Casino Slots Change

I've made a quick change to the Tech Slots in the casino, from now the bottom prizes will be scrap boxes rather than exp to add a little more variety.

Enjoy!

New Promotion Plugin

The trial of the new promotion system starts today, unfortunately though as a side effect the times shown by /seen & /playtime have had to be reset so we are all starting at 0 again.

If you've missed out on promotion don't worry we will get to you, I'm running the old check every two hours as well for the time being to try and catch everyone.

I'll post more details on the new plugin and what it means for the way promotions work very soon.

UPDATE: 

I've turned on a feature that will attempt to calculate a players first join date from the main player data file, this will work better for some than others and will always give a slight underestimate at best, however for new players waiting for Member rank this should help get you closer to the usual 1 week! The calculation is individual and will take place the next time the player joins the server (may take several minutes from login).

Down For Maintenance

The server is down for scheduled maintenance as follows:

1. Apply management interface update - Done.
2. Full backup/clone - Done.
3. Disable all portals and set up warps to replace them - Done
4. Update spawn to fit with changes - Done.
5. Replace multi-world plugin and set up permissions - Done (took a lot longer than planned!).
6. Remove all old plugin permissions from main permissions file - Done.
7. Make several config changes - Done.
8. Fully test relevant changes - Done.
9. Install and configure new auto-promote plugin (trial) - Done.

I'll update here as things progress.

Moderators can connect but I may be afk doing config changes and there will be restarts.

The server is now open and the whitelist has been removed!

World Issues & The Future

As some of you already know we've had a few random restarts over the last week or so, I can confirm that with one exception these were chunk problems being detected and fixed.

I have been monitoring this and the crashes, although still a significant time apart, are becoming more frequent, I have tried every available tool to try and correct the root cause of the the problem with no success. Although to be honest any fix would be unlikely to be a long term solution, most chunk repair tools I tried would require removing 20% or more of the worlds chunks, leaving it in quite a mess with a large number sudden terrain / biome changes in a straight line, many peoples regions reset or possibly cut in half etc, and with no guarantee that the issues wouldn't return a month or so later.

As I'm sure most of you know most Tekkit Classic servers with similar player numbers to us reset the world every 2-3 months or have regular rollbacks for this very reason, so we are actually quite lucky that our map has lasted 7-8 months without a single rollback of more than a few minutes required, especially when you consider that on an average day we have 300+ players log in and have an average of over 400,000 block changes.

Again some of you already know that I've been working hard behind the scenes to try and keep the server running without my major involvement next year due to other commitments and this has included the building of a new spawn, the intention now is to keep the new spawn where it is and make that a new world to replace the current one. 

However there is still significant work to be done before we can switch and I am unsure whether we can support 2 full size worlds at the same time so whilst I hope to be able to transfer builds across at least for VIP's, Staff & hopefully Member+ players I really cannot say at this point what will and won't be possible. For now though please make use of VIP Island and The Vault to backup your items just in case things get significantly worse and we suddenly have to switch worlds with little or no notice.

I'm also concerned that the process of switching etc may be so time consuming that it may hinder my chances of getting the server ready for January, as always I'll try my best but cannot make any promises at the moment as this is incredibly bad timing and it makes testing some of the required changes very difficult due to random errors and the possibility of more serious crashes relating to the main world having the potential to cause problems with mods/plugins and other worlds (I had to replace a couple of mods and a plugin with fresh copies after a crash yesterday).

So please encourage your friends etc to make use of The Vault and keep your fingers crossed that I can work things out for the long term, I will post updates here as soon as I know more. 

New Commands

As some of you already know a couple of new commands are now available to you, these are:

/playtime

Allows you to check how long it's been since you first joined the server, the plugin is only aware of the last 8 days history (since it started logging) so this is the longest playtime anyone will have at the moment. This will also allow NewBuilders to check whether they are eligible for Member rank yet.

/seen <name>

Allows you to check when a player was last online, obviously this is of limited use at the moment but longterm this will enable players to check if buildings are abandoned as long as a lockette sign is present or it is protected.

Enjoy!

Scheduled Downtime On Monday

There will be a scheduled downtime on Monday to perform a number of changes as follows:
Full backup / clone.

1. Apply management interface update.
2. Full backup/clone.
3. Disable all portals and set up warps to replace them.
4. Update spawn to fit with changes.
5. Replace multi-world plugin and set up permissions.
6. Remove all old plugin permissions from main permissions file.
7. Make several config changes.
8. Fully test relevant changes.
9. Install and configure new auto-promote plugin (trial).

Warps will all be sign based for now rather than using /warp, but this will not be the case longterm and I'll be bringing in changes to how we use them gradually over the next couple of weeks.

The new auto-promote plugin is obviously impossible to test thoroughly on the test server, it seems to work fine but it's impossible to say without a live trial, so I've decided to set it up on a trial basis, if it doesn't work out I'll remove it but from I managed to test on the test server it looks promising.

Initially it will just be used for time based automatic NewBuilder to Member promotion like we have now, but I hope to enable a couple more features if all goes well. Obviously there may be bugs to work out so if you're a NewBuilder waiting for promotion please bear with us.

Downtime Monday;
Start:    9:00am (UK)
Finish:  11:00-11:30am? (UK)