Dark Age Of Camelot: The Grab Bag Returns From Vacation!

Article can be found here!

It's baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack:

Q: New Frontiers question: Can you siege keeps and other things on shore from your ship? Or can you only attack other ships?

A: Anything that can take damage from a siege weapon can be attacked from a ship, if you're in range. Attacking other ships is fun, especially when you sink them and all the sailors have to dog paddle on the surface of the water. I expect some great screenshots, soon. Anyway, we had the beachfront keeps in mind when we had a mental image of ship-mounted siege weaponry, so have at it.

Q: Can you restore my character? My account was in enemy hands for a time and I recently got it back. But some of my favorite characters were deleted. Now I'm wondering, is it possible for Mythic to reset my account to before they were deleted? Or give me back my friar, if not all the characters I had? If it is possible, I was wondering who I would need to contact about it. Thank you in advance.

A: Ouch. I'm glad your account is back in your hands. I hope you changed your password, and called technical support to change your secret word as well.

There is a chance we can get your old character back, but there's no guarantee. It is possible, not certain, that the characters you want restored still exist in backups. Every character deleted, created, or played since a character was deleted decreased the chance of an old back up, however - so don't create anything new, definitely don't delete anything further, and send in an appeal right away. Be aware that the oldest backups may be naked, with no gear or cash.

If the CSR CAN restore your character, he or she will do so. They empathize with things like this. If they can't, believe me, they wish they could, but no one in CS can restore files that have been overwritten.

Q: Just was curious, after a busy week of RvRing, I couldn't help notice that my wizard had disappeared from the weekly charts. With my score, I should have been up in the top three or four. Does this happen often? Not a big deal, but was curious. The overall total is correct. What happened to the "last seven days" ranking?

A: I should have posted yesterday, and I apologize. The database that keeps track of the seven day totals is supposed to delete numbers older than a week. That makes sense, since the formulas that calculate the numbers for display only use the last seven days of figures. Something went screwy with the database, however, and the old numbers weren't being deleted. THAT made the machine slower than snot, and the updates were falling behind/taking too long to load. We've fixed the problem, we hope, but we had to completely reset the database yesterday afternoon. Sorry about that.

Q: I have heard a lot of questions and speculation about the Quickness stat, so was wondering if I could get a true answer in the Grab Bag?

We know that the higher your Quickness is, the faster your swing speed is. However, does this reduce "frontload" damage? If so, could you give us a good explanation on how this works? Also, do Realm Abilities such as "Mastery of Arms" and ToA bonuses to melee speed do the same?

A: I went to the Code Warrior for the answer to this one. "If I understand "frontload" damage correctly, he's asking about the correlation between DPS and actual speed - slow weapons hitting slower but for more damage. Quickness does affect this; it can reduce the weapon's speed by up to 40%, and any Quickness over 250 has no effect. Mastery of Arms and TOA bonuses also reduce weapon speed by what's listed in their delve.

"Increasing your Quickness decreases your swing time - style damage, however, is based on your swing time. Therefore by decreasing your swing time, you also decrease your style damage, thus reducing frontloading. Over time, increasing your swing speed adds more damage because the non-style damage comes faster while the style damage remains the same, however each individual hit will do less damage."

Q: Another New Frontiers question: In the 1.70T patch notes it talks about players earning exp for taking the center keep in the battle grounds. The note is below...

Battlegrounds

- Experience rewards have been added which will be granted upon the successful keep capture in the battlegrounds from levels 1-44. Upon successfully killing the Keep Lord/Jarl/Chieftain, every eligible player inside the keep region will be awarded approximately 25% of their level in experience. This experience reward can be earned once per level for every level, up to level 44.

I have a few questions about this.

1) Is the formula based Current Lvl * 25% = exp earned or is it current exp * 25% = exp earned?

2) The exp can be earned once per lvl for every lvl up to 44. Does this include lvl 44?

3) is this exp bonus available for the mini dings from lvl 40-44?

A: From the Moderately Evil Overlord:

"1. The experience is equal to 25% of the current level's experience. In other words, 2.5 "bubbles."

"2. Yes.

"3. No, once per level."

Q: What is the strongroom? Inside the Relic Keep there is a door that says strongroom door. When you click on it, it says "The door is locked. Use a key to open it." Where do I get a key, and what's inside?"

A: Ah, you've found a bit of vestigial design. We built a storeroom into the keeps, in case we wanted to have more treasures and so on for quests. That was during the art stage, when we're actually building the world objects. By the time the objects got to the content team, we'd changed our minds and decided that the relic keeps should only have relics in them.

And now, of course, we're beta testing relic temples - lovely open air things you can only reach if you've conquered enough territory to open the gates AND mounted a defensive force to keep away last ditch defenders... so the strongroom will be gone soon.

Q: How often can I copy to Pendragon? I've copied one of my characters over, but I'd also like to copy over my other 50.

A: It's once per account per patch, normally. 1.70 is special, though, and we've reset the copier a whole bunch of times. We'll probably do it again next week at some point.

Q: I've noticed that quite often the time of day changes (day to night or vice versa) when zoning between the capital city and the cities surrounding it. What's up with that? Are the capitals so huge they span multiple time zones? Or is there an evil spell afoot?

A: The evil spell of the demon Server Sync. ;) The capital city is on one machine, and the zone outside is another. I've grossly oversimplified, of course, but that's the basic issue at hand. We try to keep them close in time, of course, since lots of people like to shop or train while they wait for a night spawn or what have you, but keeping them perfectly synced up is one of those things that would take resources we've currently allocated to other things (like New Frontiers, grin).

***

As regulars to the Community section of the Herald already know, along with regulars to the Vault message boards, it wasn't Elvis that left the building - it was our Miss Julie. We wish her the very best as she leaves to pursue other opportunities.

Don't cry, Vault regulars, she will be replaced. Meanwhile, several of us (including the content producer, the executive producer, and me) will continue to lurk as we always have, looking for thoughtful posts and feedback.

I've got to keep this short. I need to go home and wash my favorite Mythic t-shirt and pull out my dancing shoes (the ones that make me SUPER TALL; you know, 5'6"), because I'm off to Toronto, Ontario, Canada. There's a big honking player gathering going on, and since it'll be a few months before we have one of our own, I can't resist the chance to meet the crazy northerners. Neither can Mythic's intrepid marketing princess, Becky, who will be there as well. So if you see two Virginia blossoms, used to eighty five degrees of summer sun, out on John Street trying to decide if 17 degrees "C" is hot or cold, give us some pity. Metric system, bah.

There's yet another player planned gathering the FOLLOWING weekend near here in College Park, Maryland, for those loony Percivalians. Man, you guys just don't stop partying. I blame Kardinal and Danyeel.

Attention, Camelot loving Hawaiians - when's your gathering?!

Have a great weekend, gang. If you're staying in the United States to enjoy your three day weekend, remember, be safe behind the wheel.