Spicy politicsMonday, April 30, 2001
Spicy politics
HI there TC! Sion here. I do not normally submit TC news due to being so tied up in my own work on uochat that I really don’t have time. However today I am going to share a little piece of my mind with you for the sake of both your entertainment and my own amusement.
A guild in ultima online can be one of a few things, it can be a place where friends meet, a ground for role playing, a place to prosper and help build your chars or it can be a mix of all game play styles and people that joined together enrich everyone’s game experience. TC is just that, we pvp we pvp more than anything else but we are a broad range of people that when bought together “enrich” each other’s game experience.
The question you have to ask yourself time and time again is what makes TC what it is? The answer to that question remains firm and my mind and I would hope does also for the rest of you; it’s the blend of friendship trust and strong leadership. Without those things we would be just another bunch of players.
If a member of the guild no matter who he is, is upset at someone or something that directly effects TC or his fun in UO he should bring that immediately to the attention of whom ever those problems lie with in doing so that will eliminate any chance of there being any misunderstandings. That in it self would seem a logical step to take any way and I would think that we would not even have to discuss these sort of matters any way.
Drachenfels is an odd place to be right now the faction wars are raging and some of the internal politics is comedy gold. The only really organized faction is the True Brits. All the other factions seem to war both the other factions and each other and then in turn wonder why they lose every battle and cant hold the sigils. The addition to politics in pvp makes things that little more spicy and I am glad to see my suspicions of other factions and guilds not being able to handle that. A word of advice to all our enemy’s, learn to fight as a team or you will never win, if you are warring and arguing guilds in your own faction you don’t have a hope in hell of getting any where.
That about sums about my random crap for the day, I have little more to add, I will try and make sure I add news here a little more often as I am sure wood could use a hand. See you in game all, and if you can’t be good be evil!
Sion
Thursday, April 26, 2001
friday - restart :)
we restart a little sooner, as most of us got extremly bored in "holidays" ending up pvping as usual :) *g
Woodstock
Sunday, April 22, 2001
thanks to all for 32h sigil defense
a BIG mixed pic about the 32h sigil-defenseFrom friday in the evening to sunday in the evening a big effort was made in rl hours to hold the sigils.
In the end we succeeded by far over what we planned first. A big thanks to all that participated.
The explanation of the faction-big-pic collage:
From Up to down. Not all in right chronologic order;)
-GameBoard Setup by Jeanne late saturday. It wasnt clear if we stay TB or not.
- Minax nearly Successful attack Saturday 15:30
- The defense continues. relaxing on bridge
- Defens early Sunday morning.
- Dartboard and chess game erly Saturday
- counterattack on Minax following some Minax through a Gate to a tower
- Serverup defense Sunday morning
- some LTD playing a COW CALLED guy
- SL gated in brit wall and died
- Minax main attack at 3:30 Sunday morning. Time of massive CC and freezes. Server couldnt handle anything.
- 9:00 Sunday morning. 4 Towns are ours. we took brit while fighting with a severup minax force.
- Marsha making conclusions in chat
- Buffy took leadership (..)
- UOAM of 3:30 fight
- Julie at stone
- TB back to 8 towns.
While after multiple talks we dont plan anymore leaving the faction, we will not participate actively this week under Buffy at factions. This week will be kindof holidays. Enjoy. And thanks to all DA, TC, 6@6 and other guilds and guildless that spent so much rl time on this.
Woodstock
Saturday, April 21, 2001
unknown packet & sigils
Unknown packets
everyone knows the unknown packet crash.
now someone got the unknown packet but instead crashing he got this effect.. i hope osi FIXES it soon. the actual person logged of and on and the client was ok again.
we mailed the thing and how it exactly happened to osi. 
sigils
Yesterday we tried to hold the sigils 24. While i informed all for 2 days before about our plans to hold them, it was nearly not possible to mobilize the masses of TB besides the usual suspects. I dont know where they hide. we have characters we cant join TB with but i see only the same ppl consisiting of 2-4 guilds and some lonely players participating at anything in the last time. I guess biggest part is enjoying faction items in trammel hunting monsters etc, having nothing to do at all with faction.
