Verdantine and the Sixth Character Slot

Related topics: Verdantine

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Verdantine and the Sixth Character Slot

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Posted on 20-Apr-2004

We have some good news and some bad news on these topics.

First, the bad news: Due to unforeseen complications, it will not be possible to bring Verdantine online for the May event as we had previously announced. We’re very sorry about this – we try hard to make sure that our dates are accurate before we announce them. Unfortunately in this case, there is a lot more NetOps work that needs to be done to get the world in shape than we anticipated. Our current plans are for Verdantine to be brought up in the June event, tentatively scheduled for June 9.

The second item of less-than-wonderful news: As part of our preparation for the sixth character slot in June, we added code this month to allow the display of more than five characters at the character select screen. Unfortunately, this exposed a bug that had been hidden in the code for many years. In the past, it was possible to get into a strange state in which you had more than five characters on your account, but the game would only show five at the character select screen. Sometimes it would be a recently-restored character that “disappeared;” sometimes it would be a newly-created character.

When we added the new display in the April event, players who had experienced this bug in the past suddenly found all six characters visible and playable. Some players even figured out how to exploit this bug to intentionally create six playable characters.

On Monday, April 26, we will be patching the game to fix this bug. The servers will be brought down at 6:00 AM PDT / 9:00 AM EDT / 1:00 PM GMT, and we expect them to be down for approximately four hours. During this downtime, we will be fixing the bug noted above, as well as fixing a bug that was causing some players to be ignored by monsters after having been banned for UCM.

Now for the good news: During this same patch, we will be unlocking the sixth character slot for all accounts on all worlds. We’re also making the extra character slot active for all accounts – both existing and newly created – as well as opening it on all worlds, whether or not you currently have characters on the world. All accounts will have six character slots on Verdantine when it opens.

One question you may ask is, If we’re giving everyone the sixth character slot anyways, why fix the bug? Interestingly, if we opened the sixth character slot without resolving the bug, players would then be able to use the bug to create a seventh character. We’d rather get out of that loop, :D.

Again, we apologize for the unexpected downtime and for the delay in the opening of the new server. At the same time, we’re very excited to be able to give our players a new character slot on all worlds two months earlier than anticipated.