Nilrem said:

The question has been asked, I think in the 1st page, but has been progressively deluding.
It's time to give it back to life.
Do you think we need an specific coded system for the auctions?
That is what should focus our attention now.

This thread is not just about the auction system.  The real problem here is the rule was never communicated to the player base.  There have been a number of good suggestions to improve the auction system in this thread, but unless new rules or rule changes (no matter what they are) are communicated to the player base before they are implemented, we could see a repeat of what happened yesterday.  This to me is the cruicial point of this whole thread, we need to have rules communicated to us before they are implementated, not after, & not by word of mouth.  Such rule changes should be posted on the Forums with an implementation date.

Karyuu I believe asked for suggestions as to how to improove the system.  I believe she was specifially talking about the auction system, but since I believe the real issue here is how rules are communicated to us, I offered a suggestion as to how rule changes should be handled in my previous post.  We can improove the auction system all we want, but unless rules are communicated in a better fashion, the potiential for what happened yesterday will still exist.

Again, I applaud those that stated a mistake was made.  Lets establish a policy on how rules are communicated so such a mistake can be avoided in the future.

Gan, "Long Beard"
Leader White Dragon Clan
Dragon High Master of the Dragon Council

Yorik said:

However the updater doesn't even boot correctly   It silently crashes out before showing the graphic window.

I had the same problem when I ran the updater for the 1st time.  I tried running the updater a 2nd time & it ran smoothly.  I am not sure why, maybe I just got luckly, but there still appears to be problems with the updater.

Gan, "Long Beard"
Leader White Dragon Clan
Dragon High Master of the Dragon Council

AljoshaNL Said:

I just made an alt and already found some stuff and now he's deleted even though he didn't abuse any bugs.

Talad Said:

After the last update we faced a very bad bug. Basically all newly created chars had the ability to train at no cost. This resulted in people with 150 in sword after 20 minutes of play.

Today we deleted all characters created after 2006-07-04 (yyyy-mm-dd) to fix that issue. Sorry but was necessary to be fair with other older chars.

That is why your character was deleted.

Gan, "Long Beard"
Leader White Dragon Clan
Dragon High Master of the Dragon Council

I didn't think to check the task manager prior to re-booting my computer.  But, before I made my post above I did an experiment.  I started PS & at the logging screen I exited PS using the quit button.  Then I accessed the task manager & the psclient.exe program was not listed.  So for me at least the only option was to re-boot my computer.

Gan, "Long Beard"
Leader White Dragon Clan
Dragon High Master of the Dragon Council

When I 1st logged into PS I got the message "Not running the correct version of PS".  I closed PS & then downloaded the 015 patch from Talad's post.  When I 1st tried to extract the files to my PS directory, I received a message "can't extract that file another program is accessing it", paraphrasing not an exact quote.  I received this same message for numerous files in the package.  I double check to make sure I had closed PS & I had.  I tried again & still received that message.  I next re-booted my computer, then tried to extract the files again.  This worked.  I was using Winzip10 to unzip these files & I am running Windows XP Pro.  For some strange reason, eventhough I had closed PS before I tried to extract the files, Winzip thought PS was still running.  If anyone is having problems extracting these files try re-booting your computer.  It worked for me.

Gan, "Long Beard"
Leader White Dragon Clan
Dragon High Master in the Dragon Council

My character Ganinos has been around for almost 1 1/2 years now.  We have had one complete wipe during that time.  The devs did give us advanced notice (over a week) before that wipe took place.  After they announced the wipe, most people quit hunting.  There was a lot of RPing going on during that time.  Bodacher & I put on Dash & Bash contests to give people something else to do too. 

The devs did announce the only complete wipe I have seen.  This doesn't mean they will announce the next one, but they have done it before.

Speculating that another wipe is just around the corner, IMHO, doesn't do any good at all.  Ever since that complete wipe, there have been people (not devs or GMs) who said that another wipe was going to happen in a matter of weeks.  This has happened 2 or 3 times that I remember.  None of those wipes took place.  I wouldn't listen to any player that predicts a wipe.  The only time I would believe that a wipe was upon us is if the devs announced it as they have done at least once in the past.

It doesn't really matter to me if they announce a wipe or not.  Wipes will happen.  The devs have stated this plenty of times.  After all this is a pre-alpha game & wipes both complete & partial are to be expected.   If they announce a wipe before hand, great.  If not oh well no problem.

IC response to a complete wipe: "I told you the outworlders have strange powers & to beware.  Look what they have done to us?"
"Beware the outworlder surface dwellers, beware".  "These outworlders have created another great cataclysm".

Those that have heard my "Alien" stories, I now use "outworlders" instead of "Aliens".   The stories are the same, just now use a different word per request.

Gan, "Long Beard"
Leader White Dragon Clan
Dragon High Master in the Dragon Council
 

[From the journal of Gan, "Long Beard"]

A message sent to the Dragon Council on his account of the 1st day of battle.