it started very chaotic besides that all was talked and planned before. the traps werent ready when the first attack on castle was already ongoing and the placer died in the attack. minax took the sigils already before in a fight inside the castle they have to give them back.
after that only some smaller attacks followed. i tried to divide ppl to have enough loging in after serverup and know how many can stand defending. with 8 ppl that told me for sure defending i thougth all was ok, but as i woke up for serverupdefense the sigils were already gone. of the 8 assured ppl only 4 were able to defend when minax came with 15 ppl(as i heard).
To make the hapyness of this morning complete in combination with uo and tb some twits decided to fill up all places at tb stone so julie cant apply for leadership anymore. as we were all defending and had a lot to do it was forgotten as the msg is overseen quite easily. thanks a lot to everyone that filled up there, and i wish you a great time. im sure you will be able to get tc and da working with you, as well as participating at most fights.
in combination with this, the charjoin, etc, we will debate about staying tb or not.
Woodstock
Tuesday, April 17, 2001
Cats & Lost in Yew
While we are all here quite busy since some years i wondered actually how factions had its impact on catskills the shard where still most tc`s have their origins. ;) (Basically its Cats, Atlantic and Cheaspeake)
I logged on and woke nirax that slept very very long and still is unchanged since october 98 when df came up. Lets have a look on TB Cats where i happened to look first. I joined TB Cats with Rubens my old tank thief
 |  |  |  |
 |  |
Monday, April 16, 2001
to lose or not to lose.. / osi 3d
I logged on relatively late as i had a shadowrun session before (thats some p&p; stuff i love a lot;) squelching everything out of the last hours of these holidays *g i came in uo to hear vampireDA asking if grouping wouldnt be a great idea as minax had sigils for xx hours.
One factionmsg, 2 chatrequest and 1 uoam request later we grouped wiht 8 DA and 2 dragons as well as 5 TC and 2 guildless TBs. The reports were telling about 25-30 minax in keep + multipla dragons so i already stated that everyone should get fun out of it and take it slow, and relaxed as you cant do shit with not enough ppl vs a good defense at minax keep.
After we began somehwat not motivated we got report that SL was attackign from back, i was extremly unamused and gated all in my reach out as well as gave a factionmsg to retreat to let sl show if they can give minax a fight.
not surprising besides attacking us from back they didnt even reached minax entrane.
while minax moved out to attack sl we heard that the defense in fort was broke and down to a handful people.
the only problem was that the main minax force for such a move should be avoided, we needed a gatein south of fort.
at the time we were searching for south runes we counted 4, than 6 than 8 than... more and more were coming back until the defense was standing again.
ervins char-brother marked us a rune south and i hold it for the right moment. the right moment came liek ten minutes later when minax made an attack on britain which they lost. seeing that their forces in fort were a lot smaller we did a rush in with around 13 people and 1 dragon. the fort defense wassmaller but still a lot.
in this fight i saw only 2-3 people rel poring over the walls or recalling on the pic you see that minax as well decided to not leave the fight this time. at the end only a handful da and tc were alife while the fort was ours. 
the problem that resulted was though that of our 2 thiefes one died in fort, and the other got crash before rushing in fort and when he came back the fort was already sieged by returning minax forces.
we had to wait for our attacker-thief to get out of statloss.
we managed to hold the fort exactly the 20 minutes until he was able to steal, when minax managed to raid inside outnumbering the tbs inside at least by 3 but that isnt the prob. i think that fight was great fun for all :)
as the 3d client takes a way we already know of ultima ascension i thought i install the cds of my cousin and have a look on it. although i played the old ultimas favoring 6 and 7 as well as 7 serpents isle, i got once an alpha version of ascension that was a demonstration in a pc-games or so, which was so awful that i actually never played it. interesting enough to say the product in the patch 1.18 is now engine-side aging still the most astonishing 3d environment i ever saw. WOW. its so huge you cant gasp it.
this is actually in the museum of britain (you see the avatar in front) and with the little switches down you activate a scene while you get an interactive story told of the ancient ultimas.. )
most likely its an old thing for you, but i was extremly amazed, especially when i noticed at least 2 textures beeing used from ascension in the uo 3d client ;)
i think the first is the gras, and the other is the texture of the grave of "gwenno" you can see in 3d movie.
