AndyVGR.com

A lot of you will probably not like this, but it has been a long time coming.  Originally the exp gain for skills was designed for a short-term map, not a long-term map.  So it was always easier to raise skills than what it should have been.

However, the skill reset comes as a result of a bug with mcMMO that allowed everyone on the server to gain incredibly dramatic amounts of skill exp.  This was unexpected, and not something that could be fixed.  Since the skill reset has been set aside for long enough, this bug pressed the issue further, and so as a result, I’ll be resetting skills within the next 7 days.

There are many of you who have ranked in the top three in several skills, and as a reward for the time and effort spent reaching such high ranking levels, each person who made it in ANY top three, in any category, will be given a money grant based on how many categories they ranked in, and the specific ranks they held in each category.

To prevent people from taking advantage of the bug in skill gain, I have already had screenshots taken from several days back of the top 10 in each rank.   If you were ranked in the top three in any category you will get $50,000 for each time you ranked 3rd, $100,000 for each time you ranked 2nd, and $150,000 each time you ranked 1st.   You can then use the money with the /m2x command to purchase exp from the server to get a jumpstart in skill levels.

With the steadily growing popularity of Bretonia’s Best, we’ve had more players coming on who tend to Flymod, speedhack, and Xray.  So, to help combat this and strengthen the security of the server, we’re making a few solid changes.  We’ll be forcing players to use Spoutcraft to connect to the server.

Spoutcraft is a Minecraft client that is modded to take advantage of special serverside features enabled by Spout.  Many plugins already intereact with Spout to provide Spoutcraft users with interesting and cool features.   Factions, for instance, provides spoutcraft users with the ability to see colored faction tags above a players name, helping to identify from a distance whether someone is friend or foe.  McMMO provides spoutcraft users with experience bars for their skills, to visibly show how close players are to their next level.

The fact that Spoutcraft itself is already a modded client (designed only to take advantage of Spout-enabled features), it is much more difficult for modders to mod the Spoutcraft client, because changing Spoutcraft files will cause the client to fail connection to the server.

At the same time, we will be enforcing one texture pack on all spoutcraft users, to stop permanently the use of invisible texture packs, which allows players to see other players through walls, or ores through the ground.  This single texture pack is a big deal because many people prefer to use their own texture pack.  However… This is a roleplaying server, and in the spirit of roleplay, having all players see the same thing makes more sense than everyone seeing different things.

Since this is a big change, though, I will have a forum thread ready for people to make suggestions as to what texture pack they want to see used. PLEASE NOTE: I will only consider texture packs that are generally realistic.  This means crazycolored, weird, or otherwise unusual texture packs will not be considered.  Once I have enough suggestions, I’ll put the suggestions up for voting.  Once we’ve reached the decision, the texture pack chosen will be enforced.

As I’ve said already, this is a big change.  We are sacrificing the option for multiple texture packs and forcing players to use Spoutcraft (which, to be honest, is better than the default client anyways) for the better security of the server, to take another step in preventing modders from modding, and xrayers from xraying, and to prevent people from having unfair advantages in PvP by seeing people through walls.

Now, please head to the forums, and look for the thread “Spoutcraft Texture Discussion”.

It turns out that the power outage caused a corruption in the world files.  We were hoping to restore a backup of the world files, but upon doing so found that the back up had been corrupted as well.  I know a lot of people have put some hard work into the game, and this is going to be pretty hard on a lot of you, but its unavoidable… we’ll be switching maps again since I’m unable to restore the current one.  Any skills you had and any money you had will still be there, its just the world and inventories that will be lost.

I apologize for this, and we’ll be looking into measures to prevent this kind of scenario from happening again, since this is the third or fourth time its happened.

Hey all, as you’ve probably already noticed, the Minecraft server, as well as the Mumble server, are down at the moment, and have been for close to a day now.  We’re experience some difficulties brought on by a power outage, and we’re currently working on getting the server back up and running.  This may take some time however, but keep checking back on the server and it will be up again eventually.   I’m saying this because some people may fear that the server is going down for good, since it has been down for quite a while now and may be down for a while longer, but we’re not shutting it down for good, just to ease any concerns on that.

Here’s a great write up on how to fix skyrim’s issues on the pc.

http://www.gamefront.com/how-to-improve-skyrim-with-ini-file-tweaks/

I love this gif!