Midgard had a nice power relic, for a while... the fact that a Midgard group found a relic just lying around in Emain Macha was kind of suspicious, and the next day rumours were confirmed. Someone had used a cheat to remove the relic from the Hibernian shrine. The relic has been returned and the offenders have been banned, hopefully returning things back to normal. See also the official GOA post on their website.

Yesterday also meant the end of an era: BarrysWorld/GAME.net closed all their forums and as such also their English DAoC community forums. For a while now a replacement has been available in the form of FreddysHouse. I expect that community will quickly grow now that BarrysWorld has closed their doors.

Be sure to check the latest GOA Friday news for an update about the soon coming 1.65 patch and Trials of Atlantis (the next paid expansion). It even boasts a player's tip that actually tought me something :)

Lasty, some belated "gratz" for Susanoo (Skeggi) on reaching level 50! If anyone has a genious Critblade template lying around, he might be interested ;)

Some maintenance on the entire game platform is scheduled for tomorrow (wednesday the 21st). As a result, the game servers will be unreachable between approximately 8am GMT until 1pm GMT.

See the official announcement for more information.

Update: Excalibur was back up at 12:54 GMT, nicely on schedule :)

Some news about the recent Excalibur problems:
GOA has identified a subtle hardware error in the network Excalibur has been using since shortly before Christmas, which caused a multiple zonecrash last night and possibly also (some) of the other crashes.

As of 15:20 CET, Excalibur is therefore down for a short hardware maintenance to hopefully fix these kinds of problems.

Original news item

Since the last news post Excalibur has crashed a couple more times. GOA is investigating the situation and trying to up with a solution, but in the meantime action has been taken to avoid long downtimes of the server.

On to guild matters: Poxe (Nannie) has received his promotion to Emissary today. Congratulations and welcome :)
There are several other new members that I have failed to mention in the news so far: Shockwave, Nachael and Dreggel. I haven't met you all yet, but I look forward to getting to know you ;)

Once again, Excalibur is having problems. For the second time this night (it's 1:20 AM at the time of writing) the server is down.

Apparently whatever problem has been causing the downtime has been underestimated. I hope it gets fixed soon ;)

As of about 10 AM this morning Excalibur is back up and English players have had their subscriptions extended a day to compensate for the downtime.

Just a quick update: at the moment Excalibur is down (since last night), and unfortunately since it's weekend we're not getting any indication from GOA when it might be back up.
It's possible the server won't be back before monday. In the meantime, have a nice weekend all, I suggest you spend this time to do something other than DAoC :)

I hope you've all had a nice Christmas and a good new year's eve, best wishes for 2004!