Woodstock
Sunday, April 15, 2001
happy easter & mooamp
happy easter :)
Moo-Skin Theristis was so friendly to point at this winamp skin. Actually you get all the bmp files inclusive so you can easily change the black to white-purple if you are going for mad-cow-disease. On the named page you find basically all utils to turn whole win & rest into a moo-desaster :)
A very interesting thread can be found on DA board. - ok i was kidding. Yew sigil was captured today from its heavy npc-guarded socket, and later the day we invaded minax keep where some sigils were hold.
Woodstock
Saturday, April 14, 2001
allowed, not allowed, maybe allowed
GM Phil made it in last news easy for Minax to take Delucia after some gm calls where he decided to interact ingame later.
Today the same thing happened again, called by some poor sl that
complained having no chance in factions. They called a GM and the gm basically removed some Guards in yew as well as putting the other guards besides the vendors. Now Rammstein and Chris Bloodlust which are Sheriff and Finance minister didnt thought about giving up, and wanted once a clear statement about what actually is allowed, and what not.
After an unbelivable effort with xx gm calls and the threat to get banned they got this from gm xena:
GM Xena asked above her and it is legal and faction tactic to place the guards and npcs how you ever like. GM Phil was wrong the day before.
As still many guards were deleted before they didnt stopped calling until they were replaced or placed back.
i personally would await following from gms/dev to factions: very clear rules and the rules be known by both gms and factions in some docfile whatever that you can actually see.
at the end we got a counselor that interacted between us and gm which also told us it would be legal to block every square in a faction kleep by boxes and 400 stones ore. - which is ok by me.
after me if something is possible ingame it shoudl be legal. if not, i want a clear statement, until its fixed. faction is a thing of competition so a clear ruledefinition would be more than "helpful" instead of threatening ppl with bans for things that come out of a TOS that you can interprete like the lines in your hand.
besides that a guild-note:
try to know why you are in this guild and make it more easy for me. you decide within the next time if all this will go on or not.
Woodstock
Thursday, April 12, 2001
faction towns..
ice posted an interesting html(click to open) about how they defeatet delucia, as well as a gm call.
my conclusion of this is that i would really appreciate a law-book for uo. i have no clue anymore whats allowed and what not.
Woodstock
Tuesday, April 10, 2001
minax siege
As you may noticed we lost yesterday after long and "hopeless" sieging minax after we lost the battle at pillar too, while only 3 guards could be placed in brit. SL was defeatet early in the morning and as it wasnt saved after serverup again, to take the sigils they were guarding.
"TB" had yesterday some problems. We had Com attacking from back in that siege EBR attacking from down and back, as well as not enough people. Lets have a short look on it
Blue = Minax. If no arrow on a line its always from fort to outside.
Red = TB. If no arrow on a line its from outside to inside.
Yellow = SL which has kindof "ally" with minax.
Cyan = Com
I will not comment here what to change but have a look for yourself so we get the same thoughts.
(1) on this wall-part the know game "who FS first" starts. the fight has there his main part always when (a) the entrance is blocked by chests and (b) when tehre are too many oranges as well as (c) a lot traps are placed in front so its no fun fighting there.
1 starts to get some minax down hoping they are in loss and not availablt some time as well as letting them use ressources. While that may be great it can only work if the entrance is sealed from any part and no one can come with fresh reags inside.
(2) That are the main direction from backstab attacks of other factions while we siege.
(3) Usually at same time as (1) starts a figth with the ppl on the right turret down begins too. Usually that one is very hard as the positions down which allow to shoot up are less than those from up reaching every position in spellrange down. When you cast pos or flame field, even better para field, the turret attack gets disturbed for the time the spell is up.
