Grab Bag - June 23, 2006

Don't you think I'm funny? Eh? Don't you? Fine, I'm not funny. Just read the column:


Did you change your mind about EA? I thought I saw someone from Mythic saying that there was no EA deal.

You did see something like that. That was last February/March, right? At the time, a very early set of discussion had just ended with us saying, basically, no thanks. Since the entire Camelot player base is no doubt sick of hearing from me on the topic, this is a quote sent over to Warcry when they asked Mark Jacobs this question: "In terms of changing our mind, it was a matter of EA and Mythic reaching a place where both sides felt comfortable about the deal and both sides understood how we would be able to work together in the present and the future. At no time did either Mythic or EA say to each other "Get out and don't come back!" but rather, both companies never had a "meeting of the minds" as it were. So after lots of discussions, conversations, tough but fair negotiations, we all agreed on how we were going to build a great future together and closed the deal."

How do I know you're not going to shut down Camelot?

Because I said so. Okay, I know you want to hear it from someone besides me. We're going to be announcing our fall expansion pack next month (we pushed it off because we did not want something so important to us to be buried in the wake of the EA announcement… and frankly, we're still discussing how EA is going to HELP us with that expansion), and we're going to announce more details of our Camelot Round Table within the next week or two. But don't just take my word for it. Mark Jacobs, who still runs this place, said that "[Camelot] is not in any danger of being shut down."

When the deal goes through in 2007…

I've seen a lot of questions that start this way. Y'all, the way companies do "fiscal year" is sort of bizarre. You'll have to take it on faith that the second quarter of fiscal 2007 is (for EA, at least) this summer.

Why can't I, as a guild officer, use /gc autoremove on the characters of a player who quit the game and canceled his account? He was a rank zero.

We designed the system so rank zero characters are supreme. If you could kick out a rank zero, the rank would not be surpreme! I am familiar with all the things that can go horribly wrong with a rank zero character that belongs to a human who has gone crazy, mean, or just AWOL. But to be a rank zero must have meaning.

(Insert question here about the newfangled quest journal and the custom UIs)

Wince. Sorry about that, guys. We've been doing a lot of behind the scenes stuff for the quest system as a whole, and that new in-game journal is part of that. It was on the "to do" list for our programmers, but not yet on the "to document" list. IMO, I think the programmers finished the first draft of the journal ahead of schedule :) It shouldn't have gone live yet, and I apologize. There are a couple of bugs with the way older quests are displayed, and we're working on that. The new journal is also missing the capability to remove old quests, and that has been brought to the producer's attention. Finally, I know this messed up a bunch of custom UIs, and I'm really sorry about that - I'm told I will have the information you need on Monday.

You should make a note somewhere in game context help, or on a patch note, that the /gc autopromote [name] [rank] is case sensitive on the name, and that the forced capitalization of the first letter does not count. I.e.:

/gc promote John 4 failed for me, but

/gc promote john 4 worked

Both characters appear in game with first letters in the name capitalized. This may cause some confusion if it is not documented, explained, or desensitized. Can I have a cookie?

You are hereby rewarded one cookie for finding a bug. The Lord of the Underworld says: "Thanks! Found the bug and it should be fixed in the next live update. Basically you have to type all character names for these commands in all lower case for now (i.e. 'bob' works, but 'Bob' doesn't)." This is not a long term problem - it will be fixed either by next Tuesday or next Thursday. I'll keep you posted.

Did you nerf necros? Before 1.84, I still got item bonuses even when the item was at 70% con. Now I don't.

Actually, if you look really closely at your stats, you are still getting the bonuses. There is a display bug that is only affecting you guys, and it will be fixed next week. In the meantime, you only need to repair the items if you really, really feel like it - rest assured that the item bonuses are being applied. Sorry for the scare.

What's "prime time" to you? We're all in different time zones :)

When I say prime time, I mean western hemisphere, and I mean 6:00 PM to 2:00 AM EDT. That is when the vast majority of our players are logged in - a chart of that time period looks a bit like a bell curve, as it starts with east coasters getting home from school or work, and ends with the west coasters going to bed.

***

Our Moderately Evil Overlord, Walt, is going to be doing a short interview soon with the Camelot Vault on the subject of the recent drama and the future of Camelot, be looking for it.

Got an email from a player asking when we were going to add the Valkyrie's new spell line to the Herald spell library. That confused us… because we'd already done it. The Herald problem has been fixed, and all existing spell lines now display.

The announcements for the upcoming Camelot Vegas Roundtable and the fall expansion pack have been written! You should see the former next week, and the latter the second week of July. Well, assuming my legendary jinxing powers didn't kick in just now.

I surely do wish I had more information for everyone about the EA thing, but everything I know, I've put here on the Herald for you. Don't worry so much, y'all. Come to an event, either a road trip or the full-blown Vegas party - see us Mythic people in person if you don't believe a bunch of words on a web page. Besides, I enjoy the heck out of meeting fellow players. Even the guy with the binder, he's a handsome guy with a great hat ;)

Have a good weekend, people.