First of all, we have a new member since yesterday: Sophocles. He's been playing on US servers for some time now, but finally decided to give GOA a try and hopefully get some more primetime action :)

Then there's of course the release of Trials of Atlantis and 1.67 tomorrow. The servers will be coming down at 6am GMT and are expected to be back up with the new version by the end of the afternoon.
Because of the TOA release the official DAoC Europe website will be transformed into a 'lite' version of itself, in order to be able to handle all the expansion activation requests better (you'll know why if you remember the Shrouded Isles release day).
Be sure to read all about it in the official article on the Camelot Europe website (local copy).

If you want to start planning around the new TOA features and items, be sure to read the 1.68 patch notes, as it brings a lot of balance changes you will be confronted with when that patch hits the European servers.

More? Yes, more.. Congratulations on level 50 to Falldorn and Lequin (Ralgedi) :) Kraig managed to get to Grandmaster Armorer (900 skill) as well yesterday, also a noteworthy achievement :)

Trials of Atlantis is coming very close now. The latest tests on Gorre are looking pretty good, so I expect a reasonably fluent patching to 1.67 on Wednesday.

Some interesting news today on the Dark Age of Camelot front. First of all, the Friday News, mostly on the subject of the upcoming Trials of Atlantis expansion (on the 25th of February), be sure to check it out.

Mythic has also released some new details about the transportation system in the upcoming free New Frontiers expansion. This is a while away yet especially for European players, but worth checking out nonetheless.

That's it for now, stay tuned :)

Yesterday both Ambush (Jerelyn) and Lyseia (Shaniah) reached level 50, for the third and sixth (!) time respectively. Congratulations both :)

A new member joined our ranks yesterday as well in the form of Groshdar, another of Falldorn's friends. Speaking of which, Storka is taking a little break from DAoC to concentrate on school stuff, see his post of the forum.

Update: If you were planning on staying up late tonight, there will be some maintenance on the Opentransit network somewhere between midnight and 7am tomorrow. Expected duration is 20 minutes, during which DAoC Europe servers (amongst other things) will be unreachable. (see also the official GOA announcement)

Congratulations to Storka on reaching level 50, pretty fast levelling there! Let us know if you need help doing your high level epic quests, I haven't heard you talk about them yet :)
Thorunn, the shared buffbot of Shaniah, Skeggi and I also dinged level 50 last sunday in a nice guildgroup in Modernagrav. I hope you all had as much fun there as I did :)

A few noteworthy accomplishments from our members:
First of all, congratulations to Skeggi on reaching realm rank 5! Nice end sprint with over 100,000 LWRP :)
Dreggel has gone through the Emissary promotion procedure and is from now on a full fletched member. Welcome, and keep up the good work on the levelling :)

Be sure to check this week's friday news from GOA, and if you're into such things the latest grab bag from the Camelot Herald :)

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 ;)