(4) The entrance defense is usually very strong and blocked with chests and traps. There is no hope doing anything as long the 2 lines of defense are standing there. To get them moving you best try to reach a position in the backarea of (4) where you dont see the minax fort. (you get that graphic bug always, ubt its also helpful) now walk to the right feet of the stairs. you can be hurt there only from the left turret and he ppl left of interior entrance, which you will survive usually wiht a little healing. from there you can cast mass spells inside like FF, PF, etc. which will get the defense disturbed. OFten you can attack a dragon from there and getting it outside.
(5) i have forgotten 5 :)
(6) that was the 2nd way of SL attack yesterday
(7) the usual fall out-move in the last days some ice and soa made to attack outside when less ppl were on (1) and more on (3). you can rel por from the upper right fort-corner to the ground at (7).
(8) the conventional counter-attack way mostly guarded from right turret, and usually lost if they get out of turret range.
(9) funny attack position. you can climp on that hill from 2 points. the south one gives almost free shoot on every position of right down turret, while the upper one restricts it to the norht area of the turret.
under the turret is also a little hole in the wall which can prevent you from turret fire, or too many combos if (8) is ongoing. you can attack (8) from back from this position which usually frightens the nubs under them. ;)
Ice made a foto gallery of Julie showing her new deer mask in many positions in the recent news.
Woodstock
Monday, April 9, 2001
members
we will have in the next days some talks with the members in test week and bringing it to an end.
i herby repeat that everyone that comes to us has to come open minded and not trying to continue the way he was used before. im not interested in that. im also not interested in running with 50% test time members around where they even influence bad older tcs. so we bring it now to an end. in test time we look on following as little reiminder: your teamplay, your possibility to be online, your ability to integrate ((and not only hang with a particular person (like rl firend) that may have brought you in tc cause rl friends or whatever) - i cant deal nor feel good when i have no wire to everyone. as well as like said before ppl that just want tc toggle over their head but continuing what they are used.
i think we have way too much ppl in test time atm, and we need to change that
the "old" tcs that are for months inactive have to decide today what they do. (like ervin, sahira, unforgiven etc). either you come now online or you are one out and forever and search another guild/game whatever.
although thats a game we like to go a different way, like in football you can play it with great fun with friends at weekends, but you can also get a lot of fun doing it a little more "professional" with traings etc. if 1st is enough for you, its fine but not our way, and i think we had long enough patience with all super-long offliners.
Woodstock
Friday, April 6, 2001
sl and minax ally & time to be evil
Foto cut about 25 minax and 15 sl reaching ultimate lameness together.
I wont comment that much cause the picture talks for itselfs. Only that: if you think we fight 40-60 ppl at minax keep you are wrong. Attacking it is a feature not a bug. If you like standing around 20 hours and lose the sigils after the 21`th, its no problem as technically we have no other reason to attack minax keep than to have some fun.
While most ppl thinks who joins TC joins also a kind of resozialisation programm this "programm" is aimed towards ourselfes. After such lameness as trying to reskill ppl that get ress by lightning (Sir Lanzelot expert lightninc caster) etc as well as reskilling we will change for next time.
Woodstock
Thursday, April 5, 2001
TC & DA ignite campfires !
After long debates the spokemen and women of the DA and TC clans arranged under the critic eyes of their presidents a clarification of the cooperation of the two guilds.
Following the notes of the conference it is stated that the faction-warfare has absolute priority and thus members meeting under order/chaos will not agress each other, while no direct cooperation is awaited there.
At the press conference in the British-Meeting hall Woodstock stated
that we dont consider o/c in any way lethal to our current pvp way. As i have bad expriences from the past with same ppl fighting same day togehter and against each other, we want to realize an either or, which we now achived.
In a further note it was stated though that
currently most members spend like 5% of their online time in o/c so its not really an issue but had to be though about as it could lead to problems
Interviewing other TCs we catched some voices
Theristis:"great! i always dreamed of treaties like that!"