Gan sits down at a small table in the Dwarven camp & pulls out some parchment, a quill & a small bottle of ink.  He begins writing down his account of the 1st days fighting.

My fellow Dragons, the 1st day of fighting has come to an end.  Much blood was spilled on both sides.  It all started when we gathered in Oja road near bandit valley so that we could march on the city of Hydlaa & confront the Dwarvesbane & put a stop to their murderous ways.

The enemy came out to meet us on the road in front of the city gates.  At least they didn't hide behind the city walls.  General Bodacher confronted Drahlian, their leader, to announce our intentions.  There was much shouting by both sides & I am not sure exactly what happened between our General & the despicable Drahlian.  Then, all of a sudden, General Bod & this woman were fighting.  Both sides held there ground to observe what would happen.  Soon the Dwarf hater Drah lay died at General Bod’s feet.

The Dwarf haters charged our lines & an all out battle ensued.   Many of Hydlaa’s citizens came out to watch the confrontation.  It made it difficult for the warriors to target the enemy.  But I am sure they were there to support us.  Blood from both sides ran like water in a stream.  I saw Bodacher fall, then Proglin, then Einnol & other Dwarven Brothers.  At the end of this 1st battle, myself & 2 other Dwarves were left standing.  I had killed 2 of the enemy myself.

No sooner had this battle finished & the 3 of us where standing there, over looking the carnage & trying to catch our breaths, a loan Dwarf hater, who wasn’t in the main battle, snuck up from behind us and slew 1 of our survivors.  I turned to face this assassin & got in 2 quick blows.  He blocked the 1st & I crippled him with the 2nd but he didn’t fall (was using daggers at the time & did 198 dmg).  He then struck me down with one blow from one of his short swords. (It was said that this was an alt of Drahlain’s but don't know that for sure).

I put away my daggers & decided to use my trusty Silverweave Short Swords of the Defender the rest of the day.  The enemy kept massing in the road outside of Hydlaa’s main gate.  We mounted numerous charges.  We would gather just inside the city gates then charge their lines.  I recall at least 3 such charges. It is hard to remember the exact number now as it was all out war.  One of those charges we had decided not to actually fight, but to charge through their lines and re-group at the magic shop.  We wanted to draw the fighting away from the city so that no spectators, as I said earlier there were many, would get hurt.  But in the fog of war, many of our brothers didn’t understand the orders, as only General Bodacher & I executed the plan.  Bod & I waited for a long time but only 1 other Dwarf, Gon of the Dragon Council, made it past their lines.

I had decided to go back up the road to see what was happening.  I didn’t get far, (just past the map load point), when I encountered missile fire.  I couldn’t see where the attack was coming from so I ran back to the Magic Shop to buy healing potions as the missile fire did a significant amount of damage.  I was in the process of purchasing potions from the shop keeper when a Dwarf Hater entered (I couldn’t see him do to the fact that I had the buying screen open).  Before I knew what was happening I was under attack & unable to defend myself & fell (the Magic Shop is a legal battle area).

At the end of the day there was only 1 member of the Dwarvesbane holding the road (he was the only one left on-line).  Brother Gondric when out to face him alone.  He fell.  I next went out to confront this last threat.  He started by using magic missile fire while I was closing in on him.  We next engaged in one on one combat.  This dance of death lasted a few minutes before I finally was able to crush him with a blow from one of my trusty Short Swords.  This gave me my 7th kill of the day.  I fell twice in combat, once to the sneak attacker & once inside the magic shop.  So with only falling twice in actual combat while taking out 7 of the enemy I wasn’t too disappointed in my performance on this 1st day of battle.

My fellow Dragons so ends my report on this, the 1st day of battle in this war to end the threat that is posed to the Dwarven race.

Gan rolls up the peace of parchment & ties it to the leg of a small bird.  Gan speaks softly to the little creature:  “Go little bird, deliver this message to the Dragon Council”.  Gan releases the bird into the air.  He puts away his quill & ink then lies down to get a good night sleep. 

Gan, “Long Beard”
Leader White Dragon Clan
Dragon High Master

Warrior Commander
Dwarven Star

Anyways, I used to have this problem and determined it to be graphics related, as at that time, my vid card was 4 years old and it just couldn't run the game like it could before (right after the update to 3.12 I think)  Any way, symptoms were, random freezing, if I clicked, it would display an hour glass, letting it go didn't do anything as after 15 minutes it still was hung up, etc, etc.  I found it to be that it would freeze while it had to wait for my vid card to process what it needed to be displaying but never got caught up and so it just hung.  I had to lower the setttings down in pssetup and they went away.  I changed the texture downsampling from a 1/1 to 1/4 ratio, and the problems went away. 

It may be that when it freezes you are having the same types of problems.  I'd suggest try to play around with the options to see what happens.

The freeze up is not random.  For me the freeze up happens every 50 minutes without fail.  I did try your suggestion though about changing the texture downsampling but to no avail.

Gan, "Long Beard"
Leader White Dragon Clan
Dragon High Master