Q: Autopromoter?

A: I am SO FREAKING EXCITED to tell you we have been testing the new autopromoter. We will bring it live next week if all goes according to plan.

Oh, my goodness, I cannot tell you how excited. Five years old at Chuck E. Cheese excited. Hell, my current age at a pool hall excited.

Q: The autoremove process does not seem to be working properly.

A: It's not. I had it lower on the priority list than fixing the Herald stats and the autopromoter, and the Lord of the Underworld (see below) is only one guy. These things are not simple to fix, being as they interact with the actual game servers and update frequently.

Let's just say autoremove had the potential to do very bad things to characters. If the fix is simple, we'll have the feature back in for 1.84. If not… well, I'll keep you posted.

Q: I keep trying to put in a contact email/site link for my guild's display on the Herald. In game, it seems to enter in just fine, but on the Herald, it says no email/site entered. The heck is the problem?

A: Your email address/site contains the letters "XXX" and our Herald filters think you're trying to put in porn. Sorry about that - the system isn't set up to allow exceptions. Boy, we learned THAT one the hard way.

Q: I stumbled upon some chars that had actually negative RPs in the last week ... how can that be? Is there anyway you can lose RPs ? The characters I looked into are from ABC cluster and here are some names (abc, xyz).

A: You rock like a… big crazy thing that can be rocked. Thank you for providing the server and names - that enabled us to instantly get to the problem. Here, from the Lord of the Underworld, who has been doing his valiant best to clean up the Herald stats code and streamline everything over the last month:

"After adding the new daily statistics last week it turned out the calculation for pvp kills was inaccurate.  The correction Tuesday caused the kills count to jump - in some cases it jumped up, in some cases down.  It should clear through the weekly stats by the beginning of next week.  This doesn't affect actual pvp deaths or RPs."

Q: Soandso on thus and such a server is macroing and I'm sure of it.

A: Appeal in game, and don't expect an answer because we don't discuss account action with anyone but the holder of that account. That's why I stripped all identifying information from the question, but the particular fellow mentioned in the original email got nailed for macroing and banned.

As a side note - this kind of illustrates why I actually don't really like making mass banning announcements. I know it's important for you to know that we do it, especially when the loser quotient has been high. But at the same time, I think our daily rounds of whack-a-weasel do more good than the high profile napalm attacks. Just because I don't post "today we pruned a diseased leaf to keep the whole garden clean" doesn't mean it doesn't happen. The gentleman who wrote the original email told me that he didn't think we banned people except in the great big waves, and that's just not so.

Q: Help me find something! It's a ring called the "Tiny Living Snake" and according to this guide I read, it's associated with a wandering skogsfru person out in Faraheim called "Pathfinder Folar".

I do know that it's not a quest item, just a drop.

Haven't seen it for sale anywhere, haven't even seen it drop, have killed the mob several times.

The stats on the ring are 3 Left Axe 3 Parry 48 hits and 18 quickness, 10 charges of 75 str/con decrease.

A: Thanks for providing all the details needed to find you the answer. (Alert readers are indeed sensing a theme.) The Content Queen says: "The ring does still drop by a named mob, but not the one he listed.  It is a rare drop from Dalicren in Faraheim."

Q: According to the 1.81 patch notes:

The Belt of Good Fortune and Rucksack of Eternal Greed now grant a 3% bonus to coin gained.

But this only works if you are the player picking up the loot.  If the group leader has /autoloot on, this belt does not grant you the additional 3% coin (assuming you are not the group leader).  Is this a bug, or as intended?

A: Bug. Working on it, watch for patch notes. I apologize for the annoyance.

Q: I've been trying to make some chain circlets for my shaman. I've heard that it's harder to get MP circlets than regular hats. Is this the case?

A: That's an urban legend - we checked into this, and I'm afraid you just had a dreadful run of luck. As regular readers know, our game has true random functions. No matter how many failures you have, your odds of success each time are exactly the same. If you flip a coin a thousand times, you'll get some crazy runs of all tails.

 ***

AAAAAAAAAAAGH. I need a slushie. Sorry for the quiet this week, y'all. It's that time of year - E3 time. I'm preparing to head off for a week in the bowels of the Los Angeles convention center.

We actually won't be releasing a lot of Camelot information. We have a whole release plan for later this summer to show you the fall expansion pack. It'll be a download, like Darkness Rising, and no system upgrade will be needed on your part. More than that will have to wait until June, when all the sound and fury from the trade show finally calms down.

Missy will be remaining here to hold down the fort, along with most of the company. Her birthday is on Wednesday, so be extra nice to her then :)

As I mentioned above, we're bringing back the autopromoter, or as I like to call it, the heart paddles for old guilds. If there are ANY problems next week, please email me. I won't be answering email from LA, but I will be forwarding mail to the people who can solve the problems.

Have a great weekend, and I'll see you Monday.