Clarko Corax:"what threaty?"
Zerberus:"Hm?"
Rulg:"rulg!"
Woodstock
Wednesday, April 4, 2001
more fights
Heh i thought i shock you and post the next update in a tremoundous cycle.
Yesterday basically the sigils were refreshed after serverup and early afternoon. Later a group of minax took them and guarded them. As that was not enough and they offended Britannian Peons, we thought after fnishing the threat in britannia to visit them by their source.
With dragon and some ppl we were successfull. Size on both sides was under 10 so it was fighting with good overview. Highlight of this was Aragorn making it more interesting attacking our dragon which couldnt resist gnawing his ear.
Later on Minax was kindof inactive besides some spreaded groups while SL went around with a group above 10 ppl that the 2-4 TC`s around happen to meet. To save the citicens in our controlled cities i grouped a TB horde but we couldnt find SL. When all degrouped SL happened to attack britain. While part of the group went back to their caves, the other stayed in Britain where we sent them to their ancestors. With a short organized attack force we walked to the evil caves of Shadowlords some undead evils that lost bounds to their creator Lady Minax.
In an excellent fight against the defenders the holy, lightning and bred eating britannians managed to fight the evil rush inside and fight the undeads from 2 directions, which resulted in a successfull battle for the purple/golden knights. ;)
(before spamming me.. yes the pic has something 1.4.2001 related as i missed this date in news;)
Forgot to mention..
LtD showed the day before yesterday such a great reskill performance after we fought to death a fight with 4 tc vs members of ice, soa and ltd that ice attacked grey ltd after the reskills.
while ice was willing to let us ltd alone in britain later so we could have them fighting alone, we gated in and soa and ice as well as satelite players were back too..
when therestis was reskilled and looted by a not legitimated ltd (turning him grey) later penelope which slept for months and drakarz were ready to pass by. avoiding the fight, they gated to tower where one of their reds engaged in this fight. Was extremly fun to see real-world ltd performance after all grey corpses were lying around the tower including the red. how many ltd survived.. ? o_O
Woodstock
Tuesday, April 3, 2001
SiteUP, Fights, and bred
After Strato the provider of our 2nd server team-cow.de (teamcow.net, team-cow.com, teamcwo.org) etc had a major breakdown TC Hp was only reachable by our other server (teamcow.com, located phyically on spieledindex). Problem was that the newscript is on the strato server, as well as the new-news pics, as i really thought something we pay money for would not fail for an entire week.. so far so good.
In The meantime there were a lot of funny fights like the Minax mass defend from saturday to sunday which gave us some major headaches as sieging the minax-fort 3 hours didnt brought us to an end, but a rush in action at 9:00 pm which was not very nice, but effective. ;)
Today SL showed that they are on the way back, also COM seems to grandish again which both are very good news, as it makes factions only more interesting.
some SL arrive to fight rushing up to the Castle until we defense recalled and gated in :) - after SL lost after brave fight (no joke, nearly no one ran, very surprising) minax was so friendly to arrive. Was very funny.
3d movie.. First designed for TC site, i posted it on uochat first as tc site was down
Here(rightclick link -> save as) you can download a new 3d movie. It was done on Drachenfels 3d facet and t1a and shows some very interesting locations, as well as some of the monsters while interviewing the players that were met there.
The original size of the uncompressed movie was 1.7 gigabytes, so udnerstand that after cutting i had to reduce the framerate by skipping every 2nd. so dont blame the client if it looks sometimes not smooth. i used a compression of around 400bit low-motion divX 3.2 mpeg4 with sharpen +10% and brigtness +5% virtualdub filters. you need DivX codec to play the movie which you find at go.to/doom9 in the download area under codecs.
Its size is 30mb, which takes around 45 min over isdn which if you are interested can be done nicely when you sleep or dinner.
The main issue of the actual client is a huge memory leak while the graphics, textures and polygon models were improved a lot, also the overall speed.
I hope it helps you giving you the right impression about the possibilities and potential of uo`s 3d future.
Woodstock