoS official website has finally been released.

For more details, more screenshots, screensavers and what not, head over to the official AoS Website.

On a more positive note, the 0-damage bug HAS in fact been fixed. As I mentioned at the HoC chat, a long-standing UO live team member who has recently rejoined the server team (Krum) found it & fixed it. QA failed the fix (not because Krum’s a bad programmer, because there was a case he didn’t know about). He fixed it again, and then I dropped the ball about getting on QA to re-review it, which is why it seemed to be in limbo for a week or so there. As of this morning, however, they HAVE passed it, so the fix will be coming soon to a shard near you, probably next week sometime.

Mr Tact
Lead Server Engineer
Ultima Online

Lets hope that patch comes in REAL SOON, because my mages are not happy campers right now.

...we have been working hard to hit our first major milestone for AoS, which we have done. The code is in the hands of QA now, so the dev team will mostly be fixing bugs in the release from now until we ship. I'm not really prone to hyperbole, but I have to say that I think this is going to the best expansion to UO yet. There are some big-ticket features, which I can't really talk about yet (beyond repeating what you've already heard, so I'm not going to waste my breath). What I think is going to make this a really cool release is that there are several nice little touches, not big enough to qualify for a bullet point on the back of the box, but that will make the game easier to play. For example, house deeds will be going away, replaced by a "house placement tool" that will let you build whichever type of house you want (and automatically looking in a couple of different places for enough gold to build it). Then there's my personal favorite feature, which is item properties display. When you mouse over an object, you will get a tooltip-like display of the relevant properties of the item, such as durability, damage range for weapons, damage resistances for armor, number of items in a stack, and so on.

Mr Tact
Lead Server Engineer
Ultima Online

You can read further on both these topics on the uo.com boards (you need to be registered to have access)

Sorry for the delay in the latest news. I had been offline for the past few days (yeah, rl still exists *sighs*)

You guys can stop holding your breath, the beta testing will be private and whomever will participate in it has already been chosen. That being said, there are some hackers preying on people's impatience and inviting you to participate in a bogus AoS beta testing. Do not fall for it. If you receive an email on that subject, delete, delete, delete, delete... Do not open the attached file, it is a trojan.

Someone is sleeping on it. Like everything else, some unforeseen problems make it so we're not going to get it when it was due:

Well, I updated the post in the Read-Only FAQ forum to state that the marketing site for Age of Shadows was pushed back a few more weeks, so the official FAQ will be a little later than I thought.

That's the hard part of giving estimates on deadlines - schedules are always subject to change, and it's never fun to post a delay. It's coming, though - with screenshots, lots of FAQ questions, and more!

Cynthe
Community Manager
ORIGIN Systems

For those of you who cannot attend the tournament (or simply lag too much), as promised, OSI has begun posting short videos of the final and semi-final matches for each shard. You will need Real Player to be able to view them. You can download each movie by selecting the appropriate shard at the top of the page. Note that Atlantic and Sonoma do not have movies as they had not implemented the service yet at the time they were held.

I knew it wouldn't be long before that guy showed up. Was kinda strange that they would offer a tamer template and not a bard. Well, there you have it. If you wish to have a bard and would rather for OSI to do the work for you, you can now do it for $29.99. Get your credit card ready.