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Friday, 29 November 2013

World Switch - Please Read Carefully!

There's a lot of misinformation going around regarding the impending world switch so as things are coming together now I thought I'd clarify things.

Yes we are switching to a new world very soon, this is currently planned to happen no later than December 16th to avoid having to do it over the main Christmas holiday dates. With Tekkit Classic in particular it's inevitable that this will have to happen eventually and under the circumstances ours has actually lasted much longer than your average server. The problem is that two 'full sized' worlds would push us beyond our maximum backup size and so create storage and performance issues (our backup size would inflate to almost 10GB) so unfortunately it will not be possible to run the old and new worlds at the same time.

I'm trying to look at this as an opportunity, for the server to survive past January many changes are required, specifically when it comes to automation, so I'm using this switch as a chance to make fundamental changes to that end, I'll post a full list once all the details are worked out. 

In the long term this switch could actually be a blessing in disguise as it makes some other necessary changes easier to implement.

It's a lot to take in but please go over this information carefully and ask a Member of staff for clarification if you are not sure about anything!

What should I do now?

Carry on as usual!

If you're Member rank or above get a room in The Vault asap and store items you want to transfer to the new world, the suggested way to transfer maximum EMC is to condense any 'extra' items into RM Furnaces and store those.

Don't dismantle your builds just yet! You may have heard of WorldEdit Schematics, this tool enables us to save players builds as a small file, effectively letting us copy and paste builds between the old and new world. I will personally be doing this for VIP's asap and will announce details shortly of other staff that will be able to do this for Member & Member+ players very soon. 

What can I keep and what will I loose?

Any items can be stored in The Vault, no new items will be added to the banned item list (in fact some are coming off) so you don't need to worry about that.

Alchemy Bag contents may or may not be successfully transferred, they can be flakey at the best of times so I can't guarantee anything in this regard. By all means store items you can't fit in the vault in Alchemy Bags but don't be surprised if you loose some or all of those items when we switch. Storing an Alchemy Bag in The Vault is doing just that, storing the Alchemy Bag, not it's contents!

Player data will have to be reset. Because of the way locations are stored in player data this will have to be sacrificed, including economy balances, however with the economy still being relatively young I think we should look at the last couple of months as a trial run, the economy will have more uses after the switch which will give players new goals to aim for, I think everyone will enjoy the changes.

All players will be given a cash bonus (amount yet to be decided) when we switch to kickstart the economy, you can also transfer money to the new world by storing Industrial Diamonds.

Finally, if you know of any players that are unlikely to make it on over the next couple of weeks but are likely to want to transfer items or a build etc, then please get them to take a look at this post asap so they have time to try and get something sorted out.

Old Promotion System Removed

The old promotion system has been completely removed as the new one is working out fine and catching everyone that had been missed, please be aware that the requirements for Member rank have changed slightly and is now configured as:

A minimum of 15 minutes play time on 7 different days.

From Monday all players will be able to check progress towards Member rank accurately themselves, all staff will also be able check the progress of individuals or all players online with a simple command.

Scheduled Downtime On Monday

There will be another another scheduled downtime  on Monday for what are hopefully the last of the major technical changes in preparation for January.
  1. Take a full backup/clone.
  2. Update TekkitRestrict.
  3. Update 3 mod patches.
  4. Test updates.
  5. Switch to new rank colours and add new ranks (more details coming soon).
  6. Permissions cleanup.
  7. Test colours are applied correctly and ranks promote in correct order.
  8. Tweak auto-promote plugin.
  9. Make around 30 changes to permissions, specifically relating to Staff ranks.
  10. Test permission changes.
  11. Clear out some old and redundant data.

Downtime Monday;
Start:    9:00am (UK)
Finish:  10:30am? (UK)

Monday, 25 November 2013

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!