Some changes amongst the powers that be: after over 2 years at GOA, Kemor has moved on to new challenges.
For most players GMs are rather behind the scenes most of the time, but as a member of the Eyes & Ears team I can say he has been doing a great job during his time, and he will be missed. /salute Kemor.

Fear not however, reinforcements have arrived, in the form of Pilote and Requiel. Pilote has been in the Customer Support department for some time now, Requiel is a new face in GOA offices but has been playing (mostly on Prydwen) for 2 years now. They will not be bound to 1 specific server, but will have responsibility on all the English servers, wherever they are needed.

Prydwen.net Kemor thread

As you can see, tiwaz.org is back online after almost a full day of downtime.
Hardware failure of the webserver followed by software unable to properly restore the system once it was restored were the cause of this. Unfortunately the RAID controller managed to corrupt data on both disk of the RAID1 array used, and errors were made in the backup procedure of the hosting company, resulting in a somewhat out of date website from my own backups.

Things added and changed recently (like the Master Level info for each character) are momentarily unavailable, but hopefully they will be back soon. I hate doing things twice *sigh*
Fortunately no character data, forum posts, news items or e-mail were lost in all this, so most things on the website are back to normal.

See you all back in game once I'm sure everything is as it should be :)

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.