Okay. First of all, I want to say my deepest apologies, simple mistakes were made by myself when I decided on my own to redesign the Christmas present stuff. Bugs were introduced, a small time warp caused by my mistake in one script and a potential for another due to another mistake, we averted that one. Second, I can not wait for Christmas to be over, barring any hiccups it should end on the 31st of December, I do believe I am using GMT for the time, so be sure to login before that and don't wait til the last minute.
Here is the scoop.
First, candy cane of skill gain:
I missed a cprop because well to be honest I did not really look at the old script all that much other then to find out what was being done when a candy cane was created but I did not go down the list to examine the different ones because I figured they, like the United States' Declaration of Independence says, "are all created equal", this turned out to be false, the skill gain ring was originally created with a secondary property on it denoting the ability to use it for heighten skills. Why this was ever even something to be toggled on or off I don't know but this was and has been fixed.
Now onto the more serious matter. It came to my attention that the present could be used by anyone regardless of who received it. I was fine with this, I was cool with it and it turns out Blckfire was as well if it stayed within normal playing bounds, you sell it off to a friend, give it to another of your characters but it soon became apparent while I was stalking and spying on some of you that one of you had discovered a loophole. I was already in a bit of a somber mood because I had made yet another simple mistake but the fact that this was being abused by this one player at the scale it was being abused, disappointed me greatly in the trust I had hoped to have with the player base. I trust most of you I really do but I could not just let this go. I was put into a bind as to what to do and in fact when I confronted the player and here is a bit of public shaming, you may know him as
Theo on automap chat, the in game conversation went as follows, I revealed myself and started the short conversation as follows:
Me: "Are you really going to make me do this?"
Theo: "That's an odd question"
Me: "It's only odd because you know what I am talking about."
Theo: "I don't know what to tell ya mate."
I stood there just gobsmacked, he icq'd me with literally a "Yo" and I did not respond for probably a minute, I was shocked but just disappointed, I stood in this guys corner for another offense and felt like I was being stabbed in the back. After probably a few minutes of just silence, I replied something like "7 days" and jailed him for 7 days. I went through his house and found a cache of gifts he had been muling. I then hopped off and came back an hour later and figured I better run through the banks of these characters too where i found a cache of equal size in one of his characters banks. At this point I took it upon myself to indiscriminately begin dropping skills of his characters, I have not finished reviewing his characters skills and at this point don't care if they are legit gains or not so will likely hit some legit skills he actually trained but I don't really care if he doesn't mind taking great liberties in what was obviously a bug. I had multiple people report it to me, he was not one.
Just as a public notice, this is it for him, if something even remotely fishy happens again with him and his account, I was really contemplating whether a warp should happen because of these actions and I hope it was isolated to this one person, if it is discovered that it is not reprisals will come to those who felt the need to abuse this in similar fashion, the hammer falls and the pieces will lay where they fall.
If I am brave enough next year maybe I might change it from character bound to at least account bound with improved checks to check character age instead of the current check to avoid this kind of abuse.
I know you guys have had kind of a crappy two years and I am trying to remedy this, yes unfortunately there have been setbacks in the last week, but we plan on making good on the huge time warp that occurred with a couple double gain weekends. Blckfire mentioned them again yesterday I believe and I suggested pushing them off til after the new year since family will likely take up people's time more than Ultima will, though some of you I don't know, some appear to be antisocial scruffians
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That was my wasted night. Wanted you all to know the situation, presents fixed hence the two restarts earlier and the candy cane of skill fixed, though I don't know why you guys would want that, this is Pang bro, hard core, no freebies.
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Merry Christmas or my preference, Happy Christmas and please, no happy holidays, it is Christmas, generic happy holidays could pertain to Easter, Halloween, the Communist Labor Day, the really Communist May Day, Arbor day for you Candanavians, this is Christmas not just some generic holiday.
P.S. - Pete will be fixed for next year to respond to Merry Christmas for all you who were mad at me for not using Merry Christmas as the trigger word, Pete is different, his trigger words aren't the same as the bog standard Millennial's trigger words.
P.S. 2 - You get a cigar if you know why I chose Pete as the name, it should not be too difficult to discover if you know where I stand in politics and the stupid attacks on traditional institutions particularly if the attack made on them is someones perceived notion of it being racist.
Sorry for the off track.
Happy Christmas, enjoy and God willing, no more bugs, if you can call them that, from the Christmas stuff.