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11:30 PM ORIGIN HAS RESTORED MY SHAME

Got this from uo.com. Dammit, the first bug I ever got posted on Dr. TwisTer's and they go and fix it!

After Siege Perilous returns from its 5am CST scheduled maintenance on Saturday, August 14, the following changes will be implemented:

• You will no longer be able to mark any runes in a dungeon.
• You will not able to gate into or out of a dungeon, even with a previously marked dungeon rune.
• It will not be possible to place boats in a dungeon.
• Any boats currently in a dungeon will be deleted automatically after the maintenance.

By the way this will be the last update until I return from Austin Monday. Remember that the latest event of Lumapalooza, the UOSS Celebrity Chat, is Monday, so you can all poke holes in my persona and make fun of my Southern accent. I pledge to answer all questions, even the weird ones. However, I won't mention anything about the book, record and movie deals I'm working on because it would bother Jinx.

4:30 PM YOU KNOW WHO WINS EVERY WAR? THE ARMS DEALERS!

Well, Siege Perilous is seeing its first war, and, no doubt to the surprise of many, it doesn't involve anyone going OoooOoooOOOoo... yet, anyway.

Full disclosure: just for the three of you who don't already know, I am, in UO, a member of the Temple of Mondain guild. Our first activity as a guild on SP was in making a GM Smith, Mondain's Hand, based in Minoc. This was a cooperative effort, and with 20 miners and 4 people playing the smith character full time, we managed to have the first GM smith on Siege. Scroll down a ways and you can see me bragging about it.

Shortly thereafter others also achieved GM Smith, including Adrick out of Britain and Batlin (who smiths as Mr. Craftsman), also out of Minoc. Batlin immediately won the Adrick Award (given for pissing everyone off on CoB) by posting that well, he was the first GM Smith who actually worked at it. This failed to amuse those other GM smiths who managed to work through tens of thousands of ingots simply by smiling a lot and waving or something.

Not content with that, he then posted his price list, which severely undercut most other smiths to the point of idiocy. Adrick's immediate reaction (after having the same reaction as everyone else, namely "WTF Man...?") was to accept the very reasonably priced gauntlet thrown down in front of him. After a few pleasant words, Batlin threatened to have Adrick's miners killed. He also bitched about Mondain's Hand not having a life (apparently not realizing that MH was a guild's cooperative effort).

Meanwhile, Batlin's price war was having a cascading effect, as others marked their prices down to stay competitive. Adrick was unhappy about this, and pleaded with the other smiths to see reason. Batlin, being the mature competitor that he is, responded by calling Adrick a big baby. They exchanged views further and then went off to their respective corners. Meanwhile, Basil, who has apparently made it his life's unceasing mission to whine about our guild, continued in his quest.

The price war continued, as Batlin dropped his unreal prices even further. (Any lower and he would be paying players to accept his goods.) He was cheered by some, but Adrick's response was basically "if you want to provide smithed items at below market value, I'll buy them off of you and make a profit reselling them."

Batlin thought this was fairly dirty pool (Imagine! People actually buying things he offered! The horror!) and posted a complaint about it. Adrick laughed, and other enterprising merchants decided to start profiting from the war. Adrick reiterated his position, and Batlin entrenched himself and announced that he was taking countermeasures against Adrick's profiteering.

Meanwhile, the secret masters of Siege Perilous watch, and laugh.

(This evening's entertainment brought to you by those fine folks at COB Discussions.)

1:30 PM HEAR ME. SEE ME. TOUCH ME. FEEL ME.

Fear sent in this, which may be of interest to two or three of you:

An Audio Interview with Lum the Mad has been released!

Here he is in all of his glory! Lum the Mad pays a visit to the BV Studios. Fear and Lum discuss several topics including EQ, UO, and Siege Perilous. Make sure you listen to this show for it is the last time we will be able to speak to Lum as a "regular" personality. ;)

Please Note: You must have Free RealPlayer G2 to listen to the Audio Show!

Click to listen to Episode 37, the Interview with Lum the Mad!

Battle Vortex is also holding a contest for 1 free registered version of UO Assist by TugSoft Inc.

Details about the contest are available on the same page as the Interview with Lum, so come on down!

10:30 PM MY OWN PRIVATE SHAME

Ordinarily I don't talk about bugs (the TwisTer PosSe does that for us) but I found this of interest. I mean, if this is true, surely the GMs would notice these big-ass ships in the middle of Shame in between hunting down evil macroers. If anyone has any confirmation or commentary about the below give me a shout.

Thought you might be interested in this since you play SP legit, gms seem to not care about fixing this major loophole in the no gating to/from dungeons rule of SP.

1. Boats aren't supposed to be placed in dungeons, they were all deleted out of the dungeons on regular shards around the same time houses in dungeons were removed; yet there are 3-4 ships in shame on SP.

2. You aren't supposed to be gate from dungeons on SP, yet you can gate from a boat in the dungeon.

3. The guys who own the boats in shame have led all the earth elementals and scorpions to right next to the inside of the entrance of the dungeon, and all the orcs and orc mages to the outside of the entrance, preventing everyone else from getting in.

Now they have a private dungeon, and don't have to walk thier gold out like everyone else, they gate to town from level 3

3:30 PM YOU LIKE THOSE RED HEALERS ON SIEGE? THAT'S ALL US, BABY

The following is a paid political announcement from the Temple of Mondain LLC;

(note: the website is accessible here in case the domain name hasn't fired off yet)

3:00 PM ACT NOW AND WE'LL THROW IN A RARE BLACK PEARL ABSOLUTELY FREE!

If you're on Great Lakes, you should check out this eBay auction. I think you'll agree, it's truly a one of a kind item being offered.

2:30 PM IN RELATED NEWS, WORLD ENDS

Part Three of the Broken Mirrors series has been posted.

11:30 AM LUM REVEALED TO BE WORTHLESS SLACKER, CELEBRITY

My commitment to you, the Loyal Viewer - the end of the Broken Mirror series will be posted in time for my leaving this weekend so you have something to read.

11:30 AM ALL SERVERS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME SERVERS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

Got this report in the mail from someone still playing EQ:

I was playing on Vallon Zek last night and died. My respawn point was in Misty Thicket and that zone was down at the time so I got booted out of the game. While waiting for the zone to come back up I thought I'd check out the tech support chat room to let someone know about the zone being down. Nobody was there, so I went to the Vallon Zek chat room thinking others with a similar plight would be there. Nothing. Since Xegony was right next to Vallon Zek I thought I'd check there just for the hell of it.

The room was full and there was a GM and a guide there. GM-Arandiel, I believe. It appeared to be some sort of forum and they were discussing game issues and other stuff and it was being moderated by the GM. It ended shortly but before the GM left, he said that the Xegony server was the only one holding these meetings for players and that there would be another one next week.

Lots of questions come to mind. Is this Verant sanctioned? If so, why only Xegony? If they were going to do something like this you would think they would do it for all the servers and not just one.

I've seen similar impromptu meetings before, including one attended by Brad McQuaid and John Smedley during the Woop-There-It-Went Tallon Zek fiasco. These are always held in the braindamaged EQ chat client which (convienently enough) has no logging features, so no one can ever record the firm, FIRM promises made to fix things.